Why build another browser, from scratch, in C++?
Why not? Some people are hacking on 30+ year old 8 bit systems... just for the fun of it.
Ladybird browser spreads its wings
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Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#52I hear so much about Ladybird on HN, that I’m equally excited and cynical. What is the value proposition? Is it to be another general purpose browser, so there’s more competition with Chrome / WebKit? Or to be a niche browser, that could be an alternative to Electron? How close is it to achieving that?
Probably there's very little point to this other than learning how to build a browser right now. I don't see this catching up any time soon to a point where you could use this and not deal with a very broken browsing experience. So this will likely stay a bit of a niche thing for quite some time. But I'm happy for people to prove me wrong. Easy to forget that Webkit started out as a fork of Khtml when Apple embraced…
It sets my expectations. Sometimes you hear a lot about a project because it's a vaporware scam, and I'm reassured that's not happening here. I should expect to see lots of excited people posting about it because they enjoy working on it, and it's delivering on that value even without much production usage.
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#53Why build another browser, from scratch, in C++?
Because they can
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand what is wrong with Firefox. It is open-source, highly configurable and reasonably secure (if you have the time to configure). Yes, it has shortcomings, but what doesn't.
Not every open source software has spyware and ads activated by default, while marketing itself as privacy friendly. Yes, can all be deactivated, I also use FF, but I do not trust Mozilla anymore.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by your claims of firefox having “spyware and ads activated by default”?
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand what is wrong with Firefox. It is open-source, highly configurable and reasonably secure (if you have the time to configure). Yes, it has shortcomings, but what doesn't.
Not every open source software has spyware and ads activated by default, while marketing itself as privacy friendly. Yes, can all be deactivated, I also use FF, but I do not trust Mozilla anymore.
Sure, there are forks such as LibreWolf. I understand the reservations regarding Mozilla Foundation, although I generally like what they've been doing. Every org has people with stupid ideas. However, the way I see it, it's unlikely that the community will be able to produce a competitive browser in a broader sense (stability, performance, security, cross-platform...), meaning that the likelihood of Firefox being still around ten years from now is significantly higher than that we build and maintain a comparable browser ourselves. Then come the evolving web standards and lobbying power...
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#56I don't want to discourage the developers working on this project, but I'm curious why we're still writing applications that will almost certainly execute or process hostile content in languages that don't maintain strict memory safe contract? Have we not learned our lesson yet, or am I misunderstanding the situation? I believe it was a Microsoft study that linked unsafe memory access to ~70% of exploit chains.
> in languages that don't maintain strict memory safe contract?
for the same reason people still use the English language, despite being full of crazy inconsistencies and being very hard to become a native speaker, coming from another language: proficiency.
Proficiency is one of the most, if not the most, valuable metric when choosing the tool you will use to take on some complex/daunting task.
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#57The founder usually lives to stream his work—very impressive skills.
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not every open source software has spyware and ads activated by default, while marketing itself as privacy friendly. Yes, can all be deactivated, I also use FF, but I do not trust Mozilla anymore.
Firefox is open source, it would be far easier for the community to make a stripped down Firefox port with no telemetry, no ads and no upsells for Mozilla services. With that said, almost all of Mozilla's revenue comes from Google, which might possibly influence what features they implement, their stance on various web standards etc.
> which might possibly influence what features they implement, their stance on various web standards etc.
Unless you’ve got some examples to back this up, it’s FUD. Posting hypotheticals is how rumours start, and this is just stirring the pot.
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#59I don't want to discourage the developers working on this project, but I'm curious why we're still writing applications that will almost certainly execute or process hostile content in languages that don't maintain strict memory safe contract? Have we not learned our lesson yet, or am I misunderstanding the situation? I believe it was a Microsoft study that linked unsafe memory access to ~70% of exploit chains.
On the v8 engine's blog, it is claimed that most of its vulnerabilities are caused by logic issues which Rust wouldn't help with.
Perhaps it's a similar situation for Ladybird.
>Memory safety remains a relevant problem: all Chrome exploits caught in the wild in the last three years (2021 – 2023) started out with a memory corruption vulnerability in a Chrome renderer process that was exploited for remote code execution (RCE). Of these, 60% were vulnerabilities in V8.
> V8 vulnerabilities are rarely "classic" memory corruption bugs (use-after-frees, out-of-bounds accesses, etc.) but instead subtle logic issues which can in turn be exploited to corrupt memory. As such, existing memory safety solutions are, for the most part, not applicable to V8. In particular, neither switching to a memory safe language, such as Rust, nor using current or future hardware memory safety features, such as memory tagging, can help with the security challenges faced by V8 today.
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#60As long as they don't get rid of the Qt dependency the project is a bit pointless. If you are using Qt anyways Qt Webview offers already a superior way to render HTML than Ladybird.
I think the point is the opposite; they have decided to build a new "web stack" from scratch, not just build a new "browser" (or invent a new GUI framework). Hopefully the web engine is not deeply tied to Qt, but you need something in order to draw an interactive window. The article mentions that they will also use existing libraries for things like font rendering. Seems like a pragmatic decision to me.