I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by materielle » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 10:18 PM UTC

The_Colonel wrote: post #103

bgribble wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But it's a bit disappointing to see that it's still pretty much a one-man project. I don't know much about this project and I have never used it. But in my experience as a developer and user of software I couldn't disagree more. The longer something can stay a one-person project, the better! Nothing kills creativity, innovation, and velocity faster than having to make every decision by committee. Big communities ar…

> The longer something can stay a one-person project, the better! Nothing kills creativity, innovation, and velocity faster than having to make every decision by committee. One person can get surprisingly far, but there's a limit beyond which no single human will scale. Getting to the v8 performance is IMHO such an example. You might be OK with a browser which has a noticeably subpar performance, but it will likely s…

Andreas isn’t targeting V8’s JIT performance. The goal is to be roughly in line with WebKit’s performance with the JIT turned off.

The theory is that JS JIT compilers don’t actually improve real world performance on the majority of websites. This was apparently per the advice of the authors of Chrome’s and Safari’s JITs.

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

#182

Post by MrAlex94 » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 10:19 PM UTC

metasaval wrote: post #158

HeckFeck wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF.. I'd love to make the jump too, just that I rely upon FF sync too much. It's handy getting your bookmarks and other details on mobile devices. The other forks look to be desktop only.

FYI, you can use a desktop fork and mobile Firefox with Firefox sync. source: I do that with floorp and Firefox for android.

Not to hang around like a bad smell every time they come up, but just think it’s worth noting they are not open source anymore, instead being “source available”. Really gives me the old school “greenwashing” vibes Microsoft used to do with their Shared Source licenses. Poor showing considering they used others work to get to where they are, then shut the door when others started doing the same.

I would say feel free to give Waterfox a try - I’ve tried to strike the balance of useable web and privacy, with the added enhancement of Oblivious DNS enabled by default.

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

#183

Post by bambax » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 10:19 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #112

bambax wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On recent hardware, how much "performance" do we really need? Wouldn't almost any compliant browser be basically good enough?

There's several decades-old sayings to the effect of what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away, or similar observations about the software side of computing spending all the hardware improvements and more. To this general principle you can add browsers and websites; what the browser giveth, the websites taketh away. You may think browsers are slow... they really aren't! There's a staggering, even arguably insane , amo…

> You may think browsers are slow

I don't. I use uBlock Origin which blocks "ad scripts" and the like. My everyday machine is an old PC (older than 10 years) still on Win7, and everything is running just fine.

I also use a top of the line, recent PC on Ubuntu, mostly for development. Websites there feel instantaneous. I sometimes wonder what a subpar browser would feel like on that machine.

Maybe I should just try to run Ladybird on this to see how it goes.

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

#184

Post by materielle » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 10:23 PM UTC

ssernikk wrote: post #147

pessimizer wrote: post #47

Ladybird looks amazing and is moving quickly. Without the linkage to SerenityOS, I even feel like looking at the source and seeing if I can get a handle on what's going on. Looks like the idea of writing a new browser engine, or of forking Firefox, wasn't an absurdly impossible thing that would require billions of dollars. If this inspires somebody to take up that charge again, or to pick up Servo from the table, tha…

> [...] pick up Servo from the table, that would be wonderful too. I would love to see a servo-based browser in near future!

I think it would be interesting to understand why Servo seems to have moved so slow compared to Ladybird.

I suspect Ladybird’s success has a lot to do with Andreas himself.

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

#185

Post by doublerabbit » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 10:32 PM UTC

arp242 wrote: post #180

doublerabbit wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

People like you is why people burn out from open source. Can't create anything without random nobodies who spend zero effort on anything shouting at you and hurling insults at you. You're being a completely toxic asshole.

No, it's not me at all. People like you are the reason why I suffer from burn out.

The burn out is because your working on an single platform and refusing to even attempt for another project, or OS for this matter. That's how I find it.

Lets reinvent the wheel for the same OS where the wheel has already been reinvented. Yet lets not reinvent the wheel for another OS.

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

#186

Post by skissane » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 10:43 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #112

bambax wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On recent hardware, how much "performance" do we really need? Wouldn't almost any compliant browser be basically good enough?

There's several decades-old sayings to the effect of what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away, or similar observations about the software side of computing spending all the hardware improvements and more. To this general principle you can add browsers and websites; what the browser giveth, the websites taketh away. You may think browsers are slow... they really aren't! There's a staggering, even arguably insane , amo…

So many apps have low-hanging fruit performance issues that don’t get addressed because they are judged to perform adequately in practice. Addressing them takes developer time, and not all developers have the skill set to do so (especially in a methodical way).

But, what if we had an AI agent dedicated to improving performance? It doesn’t need to be capable of solving every problem, but it could address the low-hanging fruit problems which aren’t hard to solve but nobody has time to look at.

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

#187

Post by robertlagrant » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 10:50 PM UTC

chx wrote: post #128

robertlagrant wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? Code doesn't rust.

It doesn't but it accumulates cruft and since then new libraries emerge which you might be able to reuse instead of writing your own thing. Just as an example: Boost first appeared in 1999 so very likely at least early on no one used it.

Of course you could do that, but the existence of a bit of code that's survived that long within a project that's been around for 20 years doesn't mean nothing new has happened. Mozilla invented a whole language to make it easier to write browser in; I don't think they won't have considered using Boost or whatever much less radical approach we might come up with here won't have been considered and invested in.

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

#188

Post by refulgentis » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 10:56 PM UTC

jll29 wrote: post #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…

Having watched this over years, and deleted every single comment I've written on it thus far, I'm challenging myself to be honest and forthright.

There's another way of looking at, that is confirmed by the same set of facts:

- There was an OS project run by an awesome dude with a great story that was seen as in a unique position to compete with big tech companies.

- It needed a web browser.

- A web browser project was created.

- Now, the web browser is in a unique position to compete with big tech companies.

- This means it needs to fork itself, and drop support for the OS. That is because the OS project is now a toy.

My last deleted comment mentioned my deep respect for Andreas, and that my next milestone for the browser is downloadable builds and/or moving from pre-alpha to alpha (the downloadable builds was listed as a warning it was in pre-alpha).

I don't like appearing negative or arguably unsupportive, hence all the deleted comments over the years.

But, it's very important to me to make sure there's an accurate signal of what working on your own project looks like. Including the progress rate on things that sound awesome to work on, like an OS or web browser.

I've been dreaming of doing that since I was 17, and it took me 18 years of preparation, predominantly careful observation of successes, and failures, to go out on my own successfully.

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

#189

Post by skeaker » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 11:19 PM UTC

Aurornis wrote: post #169

skeaker wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I…

It's not a big deal. They're easy to disable and easier to just ignore. It just doesn't matter in the way that you want me to panic over.

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

#190

Post by skeaker » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 11:20 PM UTC

adastra22 wrote: post #175

skeaker wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I cannot tell if this is sarcasm or not.

It isn't. I can without any sarcasm disable all of that in about a minute or two, and for the most part see no reason to do so in the first place (the worst bit is probably sponsored links on new tabs but that's also the easiest to remove). Acting like this invalidates the existence of the whole browser is what makes no sense to me.

Also Windows configuration is terrible.