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

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

#41

Post by moreofthis »

no_time wrote: post #2

Looks like the website of a startup that wants my email so they can "get back to me with a quote". Such soulless corpo design is not befitting of a project this nice.

I had a similar first impression. The previous logo and branding were pretty strong imo even if the SerenityOS and ladybird website was/is a bit scrappy. Very cute little ladybird, and the natural patterns of a ladybug gave a clear visual motif to build from.

People talk about 'polish' in design as a signifier of quality but my mind always goes to conching, the process by which cacao nibs are ground down over days to produce silky chocolate. You need to conch the nibs to grind them past the point that the chocolate has a gritty texture in order to get the nice smooth chocolate we all love, but what the process also does is grind down the sharper notes of the flavour. The further you go the more the deeper and richer notes are lost. So too a design language and brand can be conched to smooth it out for broader consumption, but you can go too far and lose the flavour.

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

#42

Post by zogrodea »

PedroBatista wrote: post #20
bayindirh wrote: post #16

I wonder what would happen if Ladybird matures well to compete with Firefox and Chrome (hope so), and it's just forked away by some company and completely closed down in a whim, because BSD-2 allows that.

Why is that such a problem other than the human factor of seeing your code being used by some guys you don’t like?

I think the issue isn't the potential forking, but that the potential fork may become a dominant and closed one.

If one values the web being somewhat open/less monopolistic, an open source web browser would be more appealing.

I have faith in the Ladybird browser project to avoid such a situation though.

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

#43

Post by nyanpasu64 »

no_time wrote: post #2

Looks like the website of a startup that wants my email so they can "get back to me with a quote". Such soulless corpo design is not befitting of a project this nice.

The AI-generated laptop images with incoherent logo and keys are the cherry on the soullessness.

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

#44

Post by ColinHayhurst »

awesomekling wrote: post #5

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 :)

This is a welcome initiative speaking from a personal and professional perspective, and as CEO of an independent search engine; we are all too well aware of the power of money and defaults.

This immediately comes to mind as akin to the Signal vis-a-vis WhatsApp etc. Here there is an obvious reason to use Signal and a well-understood proposition. What might it be for Ladybird? And how will you differentiate?

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

#45

Post by ramon156 »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #27
dbcooper wrote: post #4

>Why build a new browser in C++ when safer and more modern languages are available? >Ladybird started as a component of the SerenityOS hobby project, which only allows C++. The choice of language was not so much a technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain. >However, now…

So half a million lines of tech debt?

Would another language have avoided this?

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

#48

Post by awesomekling »

yuvadam wrote: post #10
awesomekling wrote: post #5

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 :)

How does Ladybird avoid Mozilla's fate? How can it be a long term sustainable project?

It depends on what you mean by “Mozilla’s fate”. In general, we are setting a much narrower goal than Mozilla and hope that focusing on only browsers will allow us to keep things simple and more sustainable financially. :)

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

#49

Post by neocritter »

vaylian wrote: post #34
richardwhiuk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So half a million lines of tech debt?

I think that's too pessimistic. The code is there and it can be used to push the project forward. If some part of it is not good enough, then an alternative implementation can be created (potentially in a different language)

A classic: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

>> "The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive."

>> "Each of these bugs took weeks of real-world usage before they were found. The programmer might have spent a couple of days reproducing the bug in the lab and fixing it. If it’s like a lot of bugs, the fix might be one line of code, or it might even be a couple of characters, but a lot of work and time went into those two characters."

>> "When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work."

It's an older piece, but like good old code, it still holds up. Newer tools and technology have improved the creating of new code, but they've also made improving old code easier in equal measure.

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

#50

Post by rty32 »

bayindirh wrote: post #16

I wonder what would happen if Ladybird matures well to compete with Firefox and Chrome (hope so), and it's just forked away by some company and completely closed down in a whim, because BSD-2 allows that.

If you the amount of features in Chrome and Firefox (just those in the standard, nothing extra), you would know "mature well to compete" is a long way away, if not impossible.

And I don't see any problem with forking. Tons of browser bugs were found, reported and fixed exactly because companies forked them. And remember that Blink is forked from Webkit.

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