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I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

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Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#111

Post by tharne »

Y_Y wrote: post #79
Sakos wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. There are far more differences/changes between Chromium-based browsers than Firefox ones (which just remove Mozilla telemetry or provide a way to use old-style extensions). It really was a huge shame that they chose to base Edge on Chromium instead and I feel it points to clear issues in Firefox that prevent it from being the Linux of browsers. I do wonder what's so wrong with FF that nobody wants to base the…

> I do wonder what's so wrong with FF that nobody wants to base their fork on it. It's compatibility. I use Firefox now it less exclusively, and sometimes I'll need to go on some "normie" website to book a flight or something and the Continue button will be broken or some shit. Seems like lots of web devs will just make the sure works in Chrome and call it a day.

> sometimes I'll need to go on some "normie" website to book a flight or something

I have ungoogled chromium installed alongside firefox for exactly this reason. A lot of mainstream sites clearly do not care about supporting other engines.

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#112

Post by blinkingled »

I have been following Andreas' YT channel for ~8 months now and it's been fun - miss the Car talk ones lately but the live bug fixing, the updates and how he has pulled himself out of some dark times - it's all very inspiring. IOW 2x100k would not possibly have gone to a better guy!

He does this all for fun and even if Ladybird doesn't become the #1 browser the learnings in developing a x-platform browser in themselves would make this all worthwhile!

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#113

Post by rprospero »

bruce511 wrote: post #101
Tade0 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two competitors in anything is too few. Look at the mess any two-party system is comparing to where there are at least three, each keeping the others in check.

Tell that to MS Phone. Tell that to Desktop Linux. Or OS/2. Or BeOS. Etc. A browser is a consumer product. As such the public will gravitate between two choices. 3rd place is no-where land. Sure 3rd place can exist, but its always a distant 3rd. Trident got canned for a reason. MS phone was a good OS, but sales offered iOS and Android. We need a stronger second option, not another option. Mozilla at least starts at p…

As a counter-point, I remember people making the same argument when Google announced Chrome. Browsers would always be a battle between two contenders and it would be better for Google to focus on helping Firefox in its fight against Internet Explorer than creating a third browser that could never hope to scrape a meaningful market share from the existing behemoths.

It’s a long road for Ladybird to be a real competitor to Chromium. However, the road to overtaking Firefox is much shorter and I’m less hopeful that Mozilla has a road to overtake Chromium.

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#114

Post by matheusmoreira »

awesomekling wrote: post #5

Hello friends! I am very excited about this indeed :) If you’d like to know more about Ladybird, I did a presentation about it at the Web Engines Hackfest in Spain just two weeks ago: https://youtu.be/De8N1zrQwRs

Congratulations, I wish you massive success.

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#115

Post by dmytrish »

FpUser wrote: post #27

Congrats for such a nice acknowledgement of your work. While looking at their other project I am curious that the author has decided to invent their own memory safe language currently implemented as transpiler to C++ written in Rust. Why not to just use Rust as their system language. I can imagine potential nightmares when debugging such concoction.

The jakt compiler has been rewritten in jakt.

Rewriting it in jakt is now a thing!

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#116

Post by jeroenhd »

userbinator wrote: post #39
tannhaeuser wrote: post #16

Congrats! Considering HTML but mostly CSS complexity is expanding all the time as we speak (discussed on the HN front page right now [1]), are there points to be addressed at the likes of W3C, Inc and github.com/whatwg to make your work easier or even possible? Such as versioned CSS specs/CSS profiles (subsets), test suites aligned with CSS or HTML versions, test suites usable without JS (eg web-platform-test for CSS…

but mostly CSS complexity is expanding all the time as we speak That's the biggest problem facing new browser implementations, and IMHO it's deliberate. Probably 99% of sites out there do not need any of the new crap that gets constantly added to the "standard", but continued propaganda by those constantly in power will practically guarantee that they will, under some guise of "progress" or "modernity". WHATWG is bas…

A lot of CSS seems excessive but I, for one, am glad with a lot of the additions over the years. CSS tables are great (better than flexbox for many layouts IMO), CSS masks combined with gradients and other background tricks save us from manually positioned SVGs that have to be just the right size.

Recent additions include the :has pseudo class, which I've wanted for a while, a subgrid layout to alleviate the problems nesting grids can cause, scroll snapping should make those annoying Apple style scrolling web pages less of a problem to deal with, and there are tons of other great features out there as well.

With these, we can finally get rid of the janky mess that we needed 10 years ago. No more magical "width: auto auto" for centering text. No more lists of "display: float" to get dynamic sizing.

The newer the standards are, the better the documentation is in my experience. Older CSS had a lot of shitty implementation defined behavior that has since been documented to correspond to what most browsers seemed to do anyway. The newer standards seem to be written with an actual intend to be implemented consistently.

You could build almost any modern web page in Microsoft FrontPage twenty years ago with enough carefully crafted GIFs, but I think we all agree that CSS has improved for the better since then. If it weren't for all these "living standards", you would barely be able to use the web on your phone. I remember the PDA internet era, back before the iPhone made showing real websites on your smartphone a thing developers became aware of. It was not good.

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#117

Post by bunga-bunga »

Sakos wrote: post #62
quew wrote: post #53

Why don't people fork Chromium instead? License issues? Why reinvent?

Because Google retains tight control over Chromium and outsiders generally have no say in important decisions/changes. If Google kills support for one image format in favor of their own, that basically means every Chromium fork doesn't support that format. That said, most modern browsers already are forks of Chromium. It'd be nice to have a third option that isn't just Google or Google-funded.

“Chromium browsers” are not actual forks, they’re still the same Chrome.

What they could do, as GP suggested, is actually fork an existing engine and start with a working foundation that’s already compatible with the existing web.

Note: Google did it, they forked WebKit and now nobody calls Edge a “WebKit browser”

Today people complain that Safari and Firefox are “the new IE” because they don’t keep up with the slew of updates Chrome pushes out. Nobody wants to support a third, brand-new super-buggy-forever engine.

It’s an interesting bet, but incredibly high-risk or relegate to obscurity.

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#118

Post by marcinzm »

andybak wrote: post #97
marcinzm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experience with semi-private chats in modern times is that it encourages more conversation that are visible to more people since everything people say is not going to be trivially searchable for all time by anyone. In the age where the media and those with an axe to grind (and frankly the person interviewing you for a job in 10 years) have figured out how to dig up anything you ever said in under 10 minutes the we…

I'm more concerned about the people that need help with something, but don't ask on Discord for any number of reasons. I suspect 1000 people use Google to solve a problem for every 1 that joins a Discord and asks.

That depends. Would you take a public forum where no one ever answers questions and fixes are never implemented and the contributors feel burned out, or a Discord where questions do get answered? The OP clearly said their project got significantly more involvement since moving to Discord. The problem with lack of community involvement is that it puts more work on the contributors which means less questions are answered and burnout is much more likely.

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#119

Post by Intermernet »

awesomekling wrote: post #5

Hello friends! I am very excited about this indeed :) If you’d like to know more about Ladybird, I did a presentation about it at the Web Engines Hackfest in Spain just two weeks ago: https://youtu.be/De8N1zrQwRs

Congrats Andreas! I'm hoping that we see Ladybird become a contender in the browser space and in 10 years the browser landscape is once again diverse!

Of course this means that in 20 years we will probably have another stagnated monoculture based on some weird 3rd party, hostile corporate fork of Ladybird, but by that time you will hopefully own a venture capital firm and will be happily sipping mojitos in the Bahamas, and the cycle shall begin again ;-)

Re: I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser

#120

Post by jeroenhd »

FpUser wrote: post #27

Congrats for such a nice acknowledgement of your work. While looking at their other project I am curious that the author has decided to invent their own memory safe language currently implemented as transpiler to C++ written in Rust. Why not to just use Rust as their system language. I can imagine potential nightmares when debugging such concoction.

There was a video in which Andreas explained in detail what problems he had with Rust. I agreed with a lot of them.

It should be noted that most of the SerenityOS umbrella is written in modern C++ (modern enough that you may very well need to compile a compiler to build the project). Rust and C++ can interoperate, but the process isn't exactly user friendly.

The goal of the language, as I understand it, was to make working on the rest of the Serenity projects more pleasant and safe. Even modern C++ has some annoying footguns but rewriting the entire system simply wasn't an option.

As such, jakt compiles to C++, specially C++ that interoperates with a lot of SerenityOS code, and doing that from Rust code would probably be a much worse experience.

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