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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

#541

Post by abrookewood »

okasaki wrote: post #390
mdasen wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd add that fundraising has worked well for the Wikimedia Foundation. They're taking in around $175M/year via donations. That isn't the nearly $500M/year that Mozilla gets from Google, but it's still a ton of money. I don't know if people will donate for their browser like they donate for Wikipedia, but if it's able to bring joy to people, it could be pretty sustainable. Even Mozilla takes in $10M/year in contributi…

I'm not sure Mozilla is a good case for a lean software project. If they didn't give their CEO $7M per year, spent money acquiring businesses like Pocket, gave up their braindead attempts at monetizing user data while simultaneously running bizarre tone-deaf "free internet" studies, and just focused on the browser and improving the development experience (is there a worse open source project than Moz??), they might f…

$7m!? Jesus

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

#542

Post by atlas_hugged »

zzo38computer wrote: post #446
vrinsd wrote: 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.

Wat?

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

#543

Post by Chaosvex »

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…

Pocket isn't even enabled unless you choose to use it, so why would you need to disable it?

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

#544

Post by zzo38computer »

rstat1 wrote: post #515
zzo38computer wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I do not mean C compiled to WASM. I mean native code (with dlopen).

My point is not for other people to make extensions that you must use. Rather, my point is in case the user wants to write their own extensions do things that have more permissions, without needing to recompile everything. It is specifically if the user does not want the extra security (because they intend to program it to do things beyond that provided by the browser's security context), and only for that case.

(However, there might be another alternative: Provide a .a file (in case do not intend to compile it by yourself, which might take some time and require several dependencies) and allow the end user to link that file together with their own .o files, instead of using .so files. The constructor functions can be used to tell the main program of the presence of these extensions.)

(Another alternative would be to provide a separate version that may permit this, e.g. "advanced version", that might also offer additional options and other features which are intended to only be used by advanced users, therefore making the user interface more confusing for users who do not read the documentation.)

C (and other programming languages) that is compiled to WASM could be installable from the app store, since then it is safe. Native code extensions must be installed manually.

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

#545

Post by Springtime »

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 the vast majority of Mozilla funding comes from Google who are an advertising company.

The implication by users who frequently bring this up is that there's some unique influence on Mozilla. Yet if we're going by reminders Mozilla had a deal with Yahoo for three years in-between for it to instead be the default search engine and they were still paying hundreds of millions for the privilege (it's been estimated they were even paying $100m more than Google at the time, though by 2017 Mozilla reportedly felt they should have been making more and ended the deal prematurely after Yahoo was bought by Verizon).

Ie: I haven't seen evidence it's been unique partnership with Google in that regard. If there are more concrete examples of influence though I'd be interested (and it has to be understood I'm not a Google apologist either, I just seek more accurate critique as it's more robust).

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

#546

Post by atlas_hugged »

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 :)

[flagged]

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

#547

Post by Springtime »

endemic wrote: post #327
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/

Yeah, that original logo is way better. Kind of reminiscent of the Firefox logo before it got abstracted away into minimalism.

Interesting, as the icon present on the parent user's site seems to be an even earlier, less refined (and clearly AI generated) version than the prior iteration[1] before changing to the abstract design.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240208004519im_/https://ladybi...

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

#548

Post by rddbs »

r3trohack3r wrote: post #302
Sammi wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust does not make it simple or easy to reference objects from objects. You will be fighting the borrow checker if you try. This is what I mean. The web standards have lots of references between everything. This type of object oriented programming means having lots and lots of cycles in your object graph. This makes Rust very veeeery unhappy. The Servo people are trying, and they have been trying for a looong time...

I don't understand, isn't this what Arc is for? An "automatically garbage" collected pointer? Or is it not well behaved for this use case (i.e. blowing the stack on free)

Arc is an atomic (not automatic) reference counter which can be used across threads. Reference counting in general can still be tricky to use when you need cyclical references though, which is what it sounds like the spec has.

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

#549

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

networked wrote: post #102
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 :)

I have two questions, if you don't mind. 1. Legacy hardware support. Is it a goal for Ladybird to build for 32-bit and big-endian CPUs out of the repository? 2. Electron. Do you have any plans to work on an Electron alternative based on Ladybird further down the line? No free Electron alternative other than Sciter seems to use the same browser engine on all platforms. There may be value in one that implements the lat…

Big endian isn't "legacy", modern POWER is perfectly good. (It's niche, granted)

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

#550

Post by Barrin92 »

Sammi wrote: post #98
courseofaction wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the pitch for those who currently use firefox?

Finally get out from under Google's thumb. As soon as Ladybird is half as good as Firefox, then this is reason enough for me to switch. I've lost faith in Mozilla's leadership, and I believe the root cause is the Google money that they rely on.

> As soon as Ladybird is half as good as Firefox

That's never gonna happen without substantial funding because a modern, remotely feature parity web browser is a gargantuan project even if every developer is a genius. Chromium and Firefox sit at 30 million/20 million lines of code respectively, modern web browsers are basically operating systems.

Mozilla doesn't rely on Google revenue because they love Google so much, they do so because they have hundreds of engineers to pay. A million dollars sounds like a lot but that pays for a handful of engineers for a year. That's not going to get you to 5% of Chromium or Firefox.

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