Comment by awesomekling
8 months ago
Hello friends, Ladybird founder here!
Here's a short video from Chris Wanstrath announcing our non-profit yesterday, and kicking things off with a $1M donation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9edTqPMX_k
Happy to answer questions :)
I don't have much to add here, just wanted to say that I think this is a tremendous gift to the Internet that we loved. It would suffice to say that after many hard reality checks I don't really feel like there are any browser vendors that feel like good stewards of the open web, and it seemed like a new browser that actually managed to break out would be infeasible... until Ladybird showed up. And now, I'm typing this reply in Ladybird.
Of course, it has a long way to go before it is going to be a good daily driver, but I truly believe this is the beginning of something great. I've been consistently surprised by what works, and the rate of improvement is staggering at times.
My question: Has anyone given any thoughts regarding the stance to take with DRM features, e.g. Widevine/Encrypted Media Extensions? It seems like since our previous stewards of the open web didn't care enough, now making a browser with substantial marketshare without this may be hard. Seems like a hard problem, I really do wonder where Ladybird will stand if it continues on its current lightning fast trajectory.
I think it should be possible to have some sort of open extension to allow side band canvas rendering to allow for such extensions as optionally provided by the OS. Possibly with an API for custom engines in WASM.
I don't think it should have to be in the browser. I would like the option to watch the content. I know the while process of DRM is stupid and will be side stepped somewhere.
Personally, I think life would be better if browsers just didn't play the game at all. If the web was not controlled by corporations, DRM as part of the platform 100% would have simply never happened.
From my point of view, putting DRM into web browsers is actively bad for a couple of reasons beyond the usual arguments against DRM. The greatest asset the web platform has is that it's a unified, open platform that anyone can participate in; Of course, DRM harms users too, but specifically DRM harms the web as a platform. You can't simply have a "full" web browser that can browse the entirety of the web (as ordinary users understand it) without licensing Widevine. To date, only large corporate web browsers have ever gotten this privilege[1]; community web browsers are shit out of luck, almost certainly forever. Not only that, but Widevine will only officially support a small subset of the operating systems that are out there, ensuring that you can't get a "full" web browsing experience on, for example, any BSD (at least not without manual work and violating several license agreements on the way.) Even if Ladybird bucks the trend and manages to get a Widevine license somehow, it will only be possible to make this work on Windows, Linux and macOS. Yes, I understand this covers the vast majority of users, but if you can't see how this is extraordinarily antithetical to the open web I don't really know what else to say. The web didn't even begin on any of those platforms!
Of course, I seriously can't blame Ladybird if they want to go this route. After all, in the position that Ladybird is in, pragmatism is a stance that is hard to beat. Ladybird currently doesn't have the muscle to flex to try to influence the future of the web platform in such a way, especially not against the will of the mega-corp overlords that currently control the web platform.
If I had to guess, I'd guess the lack of an answer to my question is because taking the pragmatic stance on this particular issue will prove controversial, though I hope if that is the case that people continue to direct their ire towards W3C and Mozilla who pretty much immediately folded when the issue came up in the first place. In the moment when Flash and Silverlight died, there was a small sliver of hope that DRM on the web would die with it, but instead we wove DRM directly into the fabric of the web, and Mozilla, no doubt afraid to watch their marketshare dwindle even further, (which it has continued to do anyways, mind you,) played a huge part in that.
Issues like this are why there is guaranteed to be vile toxicity when something like WEI comes up. We know that there is no entity out there holding the line to protect the web platform; once one of these technologies like WEI makes it into Chrome, the era of the open web will have essentially ended. If you believe that the open web is important, then any technology that's vaguely WEI shaped is enemy #1, and when there is no other option, people will choose violence, again and again. DRM on the web isn't really quite as dire of a situation, but it isn't particularly great either.
(One might wonder what the point of keeping DRM out of the browser is, forcing users to use separate software, making their overall experience worse... but that's kind of the thing: Why in the fuck should these vendors and this DRM'd content, that is antithetical to the open web, get to benefit from the web platform built and used mostly by people who stand to gain nothing from it? If you want the benefit of the web platform and all it offers, you should be forced to lose the DRM. Otherwise, have fun deploying your own native software.)
[1]: https://developers.google.com/widevine/drm/overview
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When Ladybird first came a long the highest hope I had for it would be something like Konquer browser or the odd ball ones you see that haven't been maintained for years on various Linux Distros/old Mac Os releases.
But with the updates, it wild to see progress moving steady but impressively. And the last year - wow! With all the donations, there is now a path towards a real viable alternative rather than something that looses interest as contributors lives get in the way.
I love that you are no over promising and have provided a reasonable time line, it is the kind of restraint that typically gets things done rather than promising the world up front. I love it and look forward to where this goes from here and it could end up in some very odd places.
If in 2001 you where to say that KHTML would be the core base of the majority of web browsers in 15 years, you would have been a great joke. And look at what happened. The big thing is to keep a Richard Stallman like resolve to do what is right for the people, even if it means a little less personal success.
Be well.
Fun fact: Andreas has also worked on Konqueror/KHTML back in the day, or so I remember him saying in one of his videos.
Well that explains in part his knowledge of web rending tech. Very cool.
Hi Andreas,
First, thanks for this project and making your self accessible!
Will "plug-in" or "add-on" support be a first-party concept in Ladybird?
I ask that because in years past a few other browsers (Konqueror, Falkon, Dillo, etc) made it pretty far but lacking add-ons, useful capability such as 'NoScript' or 'uBlock' or even a tab manager made them non-starters.
NoScript for Dillo makes no sense as it doesn't support JS anyway. uBlock... yeah, a little, but most annoyances will be blocked by the lack of JS support anyway.
Plus there are plugins for dillo... https://dillo-browser.github.io/#plugins
The plugins for Dillo are only protocol plugins; there are no file format plugins and no other kinds of plugins. However, I mentioned they should implement file format plugins too; other people also wanted this, and it does seem to be wanted enough that they might do it. (Other plugins will be more complicated to consider how to support it)
Exactly. I need 1Password and a vim mode plugin for me to be productive on the web.
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I would hope that plug-ins and add-ons can be written in C (although any extensions written in C should be only allowed if installed manually by the end user (e.g. by adding it to some configuration file); it should never install them automatically from a "app store" or similar). That is a feature I would use.
If by "C" you're asking for C compiled to WASM, then fine. But otherwise I would hope that WASN'T ever possible.
The endless security nightmare that was ActiveX and NPAPI should serve as more than enough reason why that shouldn't be a thing again.
"Installed manually not from app store" is even worse because then you're encouraging people to download random binaries from random websites and that's even worse
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I would think that wasm should probably be the "binary" extension target, which could include C source.
Just my opinion.
Wat?
Seeing someone ignore the naysayers and attempt the so-called impossible task of developing a new independent browser is awesome to see. It brings a glimmer of hope that the internet is not doomed to be ruled by advertising companies with only a stagnant controlled opposition browser as the alternative.
That said, Ladybird is obviously far from becoming the daily driver for the average webizen. What do you think is going to be the first milestone where Ladybird is going to be able to be a real alternative (even if limited to certain use cases) and in what timeframe do you think this can be accomplished?
Also, do you already have any plans or ideas for how to improve the web browsing experience beyond what existing browsers provide or is your focus entirely on the engine catching up for now?
> What do you think is going to be the first milestone where Ladybird is going to be able to be a real alternative (even if limited to certain use cases) and in what timeframe do you think this can be accomplished?
At the moment, we are focusing primarily on our own use cases as developers, since those are the easiest to test and qualify. So websites like GitHub, web specifications, MDN, etc. are likely going to be very high fidelity before other parts of the web catch up ;)
> Also, do you already have any plans or ideas for how to improve the web browsing experience beyond what existing browsers provide or is your focus entirely on the engine catching up for now?
We are definitely focused on the engine catching up right now. There is an incredible amount of work to do, and we're doing the best we can :)
I think thats a very smart plan, get the websites that devs frequent up and running relatively reliably to help drive more dev use and therefore more willing contributors.
> Seeing someone ignore the naysayers and attempt the so-called impossible task of developing a new independent browser is awesome to see
Well the impossibility isn't so much in making a browser but making a browser that manages to get a chunk of web audience.
That means presence on mobile, feature and performance parity with Chrome, surprasing Chrome on some level (e.g. Safari having better vendor lock-in).
Safari is better than Chrome in many ways, arguably most.
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I'm pretty sure the impossibility advertised back then was also about just making a browser.
> Seeing someone ignore the naysayers and attempt the so-called impossible task of developing a new independent browser is awesome to see
According to Hacker News readers, the ladybird shouldn't be able to compete in the browser space. It's too difficult, the spec is too large, its competitors have large pockets. The ladybird tries anyway, because ladybirds don't care about what HN readers think.
Inspired by https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/823379-according-to-all-kno...
Congratulations on the kick-off! Now that Ladybird is no longer a part of SerenityOS, will you consider a switch to a licence which not only grants, but also protects user freedoms (e.g. the GPL, MPL, EUPL)?
Also, any thoughts on having official communication channels on some open, freedom-respecting platforms, rather than Discord only?
Thanks F3nd0! There are currently no plans to switch to a less permissive license.
And we're perfectly happy using proprietary services like GitHub and Discord as long as they make our work easier and more enjoyable. We recently evaluated a number of alternatives, and found that they all introduced more friction than we were comfortable with.
Although the task of building a browser is itself challenging, we're a pragmatic project :)
> There are currently no plans to switch to a less permissive license.
Hey, just a reality check: in the event that you actually do become wildly successful, this means that others (Google, Microsoft, etc.) will be able to fork the browser and then develop it faster than you - thus leaving you behind and taking away your users! Would highly recommend leaving yourself some mechanism to prevent that, unless you're really okay with the project defeating itself through its own success.
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> (...) switch to a less permissive license.
License "permissiveness" is a relative concept. From the point of view of the users of your software, the GPL is more permissive than MIT, since they have permission to see the source code. If you release software under MIT or BSD licenses, you allow middlemen to strip this right to users of your software.
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Less permissive licenses protect users more.
https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-t...
Indeed. This is something I could see myself contributing to (or attempting to, anyway), but as soon as I saw Discord+Github, I lost all interest.
Github I can understand to some extent, it's a convenient temporary staying place until they can afford, community-wise, to move to something truly open, but Discord? In this day and age?
> but Discord? In this day and age?
Discord IS the platform of this day and age, what the hell are you talking about? You might not like Discord for whatever reasons, but trying to make it sound outdated or legacy is very weird sounding.
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> but Discord? In this day and age?
What’s your recommended alternative?
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Agreed, Discord is a terrible platform and I wish people stopped using it. I expect in the next five years or so it'll undergo a very rapid enshitification and people will start using other things after that, but by then we'll have a decade of lost content.
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The guy used to work for Apple at WebKit team.
So he knows that corporations can take open source browsers and make it proprietary.
This seems very important given how KHTML lead to the current near-monoculture in the browser space.
The BSD license protects user freedoms just fine.
This is a welcome initiative speaking from a personal and professional perspective, and as CEO of an independent search engine; we are all too well aware of the power of money and defaults.
This immediately comes to mind as akin to the Signal vis-a-vis WhatsApp etc. Here there is an obvious reason to use Signal and a well-understood proposition. What might it be for Ladybird? And how will you differentiate?
To be honest, we are so far behind everyone else today that we're 100% focused on catching up technically, and not thinking much about differentiation. :)
That said, I do think we'll find ways to differentiate given our uncommon situation with no ties to the advertising industry. This gives us the ability to experiment with privacy measures more aggressive than others may be comfortable with for fear of losing funding, for example.
With no ties, direct AND indirect, that does make Ladybird uncommon, like Pale Moon.
Our own approach to privacy is as radical as it gets in search: "No Tracking, Just Search". As we often say: tracking, not ads, is the fundamental problem. Contextual ads do not need necessarily to have tracking. Though the duopoly of search ad networks makes that a hard road too.
Good luck. Excited to see how Ladybird progresses.
Well, your tie to the advertising industry is that large parts of the web are funded by advertising. Get too anti-advertising and servers will just treat you as an ad blocker and find ways to stop serving you.
How does ladybird compare to Servo?
https://servo.org/
I can't speak for Servo, but my understanding is that they have very different goals than we do.
Servo wants to build an embeddable engine for controlled sets of HTML/CSS/JS content, with a focus on modularity and parallelism.
Ladybird wants to build a usable browser for the open web, warts and all, with a focus on compatibility and correctness.
I'm a big fan of Servo and I hope they become a huge success! Competition and new ideas in browser engines will benefit all of us! :)
> Servo wants to build an embeddable engine
That’s what they pivoted to after being expelled from Mozilla, but that wasn’t the original goal, was it? It’s the safer(?) one they turned to when the job security evaporated.
(Not sure if that changes anything, just feel obligated to point out the retcon here.)
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The talk about correctness gets me thinking.
If there is a difference between how specs define something, and how browsers behave (and website expect them to behave), will you choose technical correctness or websites actually functioning?
Technically this has been the big problem of HTML5 vs XHTML, and "technical correctness" lost to actual usability.
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Servo is just the engine at this point. Ladybird has the whole thing.
Servoshell is the web browser built around Servo, there is also Qt Servo Webview: https://github.com/KDABLabs/cxx-qt-servo-webview
How does Ladybird avoid Mozilla's fate? How can it be a long term sustainable project?
It depends on what you mean by “Mozilla’s fate”. In general, we are setting a much narrower goal than Mozilla and hope that focusing on only browsers will allow us to keep things simple and more sustainable financially. :)
Mozilla is dependent on advertising money from Google, is that only because they ventured in other directions? I'm not intimate with their finances, but it seems just building a browser is a large enough - expensive - R&D effort.
Are you planning on charging your users?
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Unless you are planning to live off the interest from your donations, how will this be possible?
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I've heard Andreas Kling say that they will not accept donations that have strings attached. This means they can never sell search engine placement to Google for instance. This is what ties Mozilla to Google.
That's right. The Ladybird Browser Initiative will only accept unrestricted donations. We're missing out on a fair bit of money this way, but we believe it's the right path for us.
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Don't throw money away into non-browser related projects while constantly pissing off your loyal userbase.
Look, I am as annoyed as you are with the constant barrage of "rewritten in Rust" projects, but if Mozilla did not try various other projects that are not browser, there would be no Rust.
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Its easy to avoid the fate of Mozilla, don't get involved and distracted by lots of side projects.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Past-projects
It does seem the apple doesn't fall far from the money tree.
Ask for money from the start?
And don't ignore or intentionally alienate the users who might be inclined to donate.
Mozilla's fate? You mean building a browser that works?
Indeed, I doubt very much that Ladybird will get there.
I use Firefox every day, but they have lost so much market share that they have become pretty insignificant. They seem to have an oversized and poor management with fat paychecks.
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> we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain. ...We are actively evaluating a number of alternatives and will be adding a mature successor language to the project in the near future. This process is already quite far along, and prototypes exist in multiple languages.
What languages have prototypes and where can I learn more?
We have not been debating this publicly as it has a 100% chance of devolving into a bikeshed discussion :)
Clearly there is a furious internal war between CLispers and Haskellers!
Whatever language you end up choosing, I hope it will be a memory safe one. Browsers' main purpose is to interact with the outside world, and they even have to run third party code (JS) all the time, so minimizing attack surface would go a long way I think
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My favorite type of discussion! Language choice would seem super important long, long term and could provide long run advantage over other engines. Given the goals and philosophy of Ladybird zig seems like a complementary choice, and headed in the same direction in terms of community and freedom. And Perhaps just a sprinkle of something more verifiable than zig on the edges where correctness and safety are super critical. Have a look into tigerbeatle (https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/TI...) and their philosophy.
I wonder if they are thinking Swift - their C++ interop is still pretty new and has a way to mature, but it’s designed for exactly this [1] (we should expect Apple to start doing it with WebKit and other big C++ projects, even perhaps LLVM).
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgivCGdmFrw
I have two questions, if you don't mind.
1. Legacy hardware support. Is it a goal for Ladybird to build for 32-bit and big-endian CPUs out of the repository?
2. Electron. Do you have any plans to work on an Electron alternative based on Ladybird further down the line? No free Electron alternative other than Sciter seems to use the same browser engine on all platforms. There may be value in one that implements the latest web standards.
1. We are not focusing on legacy hardware support. Given our release date is far in the future, we are mainly targeting the kind of devices most people will have a few years from now.
2. No concrete plans, but it's not outside the realm of possibilities.
"2. No concrete plans, but it's not outside the realm of possibilities."
Sounds good. If it also makes it into Serenty OS eventually, it would suddenly make Serenety OS a lot more accessible and useful for way more people. But I think you are aware of this and also of the challenges.
Building a working browser is hard enough on its own.
Maybe item (2) is more up Servo’s alley than what Ladybird is trying to do? Servo seem to be focusing on making an embeddable engine, Ladybird is intended to be a full browser…
We're building one of these (out of a mix of servo, rust ui ecosystem and custom components). It's still pretty early (an initial alpha-quality 0.1 release is planned for the end of this month). We're planning to have a high standard of support for CSS and anything related to rendering, but we're not planning a JavaScript engine (although one could be added) with scripting being directly in Rust (with a Rust-based React alternative).
https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz
Big endian isn't "legacy", modern POWER is perfectly good. (It's niche, granted)
I thought someone might would take issue with it. :-) I didn't qualify "legacy" for succinctness and because I have a sense Power ISA users prefer ppc64le.
It's been so refreshing watching this project blossom from literally almost nothing. I wish you success :) Hopefully I can contribute at some point because I think this browser has the best chance of shaking up the monopoly, and I want to daily drive it.
What is the biggest challenge you expect for ladybird to be successful and do you consider this project still a "hobby" now?
Thanks again for your hard work!
We have a number of big challenges in the immediate future, but I think the biggest one of all will be the long tail of compatibility and correctness issues that inevitably awaits us after everything falls into place.
This is definitely more than a hobby at this point. I already manage 3 employees, with 3 more joining in the next month!
I hope that you continue your herculean efforts to investigate the specs and insist on correctness; the resulting implementations, dug up inconsistencies and edge cases will undoubtedly be of independent interest and invaluable to the community.
> We have a number of big challenges in the immediate future, but I think the biggest one of all will be the long tail of compatibility and correctness issues
No kidding... how about get it roughly working on hacker news, and make it the hackers way to start each day, and pull in as much help and community as possible from here?
Andreas you and your story and your passion for the open web and open tech and your merry band of hackers are going to save the web. Bravo to you and the community that is helping to pull this off. I’ll be donating to help.
Here’s hoping one day I can move to LadyBird and leave the others behind.
Bravo again.
Are you working full time on this now? How many people are working on it and about how much time per week are they able to do? Is this expected to hold steady or do expect changes over the coming weeks, months, or years?
Not trying to pry into your personal lives, just wondering because there's a lot of meaningful information behind the answers to those questions.
Yes! I'm already working on it full time, along with 3 employees. In the next month, we are bringing on 3 more.
Given the limitations of our funding model, we won't be building a huge team, but rather a small team that allows us to maintain a runway of at least 1.5 years. :)
Where on the roadmap is GPU compositing? In modern browser programming, I kind of take for granted that I can control the rendering “layers” and certain CSS properties, like “transform,” will be accelerated.
Edit: In Blink, the layer/compositing system extends to SVG elements inside SVG tags, as well, and in WebKit, it doesn’t yet, but there is an active years-long effort going back to 2019 that will eventually land: https://youtu.be/WxqJFxiprrU?si=dhQIgW1V4yS_Ca4s Compositing and using the GPU seems like a complex but important part of rendering in a browser, and a case where it could be good to implement the kind of system that other browsers have arrived at after years of iteration, when it comes time to do so.
Will the JS engine still be LibJS?
> Where on the roadmap is GPU compositing? In modern browser programming, I kind of take for granted that I can control the rendering “layers” and certain CSS properties, like “transform,” will be accelerated.
AFAIK there's some support for it already, but it has to be enabled explicitly with --enable-gpu-painting. I can confirm that with that switch Ladybird can do 3D CSS transforms (which don't work without it).
What’s the biggest technical challenge you envision in the future? It’s the amount of “standards” you need to implement and maintain? What’s the JavaScript engine situation?
There are a ton of standards at a glance, but when you look closer, you realize that much of it isn't implemented by other browsers either, and you only need a fraction of it to render 90%+ of the web. The last 10% will be a huge challenge, but we've got a long way to go before then.
The JavaScript engine is our own LibJS, currently sitting at 94.3% pass rate on https://test262.fyi/ (although the number might be a little outdated, it's supposed to be higher! Need to investigate this..)
Are you planning on participating in the standards process? Will you have anything like the Mozilla / WebKit / Chrome standards positions?
https://mozilla.github.io/standards-positions/
https://www.webkit.org/standards-positions/
https://chromestatus.com/newfeatures
What's the pitch for those who currently use firefox?
Finally get out from under Google's thumb. As soon as Ladybird is half as good as Firefox, then this is reason enough for me to switch. I've lost faith in Mozilla's leadership, and I believe the root cause is the Google money that they rely on.
> As soon as Ladybird is half as good as Firefox
That's never gonna happen without substantial funding because a modern, remotely feature parity web browser is a gargantuan project even if every developer is a genius. Chromium and Firefox sit at 30 million/20 million lines of code respectively, modern web browsers are basically operating systems.
Mozilla doesn't rely on Google revenue because they love Google so much, they do so because they have hundreds of engineers to pay. A million dollars sounds like a lot but that pays for a handful of engineers for a year. That's not going to get you to 5% of Chromium or Firefox.
Something about only being a browser company? Mozilla is many things, but purely browser focused is not it.
I would say the browser it’s not even in their mind at this point. High level people inside Mozilla not only implied but said it directly.
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Maybe they’ll add tab groups.
They are currently working on it.
Are you aiming for 100% compatibility with modern web standards or are you aiming for some sensible subset of it?
It seems to me that a large volume of code in Blink deals with obscure features with relatively niche use cases (such as WebRTC, WebUSB,WebGL, WebAudio and so on and so forth), which would mean a large amount of programmer effort for very little user-facing gain.
Additionally, in these areas, web standards tend to say 'whatever Chrome does', with FF often lifting large parts of Chrome code to support these features. Even if the above wasn't true, in practicality it is, since all clients are tested against Chrome, you'd need to follow all its quirks to have your browser be compatible.
Are you planning to do a clean room implementation of these features as well?
>niche use cases (such as WebRTC, WebUSB,WebGL, WebAudio and so on and so forth)
WebUSB is a lot more common than one might think, but I mostly see it used in music gear. Companies like Novation use WebUSB to facilitate firmware upgrades, backups, patch management, etc with their synthesizers and workstations.
Its pretty much a necessity for me at this point so that I can remain OS agnostic and still manage my gear.
Fantastic - I’ve been using a bootleg wrapper of your browser for awhile now. Fair seas ahead!
I also have a personalized build step on our pre-production web app that launches the site in Ladybird for my host. It’s been awesome to see the browser lock in functionality along with our own progress.
I remember watching one of the early videos of you starting working on the browser, and you said something along the lines of wanting a browser that was sort of a dumb renderer - one that didn't attempt to be a whole Operating System.
Does Ladybird still follow that ideal?
That was a long time ago indeed! To be honest, I think I was partly saying that because I was scared of the idea of supporting the entire web platform. It seemed so far away at the time. :)
Going forward, we want to support the open web as it exists, so you can actually use Ladybird to interact with all your websites. We may not agree that every web platform API is awesome and perfect, but we will honor the open standards to the best of our ability.
Andreas, this is awesome :)!
But please do consider putting up some screenshots of the browser - including how it renders the popular sites.
If Ladybird is "forked" from SerenityOS now, does that mean the mainline won't run on Serenity any longer?
That’s right. A version of Ladybird remains in the SerenityOS repo, and people are cherry-picking changes as we go.
Over time, I expect them to diverge enough that this becomes impractical, as Ladybird now allows 3rd party code while SerenityOS does not. It’s up to the SerenityOS community how to handle this.
Will it block ads are have the ability to run extensions to do so? I can't use modern web without an ad blocker
We will absolutely have the ability to block ads. The web is downright unpleasant without this feature!
What's your point of view about quirks as you can find in other browsers and how do you plan to handle websites that rely on unintended browser behavior ?
These days, all major browsers are taking interoperability very seriously. There’s even efforts like the annual “Interop 202x” where people vote on which interop bugs browsers should focus on fixing.
We benefit greatly from this of course, and we will do what we can to contribute when we’re mature enough!
That said, there will always be websites relying on bugs, and for that we will need a way to selectively emulate alternate behaviors in some cases. We are looking at a few different solutions for this but it’s not a huge priority right now as there are far lower hanging fruit in front of us.
Thanks! Good luck with your project, this single-handedly gave me back faith in the modern web when I found out a few month ago about the progress you guys made since I last saw it
Bravo Andreas, and thanks for working on keeping the Internet neutral. It's a thankless, titanic effort against the Goliaths that want to make it their playground, and us their loyal subjects.
Can't wait for the day I can drop Firefox and use Ladybird full time.
[flagged]
Get a hobby.
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Q1: given that all browsers support non-standard functionality (e.g., CSS attributes not ratified yet, etc) - how will you decide which non standard specs you’ll implement and which you won’t?
(or will you just use Chrome as a reference spec and implement anything it implements?)
Q2: what is your “guiding principle/mission”? Is it to be the fastest browser? The most privacy centric browser? The only 100% standards compliant browser? etc…
—-
Super excited for you. Wishing you the best in this and hope you change the world for the better.
I am a bit confused by the question. Why wouldn’t all commonly used defacto standards be supported? Or are you talking about obscure standards which no one uses?
Any browser that doesn’t display normal websites normally will never achieve mainstream usage. Who willingly handicaps their software?
There’s websites decided to pointing out which standards various browsers do & don’t support.
https://caniuse.com/
(An older not as relevant one is http://acid3.acidtests.org/ )
Holy cheeseballs! That’s amazing. Big congrats, you deserve it :D
Three questions:
Will you use Vulkan when it comes to gpu accel or OpenGL?
Will you make better adblocking capabilities by embedding faster checks and rule engines/lookups in c++ than what we have now?
How much can people who do not contribute code affect development? In terms of requests suggestions? E.g. if I would suggest to skip OpenGL and use Vulkan (so basically defining a limit on how old should the hw be), would this be even considered?
Hey please be sure to design and at least mock out a way to host/run a collection of local LLM models in a generic manner. You could give the models access to context/content/history and to bubble up functionality within the browser. I can see tons of potential for something trusted and local which I'm comfortable giving full access to browsing history and not owned by big tech.
This could be key differentiator over other browsers.
I agree, though this does not seem like something that should be built until the browser is at least usable, which currently they're projecting an alpha release in 2026. By then things might be totally different, so don't architect yourself into a corner with it, but I also wouldn't invest much or any time into it right now. Focus on building good APIs/extension points though, and those will be immensely useful whether for local LLMs, extensions, or anything.
Yeah, wasn't thinking about actually building it out, just mocking it out and taking into consideration to allow for it as you build out browser. So much easier to plan for rails, rather than foist into something later on.
edit: > Focus on building good APIs/extension points though, and those will be immensely useful whether for local LLMs.
I think we're saying the same thing, focus on good extension points for the local LLM use case.
Can you share the story of how the funding/patronage materialized? Were you already connected or was a more formal introduction & pitch needed?
Do you see Ladybird beating the incumbent browsers in any dimension .e.g. performance, usability?, security, etc?
Personally, I much prefer developing for the web than native so if there were APIs exclusive to Ladybird it might create a nice virtuous cycle of developers targeting Ladybird to do new things and users using Ladybird to try those new experiences.
I absolutely adore your coding videos where you implement new features. Any chance we'll get more of those with Ladybird?
As someone who has very little experience working on a browser, but is interested in helping, could you possibly recommend where a dumb dude that wants to help could get started?
There's probably a huge influx of people trying to get involved now, which probably really complicates and muddies the waters right now as well.
Either way, congrats!
Would be awesome to have the UI/UX of arc with non-chrome browsers! It's the most productive browser ever, with the spaces and the bar on the left. Safari doesn't come close I'm afraid, as it closes all the windows when switching a space
is there still space on your crew? i’d love to join, should i just start committing?
We’re always open to new developers! Find a website that doesn’t work right, then try to figure out why, and see if you can fix it :)
The best for a beginner is usually to start with some simple page you made yourself, since you know how it’s supposed to work, and can debug more easily.
And come join us on Discord, there are new people getting into the codebase all the time :)
Thanks Andreas! Completely forgot about the current Discord meta.
This is awesome news, congrats and keep up the great work :)
Just wanted to add a note for the roadmap: Please make sure it can compete with Safari on battery usage, so those who are mobile on a Mac are not left behind.
Best of luck!
Hey Andreas! Why you don’t just fork the code of Firefox or Chromium's and start from that point, building a Browser company like some others?
Hey kosolam! There are already many forks and ports of existing browsers. Do we really need another one? :)
By building a new engine, we can increase ecosystem diversity and put all these open standards to the test. We regularly find, report, and sometimes even fix bugs in the various web standards - stuff we find just by being the first to try and implement everything from scratch in a long time!
We also believe it’s good for the world to have more engines that aren’t directly or indirectly funded primarily by the advertising industry.
Relying on open standards is risky. It seems to me the de facto standard is whatever Chrome or Blink does.
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So freaking cool
Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be Safari’s default search engine. They paid half a billion to be Firefox's default search engine.
Here's a tweet with a couple of diagrams that illustrate how much control Google has over all browsers (including Firefox and Safari): https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1793937129250214344
I'm also curious about this. When it was just a toy project it made sense to write everything from scratch. If it's supposed to eventually be usable by people, a hard fork of Chromium, or at least some Chromium components might make more sense. Having a browser that improves hackability and user freedom while working just as well as Chromium sounds like heaven to me. Anyways, I'm clueless about browser development so I might be completely wrong.
What's the trouble with the Android port?
It's an unmaintained prototype without anyone actively working on it.
Once we get the desktop version into decent shape, we will direct more attention to mobile platforms. At the moment there's just too much important low-hanging fruit that's easier to develop (and debug!) on desktop :)
Chris is awesome! Congrats, Andi
Please. If you ever reach feature "parity" that is sanely competitive with something like Firefox or Chrome and have regular everyday production ready releases. Please. Please. Do not turn into Mozilla where you waste funds. Make a paid version and I will gladly pay for it monthly if it means you will put all the profits (or most) into development efforts exclusively. I'm still sour at how much money Mozilla wastes (and Wikipedia for that matter), they had so many great initiatives and projects they have tossed.
congrats my dude! and when windows & android version available, i don't mind 10 bucks per month subscription at all.
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Don't forget that the GitHub cofounder is the same person who dared to have a meritocracy rug [1]! Cancel, cancel, cancel.
https://readwrite.com/github-meritocracy-rug/
After reading your comment I went over to the Github but failed to find the PR you described. Perhaps you can locate it?
I did find this:
https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/pull/366/files
Do you think PRs like this carry an appropriate tone that demands they be addressed and merged?
See https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814
There's not much grace to find in the response of awesomekling in this PR.
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I think you're grossly putting your own political viewpoint on this non-issue and frankly accusing someone of sexism based pro-nouns used in documentation.
This is ridiculous. I can read documentation with "he" I can read it with "her". I am adult enough to know it's talking about a hypothetical reader.
Fighting a culture war at every corner is just furthering the toxic environment we all live in.
If it's such a non-issue and doesn't indicate the predilections of the author, why not change it to be neutral? Where is the harm? Isn't being more inclusive on an open source project better?
It seems the author is taking an explicitly political stance by vehemently opposing something as simple as neutral pronouns in a README.
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Please forgive me if this was talked about already, but I don't see it. Do you have any thoughts on Web3 support of any kind? Metamask enabled dApp development, but it hasn't evolved particularly well. There have been other attempts to replace Metmask with a better wallet such as Coinbase's wallet or Tally. But I think the whole paradigm needs a rethink. Is any of this even on your radar at all?
What can you do with $1M? Writing a web browser is difficult, so the salary for 1 developer is about $300k/year. Then you can have 3 developers. Can 3 developers create a web browser in a year? I don't think so. If those 3 developers can do that, then they'll ask for more than $400k/yr/person. That means, IMO, this project will go nowhere. However, any project that can create jobs is good, in fact very good.
I know that many on HN can't imagine it, but a lot of us work for less than that for any number of reasons:
* We're already making a top 5% income for our area and have more than enough for our needs and even an early retirement.
* We get non-monetary benefits from our job like WFH and/or flexible scheduling.
* We're working on projects that excite us and make us happy to go to work and that matters more than total comp.
Money aside, I'd rather see Ladybird hire 6 developers who are seriously passionate and live all across the world than see them hire 6 Bay Area developers who think they're better because they ask for more comp. That the passionate and global developers are cheaper is just a nice bonus.