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The Ladybird browser project

ladybird.dev

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Re: The Ladybird browser project

#241

Post by zzo38computer »

martypitt wrote: post #52
jraph wrote: post #40

I have hopes it will become a daily usable browser. A new Web engine is great. I hope Servo succeeds at this too. I would consider contributing but development is coordinated on Discord and I avoid proprietary software… [1]. It's a shame. Can't blame them though, they are doing it for fun. [1] https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infras...

Wow - that article was a tough read. I like a LOT of what Drew has to say, but this seems over the top. He claims that authors promoting their open source software on channels like Twitter, Hacker news, LinkedIn or even Github is "selfish and unethical outright": > Many projects choose to prioritize access to the established audience that large commercial platforms provide, in order to maximize their odds of becoming…

You can promote the software, as well as mirror the code of the software, on multiple services. (Unfortunately, while the code and documentation can be mirrored, the discussions usually won't be.)

Requiring the use of priorietary software to access and discuss it is a problem, and requiring complicated software is not that good either, but it is also possible to use open protocols with multiple software.

(In the specific case of GitHub, they had previously allow viewing files without needing JavaScripts; that has changed now, but the data is included as JSON data within the HTML file, so I was able to write my own much shorter script to substitute for theirs. Of course, that does not help much if you do not have that script, but you can still use the git protocol to download the files, or to use the API (the form for creating a new repository has stopped working on my computer, but I have been able to do so by using the API).)

One thing they do not mention is NNTP, which I think can be a helpful alternative than mailing lists (although you can also have multiple interfaces for the same messages).

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#242

Post by cpeterso »

throw7 wrote: post #226
jraph wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but a lot of popular sites don't even work with Firefox Which ones? I have always exclusively used Firefox and rarely have issues.

My goto example is roll20.net. During a gaming session some feature or thing didn't render. Switch to chrome... worked perfectly. The real problem is that firefox is tier 2 support or not even. It's a small percent of users so it's a cost/benefit for these businesses. A recent issue I had was buying tickets from air india. You can't with firefox... it'll hang at a certain point. Switch to chrome... works perfectly. T…

Thanks for trying to use Firefox first!

You can report websites that don’t work in Firefox on webcompat.com and Mozilla web developers will test and diagnose the problem. When possible, they attempt to reach web developers at the site (using personal contacts or referrals when official channels aren’t working) to share the bug report and a suggested fix.

In other cases, Firefox can include a site intervention script to patch the site or send a different browser User-Agent string to make it work.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#244

Post by lp0_on_fire »

carlosjobim wrote: post #221
bigfudge wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was in a time when expectations were low and all the banks were pretty equally crap. There are better choices now, and even my mum would be pissed off of her bank website didn’t work in her current browser.

Would she be pissed off at A) The bank? B) The browser? C) The computer? D) Her internet provider? People can change browser more easily than changing banks. They can even have multiple different browsers on their machine, and one for only doing banking.

For many people, the icon on the desktop they click isn't important. They just know when they click that icon, it brings them to "the internet". If she's one of those people, my guess is she blames the bank.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#245

Post by cantours »

jorvi wrote: post #212
mouse_ wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If something is bad, we should be trying to rewrite it. Will you not touch WireGuard because OpenVPN is full of holes?

If massive companies like Google and Apple can’t even find all the vulnerabilities, how are you expecting a scrappy team to? Don’t get me wrong, how far they’ve gotten is very laudable and as a educational exercise it is really cool, but it starts being a pretty massive risk if users start using this as a daily driver.

Google and Apple are just a bunch of scrappy teams trying to work together on insanely massive and bloated code bases. Numbers of bugs scale with lines of code.

Small scrappy team writing simple and consice code from scratch is likely to produce fewer bugs than enterprisey monstrosities.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#246

Post by ripley12 »

webprofusion wrote: post #93

Great to see some competition still alive in browser engine development. See also Servo (previously part of Mozilla) https://servo.org/ - that and Ladybird are still very underdeveloped compared to every day browsers. It's a huge shame that there are no nightly builds of ladybird to try out but I assume that's because they just don't want the bug reports (if everything doesn't work it's pointless getting random bugs…

IIRC there are no builds because forcing people to compile it themselves ensures that users (and people who file issues) have a certain amount of technical competency. Keeps life easier for maintainers, but will probably change if/when the project matures.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#247

Post by redder23 »

pennomi wrote: post #205
JimDabell wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What would be the alternative in your opinion? Force Apple to allow alternative rendering engines, but only the ones with People already mistake Blink-only APIs like Web USB, Web Bluetooth, Web MIDI, etc. for web standards. The market is already dangerously close to where it was 20 years ago, where a vast number of web developers treat the most popular rendering engine as if it’s synonymous with the web. Handing mo…

Blink isn’t dangerous, Chrome is. You can have a privacy focused Blink browser.

You fail to get it, YES Blink indeed is in fact dangerous because its controlled by Google and they dictate what they allow and what will be next things in the Browser and basically force everyone else to follow up with features they implement. They have a way to big control over browsers with the large market share they have. It has very little to do with with privacy. I use Brave myself. Using Blink as rendering option is cool and its cool that is open source but it does not change the control Google has over browsers. People could fork it of they disagree with things they do but if they are not as big as Apple the fork would disappear into meaningless and would never even come close to somehow influence and web standards ...

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#249

Post by F3nd0 »

I want to feel excited for Ladybird, but it's an incredible shame that such a promising and potentially very important project has settled on a pushover licence and Discord for their communication platform. The latter especially is an antithesis of freedom and openness, which I feel ought to be valued by people celebrating Ladybird's progress.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#250

Post by Misdicorl »

jorvi wrote: post #222
Misdicorl wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That advice has context. Do not roll your own if the feature is not your core product offering . So don't roll crypto if you're not selling crypto. If it is your core offering (and media decoding is absolutely a core offering of a web browser), you should choose carefully whether to get it off the shelf or roll your own. Otherwise how would new/better stuff ever get built?!

If Apple and Google can’t even find all the vulnerabilities in their libs, how on earth would a scrappy team of a few devs, especially since media decode isn’t the sole thing they’re focused on? > Otherwise how would new/better stuff ever get built?! The problem here is that people are salivating to use this as their daily driver. When WireGuard was still in development, everyone got told in very strong terms to not…

> but any user that thinks their media decode libraries will be bulletproof libs free of vulnerabilities are nuts.

Sure. And its a high bar to challenge the same or better vulnerability profile that the established players have. But a "small scrappy team" which is capable of doing everything this team has done certainly garners a lot of confidence that the bar is possible.

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