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This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

ladybird.org

31–40 of 86 posts

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#32
post #26

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…

As of a week ago their pre-alpha version was capable of running my extremely heavy JS+ SVG + worker thread + SSE app, a bit slowly I admit but correctly in all major exercises I tried. So, I'm optimistic. They're doing great.

Separately I wonder if the compatibility job is easier now that you can just give the HTML5 spec to Fable and Bob's your uncle.

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#33
post #26

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…

The history of Chrome and Safari traces back to KTML, the renderer for Konqueror, a niche browser on Linux with so little market share there weren't real conversations about it ever seriously competing with Firefox or IE.

Then something unexpected happened: Apple adopted KHTML for Safari's WebKit. WebKit was then adopted as the render for Chrome

Could a niche browser still become mainstream /today/? I think so.

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#34
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#35
post #26

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…

The history of Chrome and Safari traces back to KTML, the renderer for Konqueror, a niche browser on Linux with so little market share there weren't real conversations about it ever seriously competing with Firefox or IE. Then something unexpected happened: Apple adopted KHTML for Safari's WebKit. WebKit was then adopted as the render for Chrome Could a niche browser still become mainstream /today/? I think so.

The web standards are enormously complex compared to that time. Not sure if today's tooling can compensate this.

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#36
post #32
post #26

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…

As of a week ago their pre-alpha version was capable of running my extremely heavy JS+ SVG + worker thread + SSE app, a bit slowly I admit but correctly in all major exercises I tried. So, I'm optimistic. They're doing great. Separately I wonder if the compatibility job is easier now that you can just give the HTML5 spec to Fable and Bob's your uncle.

The browser might reach 95-97% compatibility eventually. But the last 3-5% gaps are the most stubborn. Many of these 3-5% are not trivial API calls. They might be some subtle legacy quirks, timing/rendering things, etc. There is a lot of poorly written historical code that might be illegal by web standards but browsers are forced to support. Established browsers have decades of patches and regression testing.

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#37
post #26

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…

Not even Firefox can keep up chasing down the chromium universe.

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#38
post #32
post #26

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…

As of a week ago their pre-alpha version was capable of running my extremely heavy JS+ SVG + worker thread + SSE app, a bit slowly I admit but correctly in all major exercises I tried. So, I'm optimistic. They're doing great. Separately I wonder if the compatibility job is easier now that you can just give the HTML5 spec to Fable and Bob's your uncle.

But I agree, it's impressive. My blog uses a lot of modern CSS features (such as nested selectors), and this latest version rendered almost perfectly. Much better than Servo. Still, this small gap is often the difference between a normal browser and a browser that is a pain. Safari has much, much better compatibility, but even then this browser is hated for it's quirks, because even much smaller compatibility gaps are quite noticeable.

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#39

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.

I wonder if another path to “success” for ladybird could be rather than end users downloading it for the main browser, if it gains enough dev interest, we could get some kind of competitor to electron and it would end up getting bundled in that way as a lighter weight runtime to chromium for that use case.

Re: This Month in Ladybird – August 2026

#40
post #19
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.

Disk fragmentation isn't a thing for ssd's

It's still a thing.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast24/presentation/jun

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