The Ladybird browser project

He claims that authors promoting their open source software on channels like Twitter, Hacker news, LinkedIn or even Github is "selfish and unethical outright":

> Many projects choose to prioritize access to the established audience that large commercial platforms provide, in order to maximize their odds of becoming popular, and enjoying some of the knock-on effects of that popularity, such as more contributions.

> To me, this is selfish and unethical outright, though you may have different ethical standards.

I find Zealotry like this tough, and promotes a definition of FOSS that feels hostile against those who want to simply build something cool, and share it with the world - (or even more controversially, make money from FOSS).

Given such a strong view, it's really surprising that he then posts stuff like "Can I be on your podcast"[1] to try to promote Hare - his programming language.

He didn't ask for podcasts that aren't distributed on platforms like Spotify or Apple Podcasts. In fact - he's right there with several appearances promoting Hare.

That feels like hypocrisy.

[1]: https://drewdevault.com/2023/11/09/Can-I-be-on-your-podcast....

1.) Refresh Firefox: Click the menu button with 3 lines -> "Help" -> "More troubleshooting information" -> "Refresh Firefox..."

2.) Check your Enhanced Tracking Protection settings from the Privacy & Security tab in the Settings menu. If it's set higher than Standard, it could be causing sites like reddit, sites that use Cloudflare for protection, etc., to load incorrectly or fail to load entirely.

If you think you are "pro open web" but don't see the value in new browser engines (rather than just Safari, Firefox, and endless Chrome skins), then you're not actually "pro open web" you're pro status quo.

But also, you're completely missing that the whole point of serenityos was to do everything from scratch, and simply porting an existing engine like webkit (which Andreas is extremely familiar with) isn't an interesting task. Porting something like servo (that doesn't even benefit from significant web compatibility) is even more pointless.

At least building a new engine from scratch has the potential to introduce a new non-gecko, non-webkit derived browser, even if it takes a while (though despite the size of modern web specs, it's in many respects easier[1] than doing it 10 or 20 years ago).

[1] It's still not easy, but prior to the immense work from the major browser developers in the late 2000s and 2010s to actually make the specifications accurate and complete, you could not do what serenity/ladybird has been doing and just implement the spec. Firstly often times the spec simply did not exist, but then the W3C specs were largely incomplete, often times ambiguous, and frequently just did not match reality. Even TC39/ECMAScript, which was much more constrained, had absurd amounts of ambiguity and incompleteness. Nowadays, you can go to most specs and be fairly assured that if you implement the spec as written the behaviour will actually be correct (maybe inefficient or slow), and the difficulty is the much more tractable problem of there being more features to implement.

It’s even more specific than that though isn’t it? A fanatical belief in a single cause to the exclusion of all else.