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I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL

awesomekling.substack.com

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

#241

Post by metasaval »

MrAlex94 wrote: post #182
metasaval wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In this case I had completely missed the bad smell, so I appreciate the comment cause it prompted me to look up the whole situation. yikes. I was already planning on moving to another fork soon since I wasn't using most of floorp's power features, so this just expedited that.

Also from your language it sounds like you're a Waterfox dev? If so thanks for all your hard work on open source software! I haven't tried waterfox in years, I will definitely give it a go after uninstalling floorp.

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

#242

Post by meandmycode »

refulgentis wrote: post #188
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 wa…

What unique position does this browser have? in the nicest way, truly nobody cares, both are pet projects

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

#243

Post by nottorp »

ykonstant wrote: post #154
nottorp wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100k is not "well funded by large investors" anyway :)

That could fund my research for 5 years :(

Yeah but one person working 5 years or 5 persons working 1 year isn't likely to be enough to make a modern browser that is feature complete enough to be able to replace the likes of Firefox, Chrome etc.

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

#244

Post by account42 »

shiroiushi wrote: post #233
Aurornis wrote: post #169

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 I…

How big a deal it is depends on what you're comparing to. Yeah, at first, when I read his post, I was wondering if it was a joke or something, with so many checkboxes in different places. Then I got to the point about Windows and realized he's right: compared to Windows, all those steps in Firefox actually aren't that bad, and actually stay unchecked unlike Windows which happily changes things back.

> all those steps in Firefox actually aren't that bad, and actually stay unchecked

Not really, they keep adding new checkboxes that are of course checked by default.

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

#245

Post by account42 »

luplex wrote: post #153
ChrisRR wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an embedded developer it always makes me sad to see physicists and engineers pushing the limits of physics to make faster hardware, just for devs to squander that power with lazy programming.

No, that's actually the point of faster chips: To make software development less challenging and cheaper.

No, it really isn't. The point of faster chips is for the user to be able to do more things and do them faster (without having to wait for the computer). This may mean more complex software that uses the added capabilities to do actually useful stuff that would not have been feasible before. It does not mean meaninglessly squandering performance on layers of abstractions because that takes slightly less developer time.

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

#246

Post by account42 »

The_Colonel wrote: post #102
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?

LadyBird author posted a couple of days ago a demo of twitter and he himself admitted that it's painfully slow.

To be fair, Twitter is painfully slow on other browsers as well due to only fetching and rendering the content after the page and javascript have loaded.

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

#247

Post by account42 »

Kiro wrote: post #104
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?

As someone developing web games, my answer is no.

Web games are squarely outside "what do we really need" territory.

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

#248

Post by hazn »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #229
nasso_dev wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my understanding is that serenity will focus less on the web browser in the first place. it might just go back to being a simple html viewer with rudimentary js support? my hope is that they take this as an opportunity to come up with a purpose built "web" stack for serenity? use it as an excuse to reinvent the web and "fix" the mistakes that were made? maybe by actually Putting Scheme In The Browser rather than js?

I would argue WebAssembly is a better idea than Scheme.

you can have both! https://spritely.institute/hoot/

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

#249

Post by Qwertious »

luplex wrote: post #153
ChrisRR wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an embedded developer it always makes me sad to see physicists and engineers pushing the limits of physics to make faster hardware, just for devs to squander that power with lazy programming.

No, that's actually the point of faster chips: To make software development less challenging and cheaper.

The point of faster chips is to make computer programs faster. We've increased performance a thousandfold and yet programs almost always take more than a frame (16ms) to update. Once everything is rendering at absolute 60FPS (and actually, 144FPS would be nice), and the hardware is reasonably cheap (Raspberry Pi cost perhaps), then the point is to make software development cheaper.

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

#250

Post by snvzz »

awesomekling wrote: post #56
zadler wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that it dropped serenity as a target, it does seem there is something more to this story…

There really isn't anything more to it. :) By dropping SerenityOS as a target, Ladybird is free to make use of 3rd party libraries that don't currently work on SerenityOS. And keep in mind, SerenityOS would be unable to integrate Ladybird in this new state anyway, since SerenityOS has a strict "no 3rd party code" policy. (Also nice: it stops being necessary to wait 30+ minutes for multiple CI runs on SerenityOS every…

Is there something in the way of keeping 3rd party code optional in Ladybird?
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