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

lunduke.locals.com

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

#671

Post by Dalewyn »

squigz wrote: post #665
Dalewyn wrote: post #621

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. 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.

The HN Guidelines state to "respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says", which is what I did. And yes, I was aggressive, but I don't think it was unwarranted given how strongly he feels about making people "do the right thing" as far as he is concerned.

It would be nice if we could go back(?) to a world where the user operates their computer, not the computer operating their user.

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

#672

Post by Shugyousha »

Ygg2 wrote: post #478
the_duke wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nowadays the spec mostly is "whatever Chrome does". Firefox has often been forced to just conform to Chrome behaviour, despite differing specs, or because the spec was rejected/not agreed upon.

We're back to good ol' days of "Internet Explorer is the spec". It's just made by Google.

> We're back to good ol' days of "Internet Explorer is the spec". It's just made by Google.

and the code (at least a large part of it in the form of Chromium) is Open Source. I don't think it's as bleak as people make it out to be.

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

#673

Post by pferde »

lukan wrote: post #644
pferde wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had a serious interest in the project (more than, say, maybe sending a patch here and there to fix my pet peeve), I would definitely volunteer for something like that if there was a demand. That's something I quite enjoy, and am reasonably good at, I think. And as for me being there for years to come, who can say that for sure? I would absolutely try to. For that matter, will Discord still be here next year?

"For that matter, will Discord still be here next year?" Probably way more likely, than a random volunteer. Kling said they used discord because it was easy. No energy spend there. Migrating the communication structure is work and energy. Friction. But so far I also did not followed developement closely, because I did not set up discord yet and do not really want to. But I realize I am not in the majority here and I…

Not demanding, sorry if it came out like that. :) Just a bit of constructive criticism.

As for random volunteers disappearing, the protection against that is easy - increase the bus factor, by multiple people having necessary access, and by keeping your infrastructure documented. This should be table stakes for any project that becomes even marginally popular.

Then, if a random volunteer disappears, things might slow down due to lack of manpower, sure, but not come to a screeching halt.

You can't increase bus factor with Discord, since it's out of your control.

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

#674

Post by talldayo »

troupo wrote: post #590
talldayo wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people don’t support Safari they lose out on a large portion of users. If people don't support Safari, it's because the free market has spoken and overwhelmingly chooses alternative options: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl... The story would be different, if Apple wasn't miserly with their native APIs and App distribution. But this is indeed a harmful and competition-restricting deci…

> because the free market has spoken You mean the company dominating the internet heavily promoted and pushed users towards its own browser. > If their users preferred a more feature-filled browser Where by "feature-filled" you mean "all the Chrome-only non-standards because free market or something"

> You mean the company dominating the internet heavily promoted and pushed users towards its own browser.

If the company dominating their hardware did any better, maybe the majority of them wouldn't leave Safari. If Apple doesn't want to build a competitive browser, then they need some (non-anticompetitive) strategy to retain their users. Otherwise we're doing the Microsoft Shuffle again.

> Where by "feature-filled" you mean "all the Chrome-only non-standards because free market or something"

No, at this point I really do just mean "feature-filled". iOS has notoriously restrictive APIs and it makes full sense that those users would want a browser do do the things Apple prevents their iPhone from doing natively. At the rate Apple's heading, I wouldn't be surprised if next-gen iPhone apps were just PWAs that hook into WebGPU. Big-business has no reason to keep living under Apple's thumb, and market regulators can't justify it in Europe, Japan or even the United States.

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

#675

Post by K0SM0S »

josefresco wrote: post #202

What does Spotify gain by funding this project with $100K?

Naive guess: their shopping activity (leads, funnels, conversions/sales…) if/when in Ladybird would likely be tracked only by Shopify itself, at the exclusion of other big tech (most notably Google). This makes Shopify's dataset more valuable (differentiated by unique entries), which can be used in-house strategically to grow, or resold at a better price.

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

#676

Post by talldayo »

nwienert wrote: post #531
talldayo wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a vicious cycle of continuing dependency. Or a viscous cycle of continued development. There are definitely things that Chrome does that nobody else should copy, but there's also a lot of stuff like WebGPU and WebRTC that should be standard. Firefox doesn't drag their feet in the same way Apple does, and they certainly don't resist standardization by trying to limit what a user can do on their device. I have n…

The data doesn’t show they drag their feet though. If anything FF is behind. I genuinely enjoy Safari as a user more than Chrome. As a developer the dev tools suck. But as a user - the UI is far more minimal and nice. Every single action feels 2-3x faster, from opening and closing, tab opening or movement, etc. Battery lasts significantly longer. And I never really run into anything that doesn’t work, ever. Plus neve…

> The data doesn’t show they drag their feet though. If anything FF is behind.

Literally no? We must not be on the same page, both of the technologies I namedropped were Chrome and Firefox exclusive for a half-decade. And they're certainly not the only features Mozilla and Google agree upon; Apple deliberately gimps features that benefit PWAs so that browsers artificially cannot compete with their native apps.

> Just want to give a perspective as I feel people should update priors from 2021 “Safari is the new IE”

I'm sorry; people will keep calling Safari "the new IE" for as long as Apple carbon-copies Microsoft's Explorer strategy from the 90s. You can run from it, insist it's not true, but Apple will clutch to their ecosystem control whether it's rational or not. This is why we have to antitrust them, to stop the market from more of their irrational self-serving harms.

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

#677

Post by talldayo »

troupo wrote: post #589
Ygg2 wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, it does have some benefits. Like lower energy consumption, I hear good things about JavaScriptCore (Safari's JS engine), that said, so many of the features are missing, and one part is it encroaching on the iOS apps territory.

> so many of the features are missing, and one part is it encroaching on the iOS apps territory. Be careful when listing those features. Many of those "encroaching" are Chrome-only non-standards

And some of them, like WebGPU, are Khronos IP that Apple has no reason to object to except on an ideological and profit-maximizing basis. I wonder why Apple would deliberately avoid an API that might obsolete the requirement for games to use the App Store? Do you have any ideas?

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

#679

Post by lukan »

pferde wrote: post #673
lukan wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"For that matter, will Discord still be here next year?" Probably way more likely, than a random volunteer. Kling said they used discord because it was easy. No energy spend there. Migrating the communication structure is work and energy. Friction. But so far I also did not followed developement closely, because I did not set up discord yet and do not really want to. But I realize I am not in the majority here and I…

Not demanding, sorry if it came out like that. :) Just a bit of constructive criticism. As for random volunteers disappearing, the protection against that is easy - increase the bus factor, by multiple people having necessary access, and by keeping your infrastructure documented. This should be table stakes for any project that becomes even marginally popular. Then, if a random volunteer disappears, things might slow…

"As for random volunteers disappearing, the protection against that is easy - increase the bus factor, by multiple people having necessary access"

That is not easy. It works till the first drama and then some angry person deletes it all, or changes and takes the keys with them. So you have to really take care who to trust.

"If the project leadership does not see a value in using open infrastructure"

And I do not think he ever said that. He just said it was easier this way for the moment. Not that discord is meant to be the solution till eternity.

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

#680

Post by K0SM0S »

renewiltord wrote: post #367

It's a Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation. So that means it must have raised $500k from other people, each of which cannot have given more than $30k. That's pretty impressive. I wonder who the other sponsors were.

Really impressive indeed, but I do get the interest. I, for one, will give 1% of my yearly income now that they're on my radar. It instantly ranks among the top 3 most important open-source projects in my opinion.

In terms of SWE, it doesn't get harder than an OS in my book (and not even from scratch). So them coming from success in that space is more than enough to convince me they can deliver a world-class browser core engine.

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