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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

#691

Post by nottorp »

talldayo wrote: post #510
fouc wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that when Chrome came out it was heavily marketed/targeted towards developers. Developers took it up and then built websites in & for Chrome. The end result is many websites work better in Chrome than Firefox or Safari. It's a vicious cycle of continuing dependency. I'm doing my part to break the cycle by supporting the underdog by using Safari as my daily driver & developing primarily for Safari & Fir…

> 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…

> WebRTC that should be standard

What is WebRTC good for? I've never understood. It probably has some use for in-browser video chats, but other than that?

I'm asking because at some point the Chrome you are praising prevented my Mac from sleeping for like half a year or more because 'webrtc has active peer connections'. I had no conferences open in the browser, just - i thought - regular web pages.

So what can you do with WebRTC behind the user's back then, and why is it moral to do it?

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

#692

Post by nottorp »

ForHackernews wrote: post #417
dataflow wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind elaborating? How did KDE's use of GPL prevent Chromium from being closed-source? What about Google Chrome?

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.

Note that it began its life at Apple, not Google. They forked KHTML first as far as i know.

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

#693

Post by nottorp »

dataflow wrote: post #112
awesomekling wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks F3nd0! There are currently no plans to switch to a less permissive license. And we're perfectly happy using proprietary services like GitHub and Discord as long as they make our work easier and more enjoyable. We recently evaluated a number of alternatives, and found that they all introduced more friction than we were comfortable with. Although the task of building a browser is itself challenging, we're a prag…

> There are currently no plans to switch to a less permissive license. Hey, just a reality check: in the event that you actually do become wildly successful, this means that others (Google, Microsoft, etc.) will be able to fork the browser and then develop it faster than you - thus leaving you behind and taking away your users ! Would highly recommend leaving yourself some mechanism to prevent that, unless you're rea…

> will be able to fork the browser and then develop it faster than you - thus leaving you behind and taking away your users

So, that fetish for infinite growth... can we get rid of it?

Firefox keeps trying to grow in various directions and look where it's taking them.

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

#695

Post by immibis »

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.

Right, pack it up. You all heard the guy with the random username. Corporations have the power to make things convenient so I guess we should just give up and allow ubiquitous corporate control.

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

#696

Post by Crosseye_Jack »

guhcampos wrote: post #694

Please don't post content from `locals.com`. For one, it's not accessible in many countries such as Brazil.

Brazil's government blocked locals because locals wouldn't remove people from the platform. You could try accessing it via any one of the numerous archive sites such as https://archive.ph/sroUT

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

#697

Post by demosthanos »

dxxvi wrote: post #455
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 :)

What can you do with $1M? Writing a web browser is difficult, so the salary for 1 developer is about $300k/year. Then you can have 3 developers. Can 3 developers create a web browser in a year? I don't think so. If those 3 developers can do that, then they'll ask for more than $400k/yr/person. That means, IMO, this project will go nowhere. However, any project that can create jobs is good, in fact very good.

I know that many on HN can't imagine it, but a lot of us work for less than that for any number of reasons:

* We're already making a top 5% income for our area and have more than enough for our needs and even an early retirement.

* We get non-monetary benefits from our job like WFH and/or flexible scheduling.

* We're working on projects that excite us and make us happy to go to work and that matters more than total comp.

Money aside, I'd rather see Ladybird hire 6 developers who are seriously passionate and live all across the world than see them hire 6 Bay Area developers who think they're better because they ask for more comp. That the passionate and global developers are cheaper is just a nice bonus.

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

#698

Post by ArtixFox »

llama_drama wrote: post #647
ArtixFox wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that matter??

Check out this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40862781 . While it's certainly possible to write the same parallel algorithm in C++, it wasn't done in Firefox before Rust, nor has it been done in Chrome.

thats nice! in my first comment I did say that both are good for performance. I just find the idea of performance being irrelevant to be...ridiculous.

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

#699

Post by pferde »

lukan wrote: post #679
pferde wrote: post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thin…

Sure, nightmare scenarios can happen, but how often do they, really? There are many successful FOSS projects who have teams of volunteers taking care of infrastructure in this way for years, if not decades, and how many bad situations have we had overall?

Simply put, this approach is proven to work. We can always "butwhatif?" ourselves into a corner and get paralyzed because of that, but it's senseless.

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

#700

Post by kumarsw »

shortrounddev2 wrote: post #668
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?

The browser is good, but Mozilla has been consistently losing market share despite being well-funded. There is considerable debate as to what specific mistakes were made, but the foundation spent a lot of money on side projects that did not benefit the browser such as Servo, Rust and FireFox OS. Likely market share could have been improved had this been spent on marketing or engineering work that directly benefited the browser.
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