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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

#511

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 :)

Q1: given that all browsers support non-standard functionality (e.g., CSS attributes not ratified yet, etc) - how will you decide which non standard specs you’ll implement and which you won’t? (or will you just use Chrome as a reference spec and implement anything it implements?) Q2: what is your “guiding principle/mission”? Is it to be the fastest browser? The most privacy centric browser? The only 100% standards co…

I am a bit confused by the question. Why wouldn’t all commonly used defacto standards be supported? Or are you talking about obscure standards which no one uses?

Any browser that doesn’t display normal websites normally will never achieve mainstream usage. Who willingly handicaps their software?

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

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The rendering engine: Chromium had to be kept "libre", because khtml/Webkit was LGPL.

The browser: Chrome. could be kept closed because the LGPL allow the integration of libre libraries in closed products as long as the library itself remains "libre". In this case the library is the renering engine: Chromium.

As a counter example MacOS was built on top of decades of work on the BSD operating system and Apple is under no obligation to give the code back to the BSD project... and it doesn't.

So the most valuable company in the planet took from the community and it doesn't bother to give back.

For some of us that is unacceptabme.

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

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm not wrong Firefox is already Rust. The language was even created inside Mozilla.

It is. They realized that writing a modern browser (i.e. one that for example uses multiple cores efficiently by doing layout/rendering/etc in parallel) is almost impossible in C++. To the point where creating a whole new language just to solve the problem would be a smaller undertaking. Which says something about the scope of this problem. And I really do think they are right.

> They realized that writing a modern browser (i.e. one that for example uses multiple cores efficiently by doing layout/rendering/etc in parallel) is almost impossible in C++

And yet Chrome does it just fine, and Ladybird can render some websites properly that Servo cannot, curious.

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

#514

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…

> they were paid by an advertising firm to secretly install a plugin for a TV show

I thought they weren't paid, and I know for sure that the plugin didn't load the code unless you set a special thing in about:config.

By the standards of easter eggs it was fine.

> When someone raised a bugzilla bug

I didn't hear about this part, I'd like to see your source. Though I don't know if that really worries me?

And I have no idea how it, or Pocket, is supposed to have any connection to privacy.

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

#515
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Andreas, First, thanks for this project and making your self accessible! Will "plug-in" or "add-on" support be a first-party concept in Ladybird? I ask that because in years past a few other browsers (Konqueror, Falkon, Dillo, etc) made it pretty far but lacking add-ons, useful capability such as 'NoScript' or 'uBlock' or even a tab manager made them non-starters.

I would hope that plug-ins and add-ons can be written in C (although any extensions written in C should be only allowed if installed manually by the end user (e.g. by adding it to some configuration file); it should never install them automatically from a "app store" or similar). That is a feature I would use.

If by "C" you're asking for C compiled to WASM, then fine. But otherwise I would hope that WASN'T ever possible.

The endless security nightmare that was ActiveX and NPAPI should serve as more than enough reason why that shouldn't be a thing again.

"Installed manually not from app store" is even worse because then you're encouraging people to download random binaries from random websites and that's even worse

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

#516
post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have much to add here, just wanted to say that I think this is a tremendous gift to the Internet that we loved. It would suffice to say that after many hard reality checks I don't really feel like there are any browser vendors that feel like good stewards of the open web, and it seemed like a new browser that actually managed to break out would be infeasible... until Ladybird showed up. And now, I'm typing th…

I think it should be possible to have some sort of open extension to allow side band canvas rendering to allow for such extensions as optionally provided by the OS. Possibly with an API for custom engines in WASM. I don't think it should have to be in the browser. I would like the option to watch the content. I know the while process of DRM is stupid and will be side stepped somewhere.

Personally, I think life would be better if browsers just didn't play the game at all. If the web was not controlled by corporations, DRM as part of the platform 100% would have simply never happened.

From my point of view, putting DRM into web browsers is actively bad for a couple of reasons beyond the usual arguments against DRM. The greatest asset the web platform has is that it's a unified, open platform that anyone can participate in; Of course, DRM harms users too, but specifically DRM harms the web as a platform. You can't simply have a "full" web browser that can browse the entirety of the web (as ordinary users understand it) without licensing Widevine. To date, only large corporate web browsers have ever gotten this privilege[1]; community web browsers are shit out of luck, almost certainly forever. Not only that, but Widevine will only officially support a small subset of the operating systems that are out there, ensuring that you can't get a "full" web browsing experience on, for example, any BSD (at least not without manual work and violating several license agreements on the way.) Even if Ladybird bucks the trend and manages to get a Widevine license somehow, it will only be possible to make this work on Windows, Linux and macOS. Yes, I understand this covers the vast majority of users, but if you can't see how this is extraordinarily antithetical to the open web I don't really know what else to say. The web didn't even begin on any of those platforms!

Of course, I seriously can't blame Ladybird if they want to go this route. After all, in the position that Ladybird is in, pragmatism is a stance that is hard to beat. Ladybird currently doesn't have the muscle to flex to try to influence the future of the web platform in such a way, especially not against the will of the mega-corp overlords that currently control the web platform.

If I had to guess, I'd guess the lack of an answer to my question is because taking the pragmatic stance on this particular issue will prove controversial, though I hope if that is the case that people continue to direct their ire towards W3C and Mozilla who pretty much immediately folded when the issue came up in the first place. In the moment when Flash and Silverlight died, there was a small sliver of hope that DRM on the web would die with it, but instead we wove DRM directly into the fabric of the web, and Mozilla, no doubt afraid to watch their marketshare dwindle even further, (which it has continued to do anyways, mind you,) played a huge part in that.

Issues like this are why there is guaranteed to be vile toxicity when something like WEI comes up. We know that there is no entity out there holding the line to protect the web platform; once one of these technologies like WEI makes it into Chrome, the era of the open web will have essentially ended. If you believe that the open web is important, then any technology that's vaguely WEI shaped is enemy #1, and when there is no other option, people will choose violence, again and again. DRM on the web isn't really quite as dire of a situation, but it isn't particularly great either.

(One might wonder what the point of keeping DRM out of the browser is, forcing users to use separate software, making their overall experience worse... but that's kind of the thing: Why in the fuck should these vendors and this DRM'd content, that is antithetical to the open web, get to benefit from the web platform built and used mostly by people who stand to gain nothing from it? If you want the benefit of the web platform and all it offers, you should be forced to lose the DRM. Otherwise, have fun deploying your own native software.)

[1]: https://developers.google.com/widevine/drm/overview

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

#517

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 :)

Fantastic - I’ve been using a bootleg wrapper of your browser for awhile now. Fair seas ahead!

I also have a personalized build step on our pre-production web app that launches the site in Ladybird for my host. It’s been awesome to see the browser lock in functionality along with our own progress.

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

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You make it sound like Ffx is paid to be googles lackey- they're not, they're paid to make google the default engine. Apple gets paid billions every year to do this for safari on iOS. This directly makes google a lot of money so its mutually beneficial.

I would like a browser with a big team behind it and a stable reliable source of income. Google paying for everything is risky but I don't think its as big a corrupting influence as you seem to believe.

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