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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

#411

Post by mjaniczek »

Ygg2 wrote: post #354
account42 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seeing someone ignore the naysayers and attempt the so-called impossible task of developing a new independent browser is awesome to see. It brings a glimmer of hope that the internet is not doomed to be ruled by advertising companies with only a stagnant controlled opposition browser as the alternative. That said, Ladybird is obviously far from becoming the daily driver for the average webizen. What do you think is g…

> Seeing someone ignore the naysayers and attempt the so-called impossible task of developing a new independent browser is awesome to see Well the impossibility isn't so much in making a browser but making a browser that manages to get a chunk of web audience. That means presence on mobile, feature and performance parity with Chrome, surprasing Chrome on some level (e.g. Safari having better vendor lock-in).

I'm pretty sure the impossibility advertised back then was also about just making a browser.

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

#412

Post by ForHackernews »

This is wonderful news and I'm all for more diversity and user choice in the world of browsers, but this text...

> preparing to become the only major web browser which does not treat the user like the product being sold.

...is either ignorant or a deliberate slam on Mozilla. Whatever else you might say about Firefox, it has never tried to "sell" me to anyone. The fact of the matter is that Mozilla has done the impossible for decades and gets no end of grief for it.

(I expect we'll get a zillion complaints about search engine placement & Pocket recommendations because that always happens on this site)

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

#413

Post by postalrat »

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…

That all sounds great until you start considering what needs to be done for accessibility. For blind readers as well as many different screen resolutions.

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

#414

Post by [deleted] »

awesomekling wrote: post #99
ColinHayhurst wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

To be honest, we are so far behind everyone else today that we're 100% focused on catching up technically, and not thinking much about differentiation. :) That said, I do think we'll find ways to differentiate given our uncommon situation with no ties to the advertising industry. This gives us the ability to experiment with privacy measures more aggressive than others may be comfortable with for fear of losing fundin…

[deleted]

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

#415

Post by gitaarik »

bradley_taunt wrote: post #230

Love the project, but that website is pretty cold and soulless (as mentioned by others). I quickly put together a "cleaner" design for anyone interested, which also uses the original (and objectively better) logo: https://ladybird-dev.netlify.app/

Maybe it's because they want their website to work in their own browser ;)? I can see that if they start off simple with the browser, they start off simple with the website too, and it progressively grows with the browser.

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

#416

Post by SushiHippie »

spankalee wrote: post #320
mananaysiempre wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Servo wants to build an embeddable engine That’s what they pivoted to after being expelled from Mozilla, but that wasn’t the original goal, was it? It’s the safer(?) one they turned to when the job security evaporated. (Not sure if that changes anything, just feel obligated to point out the retcon here.)

It would be very cool if Servo were picked up as the engine for a new browser.

Agreed, I really hope that someday we'll get a full rust browser, because rust is a language where I could see myself contributing (e.g. fixing bugs that annoy me when using it all day) to it, compared to other languages like C/C++.

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

#417

Post by ForHackernews »

dataflow wrote: post #397
guappa wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so you know, chromium exists now as an open source project because KDE developers used GPL.

Would you mind elaborating? How did KDE's use of GPL prevent Chromium from being closed-source? What about Google Chrome?

WebKit, the rendering engine that originally powered Chromium began its life as a fork of KHTML a GPL-licensed rendering engine produced by the KDE project for their Konqueror browser.

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

#418

Post by dataflow »

ForHackernews wrote: post #417
dataflow wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind elaborating? How did KDE's use of GPL prevent Chromium from being closed-source? What about Google Chrome?

WebKit, the rendering engine that originally powered Chromium began its life as a fork of KHTML a GPL-licensed rendering engine produced by the KDE project for their Konqueror browser.

That part I know, but how are you saying that prevented Chromium from being closed-source, and why didn't the same apply to Google Chrome?

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

#419

Post by szastamasta »

postalrat wrote: post #413
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…

That all sounds great until you start considering what needs to be done for accessibility. For blind readers as well as many different screen resolutions.

I agree. That's actually one of few problems with having just canvas - accessibility. Most libraries would not have it, and it would be a disaster for disabled users, but... That's one of few things current state AI could solve. Why not make a neural net that would read or summarize page for blind people? Instead we use it to generate bulsh*t junk content and fake comments...

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

#420

Post by noduerme »

neocritter wrote: post #84
noduerme wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only exception is if you have 500k LOC in a language whose runtime is going to be deprecated on all platforms overnight. I'm referring to the uh, retrospectively unfortunate decision I made in 2007 to start building large scale business app frontends in AS3. I guess I should be thankful for the work, having to rewrite everything in TS from scratch a decade later. (At least the backends didn't have to be torn down…

There's a parallel universe where someone convinced you to rewrite it in something else from the start and you spent years on the rewrite instead and it never went anywhere. Could you have done that emergency rewrite without 10 years of becoming an expert in the problem you were solving? The alternative universe has you spending time becoming an expert in a new language instead and maybe not getting anywhere with the…

Totally true. Spending years fine-tuning the business logic and UIs made the eventual rewrites a lot cleaner and faster, having already iterated many times over the years and discovering what worked and what didn't. And learning TS after AS3 was easy enough. The real pain point was switching from a paradigm in which I owned the screen graph down to the pixel-level placement of each component, to a trying to wrangle similar behavior from a mix of DOM elements, relative/absolute positioning and arbitrary stuff drawn into canvases. Particularly for things like interactive Gantt charts and some of the really complicated visualization components that had been a relative pleasure to design and code in Flash. But yeah, it was much easier to learn a new language paradigm knowing exactly what I needed to implement, rather than having to devise the logic at the same time.
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