Announcing the Ladybird Browser Initiative

I want to follow updates from this project. They have a Twitter account but not Mastodon sigh

The website makes it sound like all of the code being bespoke and "based on standards" is some kind of huge advantage but all I see is a Herculean undertaking with too few engineers and too many standards.

W3C lists 1138 separate standards currently, so if each of their three engineers implements one discrete standard every day, with no breaks/weekends/holidays, then having an alpha available that adheres to all 2024 web standards should be possible by 2026?

This is obviously also without testing but these guys are serious, senior engineers, so their code will be perfect on the first try, right?

Love the passion though, can't wait to see how this project plays out.

Love the idea! Shopify as the highest tier sponsor? Not so much.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I've had more than a handful of people bitching at me that it's impossible to make a new, open web browser in this day.

C++

If they're starting a browser from scratch, why would they not have chosen Rust? Seems very short sighted to not have learned from Firefox.

Funny how in the video the guy say that all other browsers are based on Google's code. But Firefox is also independent right?

Best of luck, I guess, but seems like a doomed project to me. Forking WebKit, Gecko, or even Servo would seem much more reasonable, and even that is a huge undertaking.

They’re making a new browser engine from scratch in an open way, absolutely amazing!

I do have several questions:

Why would they use BSD instead of GPL? If you care about open-source so much, why would you make it possible for a company to run away with your fancy new engine?

Why are they creating a new browser, when even firefox has to struggle to keep some semblance of market share? I get that not every project needs to aim to be “the biggest”, and that even a smaller project (in terms of users), can be fun. It’s just that writing a browser engine that can handle the modern web seems like an almost Sisyphean task; which makes me wonder what their motivation(?) is.

Why the FLOSS are they using closed-source proprietary discord as their main communication channel?

I do not understand the urge to start from scratch instead of forking an existing, mature codebase. This is typically a rookie instinct, but they aren't rookie so there's perhaps an alternative motive of some sort.

Kudos to them. Opera gave up on this dream being unable to accommodate all the nuances of web standards and accounting for out of conformance behaviours that many websites rely on the daily.

I reckon this browser will need to be at least on par with reasonably recent version of Firefox to see significant adoption.

Laaaaaaaaa^dybird.

Servo already exists and is independent and written in a modern language and way ahead of this.

I mean, competition is good but they aren't the only independent browser engine.

is it open source?

Remind me in 2 years when this project becomes discontinued...

Good luck!

It would be nice if people read the post and the project before randomly making assumptions such as implying the project started from scratch yesterday or its run by some amateurs, this is a 4 year old project! It's founded by a former KHTML/Webkit developer for Apple!

Wasn't this the transphobic one?

you shouldn't use this browser the devs are transphobic sexist chuds

https://cyberpunk.lol/@vantablack/112717420300967771

The project management may have some obvious problems (jOin dIsc0Rd sErVEr; w0rD "thEy" t0o p0liTicAl). But we really need an alternative to browsers funded by Google (Chrome and Firefox).

So I'll do my best to actually build from sources and see what can I help with. Attacking the author is helping nobody.

And for the folks who are saying "wHy n0t rUst", you can always show me the (rust) code.

builds a new browser from scratch without borrowing existing code

still chooses to do it in C++

Epic fail

Is it true that there is no truly independent web browser or are there others?

"Ladybird uses a brand new engine based on web standards, without borrowing any code from other browsers." has the same energy as

I use Firefox.

It's hard to understand the purpose of this. The difficulty of the project (i.e. complexity of the web) is the real problem that needs solving. We don't need another fork of the browser-verse. We need a fork of the web itself.

I hope this pans out, because I've long ago lost hope on Firefox being a worthy alternative to Chromium.

As Firefox will introduce Manifest V3 which will make ad-blockers unusable, I hope they will not implement that as well ... But since this is so new, this will not have any add-ons at all for the foreseeable future