Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by szastamasta » Tue, Jul 02, 2024, 6:58 PM UTC

As much as I would love to see this succeeded, I simply cannot believe that you can sustain a browser development without millions of dollars. Web got so complicated. And it's perfect for all these huge ads companies owning browser engines. Nobody can catch up with this.

There's only one way we can make sure we can get really independent browsers:

SIMPLIFY THE WEB

- Limit the platform to absolute minimum - give way to render things, fetch stuff from the network, etc.

- Get rid of CSS - leave just some basic rendering primitives, so libraries can be created to paint on the canvas. We don't need 78 new animation primitives. We'll build them ourselves if we have a sensible canvas and execution platform.

- Move JS out of the browser to a WebAssembly compiler and make browsers run only WebAssembly

- Or keep JS in the browser but don't add any new features, features should be in libraries outside of the browser. Language should be as simple as possible.

- Get rid of all semantic html junk. We only need some basic blocks to move things around.

This way we can have simple browsers and move all complexity to client libraries, which you can pick and replace when needed. Just keep things as simple as possible and let people build on that.

(updated whitespace)

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

#362

Post by oldpersonintx » Tue, Jul 02, 2024, 6:59 PM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #236

fregonics wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm not wrong Firefox is already Rust. The language was even created inside Mozilla.

It is. They realized that writing a modern browser (i.e. one that for example uses multiple cores efficiently by doing layout/rendering/etc in parallel) is almost impossible in C++. To the point where creating a whole new language just to solve the problem would be a smaller undertaking. Which says something about the scope of this problem. And I really do think they are right.

except they jettisoned the Servo project...

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

#363

Post by oissla » Tue, Jul 02, 2024, 7:00 PM UTC

Honestly, I still love Firefox and I'm a bit skeptical about rewriting everything from scratch when you have a fairly decent codebase. What's the point? Just burning money? You still need to implement the specs.

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

#364

Post by dclowd9901 » Tue, Jul 02, 2024, 7:04 PM UTC

szastamasta wrote: post #361

As much as I would love to see this succeeded, I simply cannot believe that you can sustain a browser development without millions of dollars. Web got so complicated. And it's perfect for all these huge ads companies owning browser engines. Nobody can catch up with this. There's only one way we can make sure we can get really independent browsers: SIMPLIFY THE WEB - Limit the platform to absolute minimum - give way t…

From a user experience, maintaining a large collection of “feature libraries” is about the last thing I want to do on top of web browsing. To me, this approach would doom the browser as needlessly nerdy and obtuse.

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

#365

Post by freedomben » Tue, Jul 02, 2024, 7:04 PM UTC

szastamasta wrote: post #361

As much as I would love to see this succeeded, I simply cannot believe that you can sustain a browser development without millions of dollars. Web got so complicated. And it's perfect for all these huge ads companies owning browser engines. Nobody can catch up with this. There's only one way we can make sure we can get really independent browsers: SIMPLIFY THE WEB - Limit the platform to absolute minimum - give way t…

Any browser could do that tomorrow, and then their users will promptly abandon it when it doesn't work for websites they have to access. This will just never be a viable strategy because users want a web browser that works on the sites they want to visit, and site owners aren't going to rewrite their sites unless the browser has a big enough market share. But market share is going to be small for a browser that doesn't work. Rinse and repeat. It's a major chicken and egg problem.

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

#366

Post by Steuard » Tue, Jul 02, 2024, 7:05 PM UTC

spencerchubb wrote: post #329

Can anyone explain like I'm an idiot concrete reasons how Google Chrome's dominance is bad for the web? Preferably things that have actually happened, not what might happen

You want to know why a monopoly is bad, using only evidence from when it was not yet a monopoly (or not quite)? That feels to me a bit like missing the point.

I think for a lot of us on the older end, we lived through the era of Microsoft Internet Explorer dominating the web and that experience informs our thinking. As long as there was competition between MSIE and Netscape, with each one trying to outdo the other, both browsers kept getting better and the web kept becoming a more and more capable platform. But quite soon after Netscape crumbled and stopped being a serious competitor, MSIE stagnated: development didn't just slow but halted for half a decade. The web stagnated, too, and Microsoft's dominance meant that a lot of what did get built was locked in to their platform. (Partly things like CSS quirks and nonstandard rendering behaviors, and just plain neglect of new possibilities in HTML, JS, and CSS. But more than that: how many companies built ActiveX controls in that era, which mostly required Windows to function? The entire internet infrastructure of South Korea got locked in to ActiveX by law from about 1999 to 2020.) So imagining an era of Chrome monoculture brings back some pretty negative memories.

I don't expect that Google would make the exact same mistakes that Microsoft made. But it would be awfully hard for them not to shape browser design around their own corporate interests if there were no competition driving innovation and no disincentive to shaping the entire future of the web platform in Google-friendly ways. I know that's not "things that have actually happened", but the whole point is that things change once an effective monopoly is achieved.

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

#367

Post by renewiltord » Tue, Jul 02, 2024, 7:06 PM UTC

It's a Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation. So that means it must have raised $500k from other people, each of which cannot have given more than $30k. That's pretty impressive. I wonder who the other sponsors were.

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

#368

Post by szastamasta » Tue, Jul 02, 2024, 7:09 PM UTC

dclowd9901 wrote: post #364

szastamasta wrote: post #361

As much as I would love to see this succeeded, I simply cannot believe that you can sustain a browser development without millions of dollars. Web got so complicated. And it's perfect for all these huge ads companies owning browser engines. Nobody can catch up with this. There's only one way we can make sure we can get really independent browsers: SIMPLIFY THE WEB - Limit the platform to absolute minimum - give way t…

From a user experience, maintaining a large collection of “feature libraries” is about the last thing I want to do on top of web browsing. To me, this approach would doom the browser as needlessly nerdy and obtuse.

You already have this anyway. I’m not sure you have seen the size of average page js bundle. It’s many MBs of JS. All this while expanding browser APIs like crazy during last few years. Simplify the platform and let people brew.

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

#369

Post by jmisavage » Tue, Jul 02, 2024, 7:13 PM UTC

szastamasta wrote: post #361

As much as I would love to see this succeeded, I simply cannot believe that you can sustain a browser development without millions of dollars. Web got so complicated. And it's perfect for all these huge ads companies owning browser engines. Nobody can catch up with this. There's only one way we can make sure we can get really independent browsers: SIMPLIFY THE WEB - Limit the platform to absolute minimum - give way t…

We had this with plugins and it was a security, performance, and compatibility nightmare.

It wasn’t that long ago you needed QuickTime and RealPlayer for videos. Then Flash, Director, Silverlight, and Java for multimedia.

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

#370

Post by haneefmubarak » Tue, Jul 02, 2024, 7:16 PM UTC

awesomekling wrote: post #103

Sammi wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard Andreas Kling say that they will not accept donations that have strings attached. This means they can never sell search engine placement to Google for instance. This is what ties Mozilla to Google.

That's right. The Ladybird Browser Initiative will only accept unrestricted donations. We're missing out on a fair bit of money this way, but we believe it's the right path for us.

Would you accept "issue" sponsorship to prioritize work you were going to do anyways - for instance, improving performance for a specific usecase etc?