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I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

awesomekling.substack.com

161–170 of 280 posts

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#161
post #81

What's the plan for Jakt, the programming language? Does it fall under the SerenityOS umbrella? Will LadyBird continue to use C++? The blog post doesn't mention it. https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt

Pretty sure it has been dead for a while. I personally never saw the point but I suppose the whole mantra of Serenity was developing everything from scratch.

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#162
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Firefox hate is completely justified. At this point the only positive thing about Firefox is that "at least it's not Chrome".

As a Firefox user, this exactly. The amount of things that now need to be toggled off on a new install are approaching Windows “telemetry” levels: disable sponsored shortcuts on homepage, disable experimental “Studies”, sponsored suggestions in search bar, “suggested extensions”, Pocket, and the list goes on. I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF..

This is an extremely uncharitable view of Firefox and an outrageously generous view of Windows. The things you listed take 2 checkboxes in a new tab window, 2 checkboxes in settings (which has a search bar that takes you right to them by just searching "studies" or "data collection"), 2 checkboxes in settings (search "suggestions"), 2 clicks (right click the pocket button and click hide)... The only tricky one is the recommended extensions but that's tucked at the bottom of a page nobody uses anyways (everyone just googles the extension they want and grabs it from the web), but even that takes like 15 seconds once you know what setting it is in about:config. I actually don't even disable the two telemetry checkboxes because they're transparent about the data they take and what they do with it, so I'm happy to share it. You can easily do all of this in one or two minutes and it won't roll itself back.

With Windows you would be lucky to even have a supported method to disable their telemetry, and if you do get one it will probably be through an obscure series of registry edits that will ultimately get rolled back during a system update.

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#163

I never got to try SerenityOS due to the developer's bizarre insistence that users compile the OS instead of just providing a precompiled ISO or IMG file. Shame because I appreciated the workhorse 9x aesthetics it had.

You talk like the project is dead, but the blog post emphatically says that it isn't.

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting to the v8 performance is IMHO such an example. There's no doubt in my mind that Andreas could achieve that by himself. He's worked professionally on webkit, and implemented a JS interpreter, a JS bytecode interpreter, and a JS JIT all by himself after all. Also let's not forget that V8 is open-source, all their optimizations are available for others to see and implement. But to be clear this isn't a one man…

Seems like Andreas doesn't have the same delusions of ridiculing the army of (pretty smart) Chrome/V8 devs by doing the same job just on his own. His own goal is to achieve the performance of non-JITed JavaScriptCore - i.e. an optimizing interpreter.

Matching V8's perf would be infeasible, but couldn't a small team get within an order of magnitude of V8's perf for a decent chunk of websites? How much slower is Fabrice Bellard's QuickJS?

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#165
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The audacity to call this shameful is striking to me. If you feel strongly enough that this free, open source, extremely limited resource project (working on one of the largest problem spaces..) doesn't support FreeBSD, port it yourself instead of casting shame on others for not doing it. Hopefully your comment is more lighthearted than I'm giving it credit for.

[flagged]

It's not out of carelessness or spite. The developer(s) can only support something they use at least semi-regularly.

Many developers who use Windows don't support Linux for example (and vice versa). Even if the code were cross platform. They simply can't claim to support something they don't use themselves or have resources to test extensively because it'll requires continous support and there can be a lot of incompatabilities even among different linux distros or environments.

That's why, in OSS, support for different platforms is usually done by having a separate engineer as maintainer for each platform, e.g: Linux drivers, gcc (for different CPU architectures), etc. These maintainers are each experts in their respective platforms and responsible for supporting it.

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#166
post #17

Ladybird has garnered a level of mainstream attention that SerenityOS never really managed to. The browser has the potential to impact many more people, and the project is well funded by large investors. It makes sense that Andreas would shift his focus to LadyBird at this point. While Safari is busy being Safari and Firefox is busy eating glue in the corner, I'd love to see LadyBird become a real contender in the br…

> I'd love to see LadyBird become a real contender in the browser market

At this pace it would likely take decades just for them to be complete enough to show up on MDN or wpt.fyi

But I agree. With Microsoft ditching their independent Edge and becoming Chromium-based and Opera doing the same we're really down to 3 real engines. The best fourth option we can get are Goanna-based browsers like Pale Moon which are themselves just an early fork of firefox

A completely new and fresh often can go a long way in safeguarding the openness of the web. Even if there's not a powerful company behind it

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#167
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeBSD once peaked at a 0.01% desktop market share. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide...

So? You should still develop for. Why? For this whole reason. What does it matter? You should target all audiences. Why not?

Make a patch for FreeBSD if you care about it. Pick up maintainership to ensure it keeps working. That's how this works. Andreas is not your bitch.

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#168
Andreas is a fantastic coder and also a great shepherd of geeks (community builder).

The split makes sense for practical reasons - I also sense he is personally perhaps more passionate about browser hacking than OS hacking (his own contributions were more to Ladybird than to the OS for about a year as he himself writes). Smart as he is, he may have recognized that he is in a unique position to be able to contribute a cross-platform browser that competes with the big tech companies, where as SerenityOS is essentially more of a toy OS (32 bit, 1990s look and feel, not compatible with important other operating systems, no radically new OS concepts) - without wanting to dimish the contributions of its amazing developers. IMHO, SerenityOS is more about the process of writing code from scratch than the resulting software itself. Its purpose appears to be 1. to prove it is possible despite the naysayers ("only large tech companies can build a browser", "no-one can build an OS from scratch") and 2. to enjoy the coding itself.

As other commenters have already stated, the only issue will be taking as much from Ladybird over to SerenityOS as possible.

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#169
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Firefox user, this exactly. The amount of things that now need to be toggled off on a new install are approaching Windows “telemetry” levels: disable sponsored shortcuts on homepage, disable experimental “Studies”, sponsored suggestions in search bar, “suggested extensions”, Pocket, and the list goes on. I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF..

This is an extremely uncharitable view of Firefox and an outrageously generous view of Windows. The things you listed take 2 checkboxes in a new tab window, 2 checkboxes in settings (which has a search bar that takes you right to them by just searching "studies" or "data collection"), 2 checkboxes in settings (search "suggestions"), 2 clicks (right click the pocket button and click hide)... The only tricky one is the…

> This is an extremely uncharitable view of Firefox and an outrageously generous view of Windows. The things you listed take 2 checkboxes in a new tab window, 2 checkboxes in settings (which has a search bar that takes you right to them by just searching "studies" or "data collection"), 2 checkboxes in settings (search "suggestions"), 2 clicks (right click the pocket button and click hide)... The only tricky one is

It’s wild to me that this is being presented as if it’s not a big deal.

Shows how far the goalposts have moved in this conversation.

Re: I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why BSD and not Haiku?

Yeah, why not.

What about TempleOS?

I think if you care, go help them make Ladybird work on your OS. People who make software for fun and give it away for free owe all of us precisely nothing: I believe that’s a very important principle, otherwise they’ll just burn out as their hobby project turns into a grind.

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