I was very impressed by the build script. It worked flawlessly, detecting Clang and Ninja, and pulled in all the dependencies automatically. I am hopefully that this will develop into a serious competitor as there really should be more than 2 choices (KHTML-based vs Gecko-based).
Ladybird browser spreads its wings
261–270 of 319 posts
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 fin…
There has been 30/40 years of internet, and no legal battle has manage to get anything on that regard.
I would even say, topics on the internet with a lot of lobbying, such as pirating software/media, in the same timeframe, has managed to get absolutely nothing done.
I am afraid, it would not be possible to regulate legally.
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> The fact is, Discord as a platform is more accessible compared to IRC.
Guess it depends on what you mean with "accessible". In terms of accessibility for impaired users, IRC is a open protocol vs a service that disallows 3rd party clients. I'm sure there exists better options for IRC than Discord, and at the very least, IRC allows you to access it however you want, be it visual, textual, voice control or whatever.
Besides, Discord being a US company, need to prevent users from Cuba, Iran, Syria (and NK) and is also banned in a bunch of countries like China, UAE and Egypt. So in that sense, Discord seems less accessible than IRC.
Only remaining part is that Discord has a somewhat easier "getting setup" UX than IRC for younger users, as it's more similar to the type of services they're probably already use.
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Sounds like someone should work on Discord-ifying IRC to make it more palatable for the modern user.
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, didn't knew that. Still a dick move on HN's part. Shadowing should be restricted to abusers.
Wouldn't the submission get user flagged anyway? Because when people clicked it, they'd see something NSFW and devoid of interesting content.
Flagged for what? In this case user - me - was unaware that submitted content gets replaced when requested with Referer header mentioning HN. There should be a 'you cannot post this' warning instead of hidden post creation. I only noticed shadowban by accident: switched to logged-in browser to submit and went back to logged-out for browsing.
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#266One commenter who worked on Firefox made a nice blog post in response, about what it takes to make a web browser: https://robert.ocallahan.org/2024/06/browser-engine.html
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
If it only does 70% of what a regular browser does would anyone (seriously not as an experiment) use it on a daily basis? Most people just want to get on the web and go. They don’t care how big their is on disk or how much ram it uses (within reason of course), but the first time it doesn’t render their bank page or Jira page, they will drop it. Obviously I’m not talking about beta testers here or curious web devs.
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you want to support YouTube? You want to support YouTube, don't you? Any big FAANG site probably uses most of the possible features.
> You want to support YouTube, don't you? Of course no. You can use a bloated browser for that.
Then nobody will ever use your browser. Simple as that.
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because rust is a cargo cult. We're nearing 10 years since 1.0 and there's still not a single serious, widely used, large software project to prove its viability. Maybe make one instead of trying to passive aggressively convince others to do it for you?
I didn’t mention rust, I don’t know Rust and if I were trying to start a similar project I might do so in .NET Core because of my familiarity with .NET. I’m asking because I don’t know if there is a reason it would not be viable, is the garbage collection too much of a hurdle to get decent performance while trying to interpret JavaScript? Is there too much overhead tracking claims on memory and doing the bounds check…
I apologize - when people mention "memory safe" nowadays 95% of the time they're talking about Rust, I made an assumption.
Interpreting JavaScript at all it at all is a problem. Ladybird's LibJS compiles it to bytecode and interprets that (which is usually better than intereprting the AST). The bytecode interpreter is written in C++, and it's still pretty damn slow - websites take a long time to load, and LibJS is the main bottleneck.
The reality is, modern websites throws so much junk at your JS implementation, that you basically need to JIT-compile it in order to have any sort of reasonable performance. And with JIT all memory safety guarantees are thrown out of the window - it doesn't matter if you write your compiler in Rust, C++ or a .NET language - if there's an exploit it's disproportionately more likely to be in the output assembly than it is to be in your compiler.
Browsers nowadays make a best effort, and they have a stack of other mitigations in case the JIT leaks: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/d...
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
Ah, OK. My hazy memory was that it was the goatse.cx image, which is for most people more unpalatable than a testicle in an eggcup, but I didn't check exactly what it was :-).
Re: Ladybird browser spreads its wings
#270Andreas 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…
I don't think casual observers understand how many new CSS features have been added to the web platform over the last few years.
468 new features have been added since 2018; 148 have been added in the past 18 months alone [1].
I applaud the effort but unless something fundamentally changes in their approach, I don't see how they can catch up.
Sure, you don't need every single spec, but even the core ones like Flexbox, Grid are large and complicated and are constantly being tweaked.