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Ladybird browser spreads its wings

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Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings

#221

Post by dns_snek »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #194
erremerre wrote: post #133

Although I dont like quite a few Firefox decisions. Like the floating tabs which no easy way to revert. I still think Firefox as a browser is fairly decent. And I also think that ladybird is going to have all the problems that Opera Presto had (and now Firefox has) which is going to be ignored by any small developers, and targeted to generate errors by the big companies (google/microsoft...) I definitely would have p…

If enough people use different browsers then we'll get effective and slower standards once again. I think the only way to get people on other browsers is to legally require ballots on first use of an OS/device with random order. It worked in the EU, it can work in the US too.

It's great that we're faced with an explicit choice here in the EU, but I don't think it really done much in terms of affecting Chrome's entrenched market share. Most people use whatever tools they're already familiar with. Almost everyone I know uses Chrome, including the majority of my tech circle.

I think people are only going to switch once the Firefox user experience is noticeably better for the average person. Google is on track to make that happen after they finally disable Manifest v2 extensions and as they continue their crackdown on ad blockers.

Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings

#222

Post by [deleted] »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #177
oriolid wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Funny, given that the word diplomacy is a French word This is true. But it only tells about the cultural dominance that France had at the time the convention started. If history had happened differently, Chinese, Hindi or something else could be in similar position. > But if someone is not proficient in Rust it will only slow them down and they'll end up fighting the language and the compiler instead of using the l…

> This is true. But it only tells about the cultural dominance that France French is still very much relevant, but it took centuries to make it less relevant than before to the point where we are now. Rust in comparison is minutes old and there's no evidence it will dominate the field of system programming in the future. See: Ruby on Rails for web development. > This is indeed the choice. Make it difficult to write c…

[deleted]

Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings

#223

Post by kouteiheika »

segfaltnh wrote: post #148
kouteiheika wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fun project, but there's no practical value proposition besides showing that it can be done. People are cheering on it because they love the author and want a new web browser written from scratch, but practically speaking it is a web browser that is 1) written in a memory unsafe language, 2) doesn't really have any sandboxing, and 3) is highly incomplete.

I think I just read in another comment that it uses per tab process isolation. Unless that's not what you mean by sandboxing?

By sandboxing I mean running various subcomponents of the web browser each in their own process, maximally reducing their priviledges and attack surface (through things like seccomp, user namespaces, strict resource limits, clearing and disabling capabilities, minimizing what code is loaded, making the address space immutable, etc.) and maybe even virtualizing some parts (e.g. Firefox started running some components in a WebAssembly sandbox).

There is this document here:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/d...

so there are some plans for sandboxing so that's good, but if I'm reading the code correctly (please correct me if I'm wrong) then no actual sandboxing is yet implemented on non-SerenityOS systems (e.g. there are some "pledge" calls that I can find, but it looks like it'll only work on SerenityOS?), and, if I'm being honest, this is nowhere near aggressive enough for a web browser, especially one written from scratch. If the goal was "produce the most secure web browser in the world" there's much more you could do with its architecture that even likes of Chrome won't (because of legacy considerations, and because they care a lot about how fast it runs).

But, of course, practically speaking as long as it has no market share (so no one will realistically target it) then even minimal sandboxing should be fine, and as long as the project itself doesn't pretend that it's something it is not then all is good.

Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings

#224

Post by paulryanrogers »

erremerre wrote: post #218
paulryanrogers wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If enough people use different browsers then we'll get effective and slower standards once again. I think the only way to get people on other browsers is to legally require ballots on first use of an OS/device with random order. It worked in the EU, it can work in the US too.

Unfortunately that is not how it works. The only way to get different browsers is to get absolutely every single OS project with some traction to force installation of them, to show advertisement everywhere, and to couple it with the installation of any piece of software, and to set it as default, plus import silently everything. Anything that is not a dirty tactic will not work. Also, the moment a user got an error…

All of those problems can be fixed by legal means. We cannot expect the market to regulate itself into a healthy competitive balance.

Force sites to implement baseline standards and not rely on non-standard features. Disallow major web players from pushing their own browsers and from relying on their own browser's non-standard features. Permanently require browser ballots on all widely used consumer OS's. Heavily fine violators consistently. Use the money to support an independent standards body.

Naive users will get a random, standards compliant browser. This throng will help prevent sites with no concern for the law from testing against only one instead of against the standard.

Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings

#225

Post by Y_Y »

gjm11 wrote: post #168
voytec wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand what is wrong with Firefox. It's developed by Mozilla, Google's controlled opposition. I submitted a link[0] on ads coming to Firefox but HN shadowed it almost immediately (present on /newest when logged in, nowhere to be found when logged out). [0] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/06/mozilla-is-an-advertising-c...

That might be because Jamie Zawinski's website, which that link links to, does something ... special ... when it sees HN in the "Referer" field, so anyone actually following that link from here would (unless they take special measures) get IIRC a famous obscene image rather than the actual post you were hoping to link to. (JWZ is not a fan of Hacker News and its community.)

All I see is a testicle in an egg-cup. Hardly special.

(Though it might be a good idea to special-case this to ad a non-referral link at submit time.)

Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings

#226

Post by prmoustache »

tormeh wrote: post #204
1GZ0 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally if I were to attempt a project at this scale, I'd do so using a language I'm proficient in. There might be other reasons, but Rust & C++ really are different beasts.

It's debatable how many - if any - humans are truly proficient with C++.

I would say a lot but the average age is probably higher than rust by a large margin.

Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings

#227

Post by codetrotter »

Y_Y wrote: post #210
bilekas wrote: post #154

Andreas Kling is a great role model in the world of development I feel. The decision to step away from the Serenity OS makes a lot of sense. There are plenty of them, nice projects to do, but they'll never have an immediate impact if any at all. But the browser space, Ladybird is viable as a daily driver for people. I'm still today astounded the work that has been produced just on this. > Somewhat ironically, it was…

> Fascinating to see people expecting everything to work out of the box whilst being writter from scratch. (Sarcastically saying something is interesting is something I find distasteful.) Anyway the irony is that the project chose to use a discussion platform which uses lots of modern web cruft and would be a big challenge for a new browser, when they could have chosen a (maybe less capable) simpler platform like IRC…

They used to use IRC in the beginning.

Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings

#228

Post by hailruda »

Y_Y wrote: post #210
bilekas wrote: post #154

Andreas Kling is a great role model in the world of development I feel. The decision to step away from the Serenity OS makes a lot of sense. There are plenty of them, nice projects to do, but they'll never have an immediate impact if any at all. But the browser space, Ladybird is viable as a daily driver for people. I'm still today astounded the work that has been produced just on this. > Somewhat ironically, it was…

> Fascinating to see people expecting everything to work out of the box whilst being writter from scratch. (Sarcastically saying something is interesting is something I find distasteful.) Anyway the irony is that the project chose to use a discussion platform which uses lots of modern web cruft and would be a big challenge for a new browser, when they could have chosen a (maybe less capable) simpler platform like IRC…

Chosing Discord was a deliberate choice. I remember when Serenity was using IRC as the only communication channel and immediately after setting up a new Discord server the community gravitated towards it. Infact, the number of community members sky rocketed.

The fact is, Discord as a platform is more accessible compared to IRC.

Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings

#229

Post by 8organicbits »

amelius wrote: post #63

If they want adoption, maybe a good idea to build a hybrid ladybird/firefox browser, where, if some page does not render well in ladybird, the user can switch to firefox based rendering with a simple mouse click.

These sorts of things exist for the other browsers, so eventually I think Ladybird would support it as well.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/open-in-firefox-bro...

Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings

#230

Post by sanitycheck »

hypeatei wrote: post #140
getcrunk wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a new project I wonder how much simpler (or secure) a browser could be made if you only allowed a subset of js and browser apis. I’d wildly guesstimate for 70% of use cases you wouldn’t even need 50% of stuff with some slight modifications. The web is just so bloated. Edit: might as well prune down the css a little too and maybe dump wasm, webgl and canvas

This is so wildly wrong it hurts. As soon as that one important website (to your user) breaks, they will switch browsers. Just deciding that you don't want to implement >50% of web specs "for simplicity" and expecting that to be a winning strategy is very HN.

The "very HN" thing for me is assuming a "winning strategy" has to be mass adoption. There's room for a smaller web full of nerds and geeks, we had that before and maybe we can have it again.
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