Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

lunduke.locals.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

661–670 of 777 posts

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

#661

Post by cloudwalk9 »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #650
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be a great diversity in user agents because there is great diversity in personal tastes. One person's user agent might be another person's "software I would never use". As a text-only web user I am continually amazed, thirty years in, that web developers and now their CDN service providers are _still_ making incorrect assumptions about what user agent I am using. They are wrong every single time. There i…

There are easily less than 1,000 people using the internet in the way that you do. The internet is not immune from cost-benefit.

I think I see an underlying point though. What other Internet protocol or service requires the user client to supply endless additional arbitrary metadata to even gain access to a resource, let alone receive information? Not even email is that cumbersome for the clientside. Although it is the way it is for better or worse.

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

#662

Post by squigz »

dm33tri wrote: post #648
jchw wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 any…

I don't even know what DRM brings to the browsers apart from breaking external monitors and blacking out screenshots All the content behind it is still available day 0 on trackers

Because the same parties interested in DRM in browsers (and everywhere else) are slowly working on making torrenting more difficult.

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

#663

Post by guappa »

fullspectrumdev wrote: post #625
zzo38computer wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC. And for slow discussions with long messages, you can use NNTP. (However, GitHub is accessible by git in case you only want to download the repository, regardless of what else they do; however, having multiple mirrors on other services as well can be helpful)

While I’d love to agree: many people these days simply don’t want to use IRC.

You can bridge to matrix and use a matrix client. Then you get history even offline.

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

#664

Post by guappa »

pferde wrote: post #635
lukan wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There's no reason to ever have anything non-open in your FOSS project's infrastructure." Except, that it is easier to set up? What you describe sounds reasonable. But someone needs to set all that up and host it and needs to be trusted etc. So I guess if many people get involved and do set this up, they would convince the rest of the team to join them. But right now it is just a demand for more work for them.

You are correct, of course. If the project leadership does not see a value in using open infrastructure, of course it would look like additional (and unreasonable) demand. It's up to them.

Until some company pulls on them what happened to linux to invent git :)

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

#665

Post by squigz »

Dalewyn wrote: post #621
jchw wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Doing the right thing" for the user's best interests is the job of the user agent. It's just that simple. Giving the user a "choice" by implementing anti-features that they will be coerced into using by abusive websites is not really much of a choice. What you're really building there is a website agent, with a side of deception to make it sound like it's actually good for the user. Coincidentally, Google makes a ni…

>"Doing the right thing" for the user's best interests is the job of the user agent. It's just that simple. No, a user agent's sole job is to represent its user. It's right there on the tin: User Agent . Forcing no DRM is just as bad as forcing DRM, it's not the user agent's business to decide for the user. The fact that most user agents today are actually developer/publisher agents is part of the problems we are hav…

That last paragraph is unnecessarily aggressive, and seems to me an uncharitable reading of their position and how they've presented it.

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

#667

Post by njtransit »

valianteffort wrote: post #666

I would love a browser that lets me disable/enable any browser or JS features a la carte. All fingerprinting for example.

Fingerprinting isn’t a JS feature, it’s a side effect. Most websites won’t work without JS, unfortunately.

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

#668

Post by shortrounddev2 »

daghamm wrote: post #350

For comparison, in 2022 Mozilla had $1.3B in assets and over $500M in revenue: https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202... I want ladybird to succeed and show the world how ridiculous the Mozilla situation has been.

What is wrong with Mozilla?

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

#669

Post by mrln »

zarzavat wrote: post #405
satyanash wrote: post #127

No talk of the license on the frontpage. Visiting the GitHub repo tells me it is 2-clause BSD license. It's high time we had a GPLv3 web browser, otherwise, this risks the same fate as the rest of the browsers with proprietary forks. This of course comes at the cost of not being able to support non-free parts of the web standard such as DRM.

> It's high time we had a GPLv3 web browser Then write one. Perhaps BSD in its anarchic freedom is compelling to the kinds of people who decide to do something crazy like building a brand new browser engine from scratch, and GPLv3 with its detailed rules and regulations is compelling to people who like to talk about how they wish the world had more software licensed under GPLv3. Open source isn’t handed down from God…

> Open source isn’t handed down from God, it starts with one person deciding to type mkdir.

So poetic! I love that sentence!

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

#670

Post by K0SM0S »

specialist wrote: post #346
ale wrote: post #265

I’m disappointed in the fact that the main ambition here is only to recreate a browser for the sake of independence. There is so much potential in creating a modern browser that could for instance focus on performance, privacy, access to lower level APIs, etc. rather than carrying the eternal burden of backwards compatibility.

Software dev maturity phases: get something working make it correct make it fast Having a vanilla green field working web browser could enable experimentation. Prototying a novel more useful hybrid history & bookmarks feature set, for instance, is a giant pain thru the current plugin extensions. Like sucking apples thru a soda straw. As you said about lower level APIs, it's easier to "go straight to the metal".

Indeed. With limited budget and manpower, they [Ladybird] should focus on a rock-solid core engine with great extensibility, then let the community—if any—create all the things around said core.

It's the best (perhaps only) "small project to stratosphere" 101-recipe I've found. [Note that for browsers, even 1% of market share is stratosphere-level.]

Historical music/media apps were a great example before browsers (Winamp, Foobar2K, XBMC…). Tiny teams + key community contributions made for amazingly complete and rich software fit for all use-cases, beating any commercial alternative by far.

(The fact is that to this day, these 2000-2010 solutions gave you far more user-power & customization, not to mention discoverability and meta-knowledge, than current Netflix or Spotify UIs.)

A project like Ladybird should take that general road, IM(very but educated)HO. That's how they can eventually catch up to big names feature-wise.

Post reply on HN