Unless you are planning to live off the interest from your donations, how will this be possible?
With a simple two-part strategy: 1. We keep the team small enough that there's always at least 1.5 years of runway in the bank. 2. We continue fundraising actively.
I'd add that fundraising has worked well for the Wikimedia Foundation. They're taking in around $175M/year via donations. That isn't the nearly $500M/year that Mozilla gets from Google, but it's still a ton of money.
I don't know if people will donate for their browser like they donate for Wikipedia, but if it's able to bring joy to people, it could be pretty sustainable. Even Mozilla takes in $10M/year in contributions.
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.
That isn't even slightly comparable as those plugins required the end user to install them, due to the inherent security concerns. Contrast that with today: you are constantly using websites which require giant libraries that entirely subvert the underlying semantics, such as React... it isn't at all crazy to just stop adding more BS to the browser and require more of it to end up in rendering layers such as React, or even to long for a web where React is merely built on top of something like canvas. (FWIW, Flutter is like this, and it is actually pretty damned good; it isn't great, but if we concentrated on only adding features required to fix Flutter's complaints, the web would be better for it, and we'd see a ton of web browsers as a handful of people can legitimately build an operating system kernel or a language compiler or a virtual machine monitor or a CPU emulator or a 3D engine, and yet implementing all of the current web stack requires some giant company, which is ridiculous.)
Hello friends, Ladybird founder here! Here's a short video from Chris Wanstrath announcing our non-profit yesterday, and kicking things off with a $1M donation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9edTqPMX_k Happy to answer questions :)
Congratulations on the kick-off! Now that Ladybird is no longer a part of SerenityOS, will you consider a switch to a licence which not only grants, but also protects user freedoms (e.g. the GPL, MPL, EUPL)? Also, any thoughts on having official communication channels on some open, freedom-respecting platforms, rather than Discord only?
The guy used to work for Apple at WebKit team.
So he knows that corporations can take open source browsers and make it proprietary.
> No "default search deals", crypto tokens, or other forms of user monetization, ever.
Sounds good, but how would you make sure the sponsors won’t influence you in the future once it’s popular enough? After all, they are still corporations and are after profits, as opposed to crowdfunding.
Nitpick (or is it?) but the website is soulless and just bad. The website design communicates that this is just another immature project, desperately looking for a VC funding, just following modern design trends where "design == aesthetics". Yuck. I am happy to see the project thrive.
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…
The talk about correctness gets me thinking.
If there is a difference between how specs define something, and how browsers behave (and website expect them to behave), will you choose technical correctness or websites actually functioning?
Technically this has been the big problem of HTML5 vs XHTML, and "technical correctness" lost to actual usability.
Getting Microsoft to use a new engine and contribute back to the original repository is better for diversity, but forking and running away with it is certainly not.
> Forking and running away with it is certainly not If your goal is browser diversity, this would take an ecosystem of 2 browser engines and turn it into an ecosystem of 4. That seems in-line with the goal of browser diversity.
Currently we have an ecosystem of two browser engines, yes. One of them is weaponized against users by its designers, both in its open and closed form.
Having 4 (or 3.5 more realistically) browser engines where 2 of them weaponized against its users doesn't change things.
Instead, we should have 3 (or 2.5) browser engines where only one of them is (and can be) weaponized against its users. This is what brings diversity and change.
Yes, but not automatically yet! We are actively working on our WPT infrastructure (which relies on a full Web Driver implementation) and running it manually at the moment. Once we've got it stable and automated, we'll look at pushing results to the common dashboard at https://wpt.fyi/ :)
With a simple two-part strategy: 1. We keep the team small enough that there's always at least 1.5 years of runway in the bank. 2. We continue fundraising actively.
I'd add that fundraising has worked well for the Wikimedia Foundation. They're taking in around $175M/year via donations. That isn't the nearly $500M/year that Mozilla gets from Google, but it's still a ton of money. I don't know if people will donate for their browser like they donate for Wikipedia, but if it's able to bring joy to people, it could be pretty sustainable. Even Mozilla takes in $10M/year in contributi…
I'm not sure Mozilla is a good case for a lean software project.
If they didn't give their CEO $7M per year, spent money acquiring businesses like Pocket, gave up their braindead attempts at monetizing user data while simultaneously running bizarre tone-deaf "free internet" studies, and just focused on the browser and improving the development experience (is there a worse open source project than Moz??), they might fare better.