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Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

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Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#191

Post by freehorse »

josephd79 wrote: post #173
eitland wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome in itself is not the problem. Competition is good. Firefox is better now thanks to Chrome. Neither is Safari. Safari is actually part of the solution. Safari has saved Firefox and other browsers by being the only option on iOS for a long time and a better choice for many (because of battery usage) on Mac OS. Without Safari I am afraid we would all be locked into Chrome now. The problem is that Google, like Mic…

I thought the other browsers on IOS were just skins of webkit / safari ?

Yes, and the commenter claims that in this context this is actually good because it halted chrome/chromium's dominance in the internet (and I actually agree). It may sound paradoxical, but context is important imo.

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#192

Post by coldpie »

awesomekling wrote: post #130
yuvadam wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is dependent on advertising money from Google, is that only because they ventured in other directions? I'm not intimate with their finances, but it seems just building a browser is a large enough - expensive - R&D effort. Are you planning on charging your users?

We will never charge our users, or attempt to monetize them in any way. Our nonprofit will run on unrestricted donations only.

I wish you luck, more competition in the browser space is sorely needed. But please, please spend more time thinking about your finances. The surface of planet "Startups That Will Figure Out A Business Model Later" is like 99.9% graveyard. You're going to be asking people to depend on your software for an extremely important part of their lives. If you don't have a path to sustainability, you're going to do a lot of harm when you close up shop.

Between the lack of a business plan and your responses about licensing, I'm afraid I feel you're coming at this from a naive point of view. This is a seriously important line of software you're entering, please do take some time to take it seriously.

Will watch your progress and again, I genuinely love to see your project. Good luck.

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#193

Post by eitland »

josephd79 wrote: post #173
eitland wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome in itself is not the problem. Competition is good. Firefox is better now thanks to Chrome. Neither is Safari. Safari is actually part of the solution. Safari has saved Firefox and other browsers by being the only option on iOS for a long time and a better choice for many (because of battery usage) on Mac OS. Without Safari I am afraid we would all be locked into Chrome now. The problem is that Google, like Mic…

I thought the other browsers on IOS were just skins of webkit / safari ?

That is to a large degree correct.

I even thought it wasn't necessary to test them separately but I recently heard from someone with more and more recent experience that some differences exist, particularly around prefixed css attributes. Can't say for sure though, but that was why I wrote my comment above somewhat defensively.

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#194

Post by mananaysiempre »

awesomekling wrote: post #93
SushiHippie wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does ladybird compare to Servo? https://servo.org/

I can't speak for Servo, but my understanding is that they have very different goals than we do. Servo wants to build an embeddable engine for controlled sets of HTML/CSS/JS content, with a focus on modularity and parallelism. Ladybird wants to build a usable browser for the open web, warts and all, with a focus on compatibility and correctness. I'm a big fan of Servo and I hope they become a huge success! Competitio…

> Servo wants to build an embeddable engine

That’s what they pivoted to after being expelled from Mozilla, but that wasn’t the original goal, was it? It’s the safer(?) one they turned to when the job security evaporated.

(Not sure if that changes anything, just feel obligated to point out the retcon here.)

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#195

Post by jampekka »

eitland wrote: post #172
jampekka wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Safari has saved Firefox and other browsers by being the only option on iOS for a long time Amazing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(advertisement)

Hehe. But more seriously: it is actually the truth. Kind of in in the same way that people are thankful for Churchill: not because he was a fantastic man in every way (he wasn't) but because he saved us from something even worse.

Big Brother keeps Oceania safe from Eurasia and Eastasia. And especially from Emmanuel Goldstein.

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#196

Post by voidwtf »

noduerme wrote: post #69
neocritter wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A classic: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... >> "The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive." >> "Each of these bugs took weeks of real-world usage before they were found. The…

The only exception is if you have 500k LOC in a language whose runtime is going to be deprecated on all platforms overnight. I'm referring to the uh, retrospectively unfortunate decision I made in 2007 to start building large scale business app frontends in AS3. I guess I should be thankful for the work, having to rewrite everything in TS from scratch a decade later. (At least the backends didn't have to be torn down…

My current employer, similarly, invested a significant amount of resources into Silverlight. Luckily only one component of the application had been switched to Silverlight, but a significant amount of code was written to be the core of that effort and future components before browsers/MS killed it overnight.

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#197

Post by BirAdam »

greenyies wrote: post #128

I'm just not trusting a small browser dev team. The risk of exploits is too high

But you’d trust a megacorporation closely tied to government that has an explicit interest in tracking you, keeping paths for intelligence agencies and law enforcement open, and generally being deceptive? You trust browsers that openly phone home about your activity?

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#198

Post by flykespice »

enriquto wrote: post #162
awesomekling wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks F3nd0! There are currently no plans to switch to a less permissive license. And we're perfectly happy using proprietary services like GitHub and Discord as long as they make our work easier and more enjoyable. We recently evaluated a number of alternatives, and found that they all introduced more friction than we were comfortable with. Although the task of building a browser is itself challenging, we're a prag…

> (...) switch to a less permissive license. License "permissiveness" is a relative concept. From the point of view of the users of your software, the GPL is more permissive than MIT, since they have permission to see the source code. If you release software under MIT or BSD licenses, you allow middlemen to strip this right to users of your software.

That is a complete nonsensical claim & willful attempt at spreading misinformation:

Permissive licenses doesn't grants you less freedom than GPL, infact it grants you more because the user also has the freedom to modify source code without being enforced to make it public.

Companies copying the codebase to their propietary ones won't automatically strip right of users, licenses don't work like that, the original codebase will still be fine. Whether said companies will contribute back is irrelevant.

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#199

Post by mananaysiempre »

awesomekling wrote: post #130
yuvadam wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is dependent on advertising money from Google, is that only because they ventured in other directions? I'm not intimate with their finances, but it seems just building a browser is a large enough - expensive - R&D effort. Are you planning on charging your users?

We will never charge our users, or attempt to monetize them in any way. Our nonprofit will run on unrestricted donations only.

You personally I believe without reservation about this, but the thing about creating a legal person is that it’s separate from you. Its control can—and in the long run, will—change hands. So please, please write this down somewhere, ideally somewhere binding on its future (can donations have conditions?).

Re: Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

#200

Post by johnsea »

hipinspire wrote: post #85

It is a great honor to see a website I designed and coded at the top of the Hacker News front page! A big thank you to Chris Wanstrath for allowing me to work on it. I hope Ladybird becomes a mainstream browser, and I feel this is a moment similar to when Firefox rebranded from Phoenix. P.S. Check out my UI/UX portfolio at https://hipfolio.co

It's beautiful! -- Cool that Chris Wanstrath gives massive support to this project (financial and (most likely) time).
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