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The Ladybird browser project

ladybird.dev

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Re: The Ladybird browser project

#81

Post by mrd3v0 »

martypitt wrote: post #52
jraph wrote: post #40

I have hopes it will become a daily usable browser. A new Web engine is great. I hope Servo succeeds at this too. I would consider contributing but development is coordinated on Discord and I avoid proprietary software… [1]. It's a shame. Can't blame them though, they are doing it for fun. [1] https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infras...

Wow - that article was a tough read. I like a LOT of what Drew has to say, but this seems over the top. He claims that authors promoting their open source software on channels like Twitter, Hacker news, LinkedIn or even Github is "selfish and unethical outright": > Many projects choose to prioritize access to the established audience that large commercial platforms provide, in order to maximize their odds of becoming…

Promoting free software through unfree software IS selfish and hurtful to society.

Just because you don't necessarily have a solid counterargument to his convictions, doesn't make anything he said "over the top." That's just a disingenuous dismissive attitude towards what is clearly a post on his personal website that builds on established and clearly communicated values (freedom of software.)

There's absolutely nothing in that article that criticises making and sharing free software. It is clearly criticising using a certain type of medium to share free software. If that's zealotry, then any argument against doing anything is, too.

I wager that this hostility felt by these views are projections of guilt, devoid of criticisms towards said views or values. In fact, I'd argue that having no opposition towards a certain ethos then opposing it for frivolous reasons such as personal offence out of a public blog post is as close to hypocrisy as one can get.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#82

Post by fersarr »

gkbrk wrote: post #49
kouru225 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t tell from the link. What makes it so viable?

Compared to a lot of other new browser engines, this one actually renders a lot of web content decently. And if you follow their update videos, they improve their coverage really quickly. Ladybird also comes with their LibJS runtime, which has good coverage of the JS standards and even manages to implement some new features before the big browsers all get to it.

Sorry, could you explain what this means "this one actually renders a lot of web content decently."?

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#83

Post by gsich »

From the FAQ:

" Q: Why bother? You can’t make a new browser engine without billions of dollars and hundreds of staff.

Sure you can. Don’t listen to armchair defeatists who never worked on a browser. "

Nice take.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#84

Post by timeon »

kramerger wrote: post #15

I would love to use this as my daily driver, but a lot of popular sites don't even work with Firefox. I hate what a small group of lazy front-end people have done to our world...

Interesting. I use Safari for most sites and when there is rare case that site does not work I open Firefox and it just works.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#86

Post by martypitt »

jraph wrote: post #71
dash2 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, that feels like living in an imperfect world and trying to make it better. To improve something, you generally need to be part of it and its imperfections. Right, but that's the hypocrisy, no? He's being rude about people who use github, or post an article on HN, but surely most of those guys are doing just the above. When is it OK to use non-free software and when not? Maybe there's a dividing line you can dra…

Are you talking about Drew or "those guys", whoever they are? Let's focus on Drew. I've not seen him mention HN, which by the way doesn't require running non-free software, and he literally runs a free software competitor to GitHub. I've not seen him be rude to people using GitHub. He certainly strongly criticizes them. I assume he uses GitHub to communicate with projects hosted there. If he does, I don't think he co…

I'm struggling to see the distinction here.

Sure, Podcast ≠ Spotify, just as Git ≠ Github. But people choose to distribute their code on Github for exactly the same reason the people choose to distribute their podcasts on Spotify - reach.

That exact reach is what Drew argues so articulately against - in fact he expressly calls out marketing on Twitter and Facebook as a "mistake", and damaging against the FOSS community. He goes on to encourage people to prefer open infrastructure with lesser reach, even if that comes at the expense of effectiveness:

> Such projects would prefer to exacerbate the network effects problem rather than risk some of its social capital on a less popular platform. To me, this is selfish and unethical outright.

It's hard to see how that same argument doesn't extend to promoting your software on podcasts which are primarily distributed via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, etc.

On the topic of Activism, I think I'd agree with you, if he was on Spotify podcasts promoting other "Free" podcast platforms.

But he's not - he's promoting a programming language.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#87

Post by autoexec »

jug wrote: post #47

It's been so inspiring to see him and his crew of hackers build a new, independent browser from scratch. I must admit I didn't think it was possible on this small scale in terms of man hours and funding. However, the thought has also crossed my mind if we're finally seeing fruits of browsers being better standardized on "95%"+ of the popular features -- and if writing a browser today is in fact easier than both writi…

> if we're finally seeing fruits of browsers being better standardized on "95%"+ of the popular features -- and if writing a browser today is in fact easier than both writing AND maintaining a browser a decade back.

A decade back, maybe... but decades ago the number of things you had to support was just so much smaller even if you only looked at HTML! Consider https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1866.txt vs https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/

Writing a web browser was hard in the old days for a lot of reasons, but trying to write a full-featured one today is a huge undertaking and we're still adding a bunch of new features all the time and expecting browsers to support them

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#88

Post by benrutter »

the_third_wave wrote: post #35
la_oveja wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

small group of lazy front-end people? i think you actually mean a small group of chrome developers single-handedly deciding how web should work, while having the vast majority of the market share to push those decisions.

Well, no, that is not how it works. Blink undoubtedly has an oversize influence on 'web standards' (which are more and more defined as 'whatever Blink does') but that would not be that much of a problem if web developers built and tested their sites against more than just Chrome and Edge (Blink) and Safari (Webkit). History is repeating itself since the same thing happened when Microsoft's Internet Explo[rd]er was th…

I'm not particularly experienced with web browsers, but whenever I hear people who know what they're talking about, I always leave convinced that this is exactly the problem.

If there are sites that work on Chrome but not Firefox, it just seems to me that either:

- Chrome or Firefox must be breaking web standards

- Web standards must be unspecified for that use case

I have no idea the fix though, the web is so massively complex now, that I don't even know what specifying standards for every use case would involve.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#89

Post by LeFantome »

jll29 wrote: post #68
stephen_g wrote: post #19

It's really quite incredible that one guy basically started a project to create a whole operating system from scratch for fun and to give himself something interesting to do, and then accidentally created one of the most viable new browser engines in a decade or two... I've been watching the development videos for a year or two, and the speed that this has progressed in such a short time is unbelievable. Now they hav…

He is a world expert on Web rendering, and an extremely capable C++ developer. One of their success recipes is to code up the various specifications directly, which is - today - the best way to go about this. They are also heavily test-driven. He did not even use the C++ standard library, when he says "from scratch" it includes his own string class, for better or worse, which is fine since it's "just for fun", "to le…

I think their C++ library is one of the reasons they can create capable software so quickly actually. They have jetisoned just a tonne of C++ nonesense and added some really nice modern features such as how they handle memory and errors.

Also, you would think that having to implement EVERYTHING themselves ( they are making their own image decoders as an example -- inclding SVG ) would slow them down. However, as it is written in a mono-repo from soup to nuts, this allows them to very rapidly add support throughout the stack. They do not have any of the endless conversation and arguing that happens between components in Open Source. They do not have to work around things missing upstream. If they need something, they add it.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#90

Post by norman784 »

aljgz wrote: post #51
jraph wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but a lot of popular sites don't even work with Firefox Which ones? I have always exclusively used Firefox and rarely have issues.

Count me in as well. I only use Google Chrome for Google meet calls, as some feature are not working on Firefox (I'm sure this has nothing to do with the fact that Google makes both chrome and meet ;)

Meet also does not work properly in Safari, each time I have a meet call I need to use Chrome, so Google might using non web standards.
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