Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy • Hacker News Board

Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy

#221

Post by leoc » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 5:24 PM UTC

shadytrees wrote: post #158

leoc wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't describe it as such, but that's not what matters here. Andreas Kling has been out championing the anti-anti-Charlie-Kirk cause on Twitter, so it's a safe bet that the Lundukish grassroots anti-wokes see him as one of theirs. Whether he has any juice with the right-wing VC set I don't know.

Kling's politics aside, he's also had a history of abandoning projects after hyping them up on social media and attracting contributors. Here is what happened to SerenityOS and jakt, for example: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/graphs/commit-activit... https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt/graphs/commit-activity If Cloudflare wants to defend the future of the web, maybe they could also throw a few dollars towards…

Isn't Ladybird (now) supposed to be moving to Swift, though?

(I think that investment in Servo is also likely to be an excellent idea. Sponsoring Igalia's Servo work is an obvious starting place for any European institutions which are actually serious about "tech sovereignty", just to start with.)

Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy

#222

Post by hshshshshsh » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

pmdr wrote: post #196

ITT: some of you would rather see Omarchy fail and thus Linux desktop adoption slowed down because you don't agree with DHH's 'controversial' political views. Guess we'll have to keep waiting for someone with a 'clean' record to show up and promote Linux.

[flagged]

Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy

#223

Post by WhyNotHugo » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 5:26 PM UTC

ChocolateGod wrote: post #203

jorvi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Browser attestation doesn't really matter, its device attestation. Browser attestation is downstream from that. Google with SafetyNet attestation (whatever the hell its called these days) has pretty much locked down Android as tightly as iOS at this point. Hell, Apple device users already get to go in the internet "approved" fast lane because of attestation. iDevices and M-series Macbooks can send out a special respo…

> Google with SafetyNet attestation (whatever the hell its called these days) has pretty much locked down Android as tightly as iOS at this point. SafetyNet doesn't lock anything down, it just provides an API for applications to verify the app is running in a verifiable and untampered environment.

> SafetyNet […] provides an API for applications to verify the app is running in a verifiable and locked down environment.

FTFY

Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy

#224

Post by zeppelin101 » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 5:27 PM UTC

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #91

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #35

I cannot for the life of me understand the Omarchy hype. The Linux community has been theming their distribution installs for decades. What distinguishes this from that?

Omarchy isn’t for me, but for those who find a minimal tiled Linux desktop interesting but don’t want to get lost in the jungle setting their own thing up, I don’t think you can possibly do better. It’s throughly thought through, polished, streamlined, and designed specifically to be accessible to newcomers.

Omarchy sounds very compelling (though I'm personally done with trying to run Linux on the desktop), but tiling window managers are just not very practical, for numerous reasons. DHH would be wise to also offer and optimize non-tiling WM setups.

Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy

#225

Post by cheema33 » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 5:28 PM UTC

tasn wrote: post #24

justusthane wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s one of the very, very few independent browsers built from the ground up and not on top of one the few existing engines (Gecko, Chromium, WebKit), which is extremely important to the health of the open web. Imagine a world where Chromium is the only browser engine. Standards wouldn’t matter and Google could just do whatever they wanted — we’re pretty close to that as it is.

To combat a Chrome hegemony you need strong opposition, not a long-tail of weak opposition. Or in other words: Firefox needs to become more competitive. I (unfortunately) don't think having another 0.1% market cap browser is the solution, at least not for now. Just to clarify: I'm in favor of Cloudflare donating to Ladybird, and I'm in favor of them building it! I just don't think that's the solution to combating Chr…

> To combat a Chrome hegemony you need strong opposition, not a long-tail of weak opposition.

Do you have any ideas on how to accomplish this in a better way than what Ladybird is trying to do? In other words, what should Ladybird be doing differently?

Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy

#226

Post by acdha » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 5:28 PM UTC

nerpderp82 wrote: post #200

How about Cloudflare stops penalizing non-chrome browsers with elevated rates of bot checks and captchas?

They don’t penalize browsers for not being Chrome – Safari users almost never see those, because their devices support a protocol for attesting real hardware with a real user, in what is hopefully a privacy-preserving manner:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/eliminating-captchas-on-iphones-...

That’s the underlying problem here: web sites are constantly getting suspicious traffic and if you do something like using Tor or a “free” VPN, the owners of those sites are probably going to ask companies like Cloudflare to validate or block you rather than try to tell whether you’re a bot.

Anyone concerned with privacy really needs to be focused on that problem because most site owners care more about not going broke than supporting browsers or privacy tools which few of their customers use. It’s destroying the open web.

Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy

#227

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 5:28 PM UTC

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #218

I really wish the open source projects that actually have meaningful impact on the whole industry were target of sponsorship, not the ones with good marketing, but I know how hard that is to achieve. Taking money from someone is unfortunately complicated in this society. In many cases it's easier not to even ask for sponsorship, unless you are willing to deal with the bureaucracy. Ladybird is at least fighting for di…

[deleted]

Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy

#228

Post by drakythe » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 5:31 PM UTC

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #220

jorvi wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google doesn't have control of Chromium though. The source is available and it is permissively licensed. If they did something truly onerous, Microsoft would fork it within hours and everyone would switch their upstream to Edgium. The only reason Google calls the shots is because they pour billions of dollars into maintaining Chromium. The fact that they can do that (and even fund Firefox at the same time) is because…

> Google doesn't have control of Chromium though. They do. If they merge DRM into it tomorrow or something alike, it trickles down to all users of Chromium and Google Chrome. You can build _a fork_ of it. But the enormous majority of the masses don’t use your fork — they use upstream.

Chromium is upstream of Chrome, not the other way around.

However, Google Chrome is so ubiquitous that any changes Google makes to it are expected to be available in all other browsers and its a kind of defacto control even if it isn't technically control of the upstream Chromium project.

Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy

#229

Post by acdha » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 5:33 PM UTC

odie5533 wrote: post #109

tasn wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To combat a Chrome hegemony you need strong opposition, not a long-tail of weak opposition. Or in other words: Firefox needs to become more competitive. I (unfortunately) don't think having another 0.1% market cap browser is the solution, at least not for now. Just to clarify: I'm in favor of Cloudflare donating to Ladybird, and I'm in favor of them building it! I just don't think that's the solution to combating Chr…

It's possible combating it in terms of pushing for different standards could be sufficient. More little guys at the table means more sway to push things like JPEG XL through.

Only if they’re bringing real users in sufficient numbers to affect site owners’ decisions. Right now, “the web” is what Chrome and Safari want it to be. Mozilla largely ceded their seat at that table but is probably the closest to being relevant again if they can come up with a better pitch to users.

Re: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy

#230

Post by pmdr » Mon, Sep 22, 2025, 5:33 PM UTC

lavela wrote: post #44

pelagicAustral wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Sure they can, but can't I have an opinion and share that with others anymore?

> Openly aligning with DHH is certainly a choice.

I'm openly aligning with DHH with regards to Linux, Apple, Rails and webdev in general. I suppose scores of other people do the same. The other stupid or controversial things he rants about are not really of much interest to me.

Same goes for Musk: I think electric cars, rockets and fast satellite internet are cool. He posts and does stupid things, most of which I don't agree with. But I wouldn't set my neighbor's Tesla on fire because of that.

DHH's is kind of the hero that the Linux desktop needed. Controversial, loud, enthusiastic but not without flaws. We need someone to balance things out -- almost everyone else with an audience out there is shilling for Apple.