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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

#491

Post by tracker1 »

freedomben wrote: post #241
mrighele wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you allow middlemen to strip this right to users of your software. That's not true. Somebody can take the source code and build something closed on top of it, but the original code will be already free, and you will always have the right to see it. For example, PlayStation OS is based on FreeBSD (AFAIK). They took it, adapted it and added a lot of stuff. Did you lose the right to see the source code of FreeBSD ? No…

GP is clearly talking about this is the same context that the GPL does. This is a decades-long running debate and it isn't as simple as you and the sibling commenters are trying to make it. Of course it doesn't change the original project. But when people take the codebase and build a new product on it, what GP says is absolutely the case. The devs can withhold all code and rights to it from the next user. This is mo…

I think it will come down to distribution. The current crop of browsers are already open source and available. I'm not sure that a closed fork will really work for much or be a significant risk.

At least not now or the foreseeable future. I also don't think community support would work towards that.

I'd favor the more permission mit/isc as long as reasonable myself.

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

#492

Post by mananaysiempre »

Ygg2 wrote: post #476
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.)

>that wasn’t the original goal They always aimed for a better embeddable story than Gecko. That and more parallelism in layout and processing. > It’s the safer(?) one they turned to when the job security evaporated. Not safer, more like saner multithreading story. Safe rust isn't so much for security as it is safety in a parallel context.

Re better embeddability, sure. As best as I can tell the Firefox devs have been feeling some amount of dismay due to the fact that everyone embeds Chromium/Blink, despite the whole Mozilla/XUL thing having been built more as an application platform rather than as a foundation for one specific web browser. And that’s entirely understandable, as is attempting to do better on the second go-round. But now it seems that Servo is explicitly targeting embedding and -adjacent use cases only, and that’s a post-Mozilla thing.

Re “safe”, I meant that targeting the embedding usecase is safer in a social and project-planning way, as in smaller probability of other people calling them nuts and greater probability of getting something usable in a finite amount of time. Which is fair enough.

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

#493

Post by autoexec »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #480
autoexec wrote: post #466

I love the idea of this project! I'm looking forward to giving it a try. I'm not your typical user (I'm more interested in what features a browser lets me disable than what it supports) and while right now Firefox comes out way ahead of everyone else in terms of empowering users to customize things to fit their needs it feels like with every update they introduce more features I need to disable and they're growing mo…

A reminder that the vast majority of Mozilla funding comes from Google who are an advertising company. A reminder that years ago they were paid by an advertising firm to secretly install a plugin for a TV show. When someone raised a bugzilla bug about it, the project manager for the plugin (who herself had come to Mozilla after a career in online advertising tech...) marked it employee-only. Another employee reversed…

> A reminder that years ago they were paid by an advertising firm to secretly install a plugin for a TV show.

More recently they pushed an ad for Disney on users and the only way to prevent that was to turn off the redirect to the "what's new page" the show us after updates (browser.startup.homepage_override.mstone = "ignore") which means that now users have remember to manually check out https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/releases/ for release notes.

Then later they pushed a full screen VPN ad on every firefox user. In response to the immediate outrage, they suspended the ad campaign and told people to add "browser.vpn_promo.enabled" to about:config and set it to "False", even though that only applied to the one ad everyone had already seen and been forced to click past. What they should have done was add "browser.promos.enabled" and made sure that any ads they added to the browser in the future respected that preference.

I agree 100% that pocket is a huge offense. It should never have been anything but an add-on.

> ...meanwhile in Chromium browsers, WebSerial has been supported for years

Most people using Chrome are already handing all their private info and internet browsing history to Google. No exploit needed. Last I checked (it's been a while admittedly) there was no way to totally disable WebRTC or service workers in chrome and they don't want you to be able to disable ads either. Chrome isn't really an option.

Firefox is a very imperfect browser, and I'm afraid that it's getting worse all the time, but it's still the best we have.

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

#494

Post by tracker1 »

enriquto wrote: post #162
awesomekling wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks F3nd0! There are currently no plans to switch to a less permissive license. And we're perfectly happy using proprietary services like GitHub and Discord as long as they make our work easier and more enjoyable. We recently evaluated a number of alternatives, and found that they all introduced more friction than we were comfortable with. Although the task of building a browser is itself challenging, we're a prag…

> (...) switch to a less permissive license. License "permissiveness" is a relative concept. From the point of view of the users of your software, the GPL is more permissive than MIT, since they have permission to see the source code. If you release software under MIT or BSD licenses, you allow middlemen to strip this right to users of your software.

Well, with MIT, you can make your own (A)GPL fork of you like and carry on. Best of luck.

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

#495

Post by bezier-curve »

rchaud wrote: post #379
bezier-curve wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have to agree, though I think as the saying goes, "don't hate the playa, hate the game". Capitalism sucks. Sorry for my non-HN-like comment, but it's the truth.

> "don't hate the playa, hate the game" That might play if this was another Chromium fork, instead of something built from scratch.

I've been watching Andreas' youtube channel, no need to talk down to me.

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

#496

Post by mananaysiempre »

m0llusk wrote: post #392
mananaysiempre wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people actually use Fluent? When I showed it to some professional translators, the reaction was along the lines of: “Hmm, interesting, but does it fit into my existing [roughly speaking XLIFF] tooling? No? Then no.” More generally, a technical translator’s flow is turning a table of strings into a table of strings with minimal distractions and the occasonal look at the reference; I’m not sure Fluent—however nice i…

Mostly not, but the formats and limited available tooling is designed to dovetail with existing offerings. Adoption is extremely low despite fairly easy implementation of most features.

Really? So if the software I want localized uses Fluent, do I have ways to work with translators who use Trados or Transit or Déjà Vu or memoQ or whatnot? My initial impression was that Fluent’s data model is way, way too fancy for any of these (or for interoperability via XLIFF or TMX, imperfect as it is), but I’d be happy to learn I was wrong.

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

#497

Post by lukeschlather »

spencerflem wrote: post #482
KennyBlanken wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A reminder that the vast majority of Mozilla funding comes from Google who are an advertising company. A reminder that years ago they were paid by an advertising firm to secretly install a plugin for a TV show. When someone raised a bugzilla bug about it, the project manager for the plugin (who herself had come to Mozilla after a career in online advertising tech...) marked it employee-only. Another employee reversed…

C'man, those gaffes are so much less than the telemetry Chrome has, and so much more less than Chrome would have if there was no competition If your complaint is that Firefox doesn't support enough standards, ladybird is so far behind

Firefox isn't actually competing with Chrome in that sense, since Firefox's funding is essentially derived from the same advertising source as Chrome.

And Firefox's attempts to diversify by seeking new sources of advertising revenue don't actually make the problem better; what I would like is a browser that is not competing for advertising revenue.

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

#498

Post by purpleidea »

If what is written in the article is true, then why not pursue a copyleft license for the web browser to keep it Free? Otherwise a for-profit competitor can fork it and all the bootstrapping would be for naught.

Even LGPLv3+ would be a good choice here.

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

#499

Post by snvzz »

ecef9-8c0f-4374 wrote: post #129
dataflow wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are currently no plans to switch to a less permissive license. Hey, just a reality check: in the event that you actually do become wildly successful, this means that others (Google, Microsoft, etc.) will be able to fork the browser and then develop it faster than you - thus leaving you behind and taking away your users ! Would highly recommend leaving yourself some mechanism to prevent that, unless you're rea…

KHTML was the basis for Chrome and Safari. A valid concern

Was KHTML not GPL?

How is MIT any worse at preventing this, when GPL didn't?

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

#500

Post by fouc »

talldayo wrote: post #399
nwienert wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari is better than Chrome in many ways, arguably most.

A fact that appears to be lost on the majority of users that have a say in what browser they use: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

The problem is that when Chrome came out it was heavily marketed/targeted towards developers. Developers took it up and then built websites in & for Chrome. The end result is many websites work better in Chrome than Firefox or Safari. It's a vicious cycle of continuing dependency.

I'm doing my part to break the cycle by supporting the underdog by using Safari as my daily driver & developing primarily for Safari & Firefox.

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