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This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

ladybird.org

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21–30 of 86 posts

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#21

Post by phendrenad2 »

pkasting wrote: post #14
phendrenad2 wrote: post #8

Feels like the old "browser wars" days again. Between AI productivity, and Google losing the grace to bloat the web specs, I wouldn't be surprised if it starts to take market share away from other browsers as soon as it's stable.

Sure, it could easily take 1%. Going above 5%, OTOH, I would be shocked to ever see happen, for two reasons. 1) Mass-market adoption requires working well on an enormous long tail, which is difficult without a large team. 2) The primary driver of playing at that size is mass marketing/distribution, which requires $$$. Engineering a great product is necessary, but not sufficient. My perspective on this is informed by…

I agree, 1% is reasonable. That's still a huge number of people. And, not all users are created equal. If that 1% of everyone is skewed towards the more educated, IE if 5% of millionaires switch, that's 5% fewer eyeballs looking at a sports car ad.

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#23

Post by JuniperMesos »

sho_hn wrote: post #3
neuralkoi wrote: post #2

I didn't expect to see Twitch working so soon! Ladybird seems to have received a nice boost in momentum in the past two years. If you've ever watched one of Andreas videos on YouTube you'll find he's incredibly driven and knowledgeable in this area. I can imagine someone like him would go from being a "10x programmer" to a "100x programmer" with AI assistance. I am not entirely sure to what degree AI is being leverag…

> Ladybird seems to have received a nice boost in momentum in the past two years. I'm still very interested in the project and look forward to each monthly update, and I can empathize (though not agree) with the reasoning, but something is off ever since they announced the decision to close the project to outside contributions. It's still Open Source, but only a self-selected group of maintainers gets to write and me…

Free and open-source software licenses never promised that any given project would absolutely accept code contributions from the general public. You're as free to exercise the Four Freedoms with Ladybird as you are with Firefox or Chromium, including the freedom to fork it; and your practical ability to get your own change merged into upstream Ladybird is probably about as good as it is for Firefox/Chromium, too.

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#24

Post by pkasting »

ndiddy wrote: post #20
pkasting wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it could easily take 1%. Going above 5%, OTOH, I would be shocked to ever see happen, for two reasons. 1) Mass-market adoption requires working well on an enormous long tail, which is difficult without a large team. 2) The primary driver of playing at that size is mass marketing/distribution, which requires $$$. Engineering a great product is necessary, but not sufficient. My perspective on this is informed by…

Yeah basically everybody I know who's non-technical switched to Chrome when Google started advertising it on google.com (This was back when nontechnical users would start every search query by going to google.com). "Oh this says it's better and faster, let me download it". Google also paid shareware/freeware developers to bundle Chrome with their installers if you didn't uncheck some option in the "expert install" mo…

The distribution opt-outs really bugged me at the time, and I went and talked to the marketing team. Surprisingly, users who got Chrome via one of those opt-out deals used it at rates/in ways statistically indistinguishable from "organic" users (i.e. users who manually downloaded Chrome and installed it). This was a pretty strong counterargument to the idea that we were pushing something unhelpful on people who didn't want it -- they seemed to "want it" as much as the people who'd bothered to go find it manually.

I still didn't (and don't) love the practice, but it called in to question a lot of my assumptions about what people knew about software, why they used what they did, how they found it, etc.

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#25

Post by zaphar »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #17
tredre3 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The flood of low effort AI-contributions makes accepting anonymous contributions impractical nowadays. They'd waste hours reviewing things of no value. I know because it happened to several of my moderately successful projects. At some point I had to stop caring. I now only review the PR if the message is a single unformatted paragraph with few emojis, I find this to be a good signal that it was made by a human and n…

A lot of folks might not want to hear it, but realistically some there's going to have to be a cultural realization that machine-generated low effort slop is not any more desired or helpful than human-generated low effort slop. That's not an outright rejection of LLM-assisted code, it just means that a real person needs to be awake, at the wheel, and just as significant of a contributor. Literally anybody can point C…

The value of a feature or a bugfix is not calculated from the effort required but from the need or desire for said feature or bugfix. So whether or not the barrier to entry has been lowered by llm's is irrelevant. What matters as to it's value is the result.

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#26

Post by senfiaj »

I am watching this project with interest.

It's impressive that they're doing such titanic work. However, I'm highly skeptical that they can create a real rival to established browsers. I'm sorry for telling this, but Web standards are simply too complex and huge. Ladybird to Chrome / Firefox is almost like Wine / ReactOS to Windows, that last 3-5% of gap actually differentiates a normal browser from a browser that is a pain for web developers. And it's the most stubborn part to be fixed. Also, keep in mind that it hasn't much market, at least IE had a significant market that forced the developers to support it (with all the hate).

https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-...

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#27

Post by zamadatix »

sho_hn wrote: post #3
neuralkoi wrote: post #2

I didn't expect to see Twitch working so soon! Ladybird seems to have received a nice boost in momentum in the past two years. If you've ever watched one of Andreas videos on YouTube you'll find he's incredibly driven and knowledgeable in this area. I can imagine someone like him would go from being a "10x programmer" to a "100x programmer" with AI assistance. I am not entirely sure to what degree AI is being leverag…

> Ladybird seems to have received a nice boost in momentum in the past two years. I'm still very interested in the project and look forward to each monthly update, and I can empathize (though not agree) with the reasoning, but something is off ever since they announced the decision to close the project to outside contributions. It's still Open Source, but only a self-selected group of maintainers gets to write and me…

Said announcement: https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#28

Post by rzzzt »

Meneth wrote: post #13

> We also download over four parallel connections where possible. I hope you can turn that off. It fragments the file and puts unnecessary load on the server.

You never used a download manager like DownThemAll or GetBot back in the day?

As far as fragmentation goes, I think both Firefox and Chrome derivatives figure out the final file size in advance, pre-allocate a temporary file that long and put data in it as it arrives. Completing the download is a rename operation or a no-op.

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#29

Post by ChickeNES »

rzzzt wrote: post #28
Meneth wrote: post #13

> We also download over four parallel connections where possible. I hope you can turn that off. It fragments the file and puts unnecessary load on the server.

You never used a download manager like DownThemAll or GetBot back in the day? As far as fragmentation goes, I think both Firefox and Chrome derivatives figure out the final file size in advance, pre-allocate a temporary file that long and put data in it as it arrives. Completing the download is a rename operation or a no-op.

GetRight was a fucking lifesaver when I was stuck on a 28.8k dial up connection that loved to drop at the worst possible time.

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#30

Post by cosmic_cheese »

zaphar wrote: post #25
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of folks might not want to hear it, but realistically some there's going to have to be a cultural realization that machine-generated low effort slop is not any more desired or helpful than human-generated low effort slop. That's not an outright rejection of LLM-assisted code, it just means that a real person needs to be awake, at the wheel, and just as significant of a contributor. Literally anybody can point C…

The value of a feature or a bugfix is not calculated from the effort required but from the need or desire for said feature or bugfix. So whether or not the barrier to entry has been lowered by llm's is irrelevant. What matters as to it's value is the result.

The important part is the quality of the code, how well-considered its design is, how well it gels with existing code, how readable it is to other humans, how well documented it is, how well its author understands it (and thus, can make surgical changes if needed), and how well it was tested.

A PR that implements a sought out feature or bug fix can be practically worthless if it doesn’t check some percentage of those boxes. The line differs per project naturally, but almost nobody wants a PR that is missing all of them.

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