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The Ladybird browser project

ladybird.dev

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Re: The Ladybird browser project

#91

Post by jraph »

mrd3v0 wrote: post #81
martypitt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 noth…

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

Well, it's a tough call. I agree that communicating trough them strengthens them because of the network effect. But if you never reach "unaware" people with your ideas where they are (on those platforms, that is), you are not really helping either.

So it's not clear using those platforms only hurts. It could be a net win, all effects taken in account.

In any case, I agree that you should not force people to use these platforms to follow you.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#92

Post by marginalia_nu »

codemusings wrote: post #80

Love Andreas Kling and the Serentiy OS project. Hate that he's only on Twitter. Mastodon seems like the perfect fit for his audience.

I dunno, he's pretty committed to his positive utlook on things. Mastodon seems to be the far angrier place in comparison to Twitter. Twitter used to be a lot more like that, but it seems like most of the angriest people on twitter moved ot mastodon when Elon took over.

It's (IMO) very pronounced and hard to avoid on Mastodon.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#93

Post by webprofusion »

Great to see some competition still alive in browser engine development. See also Servo (previously part of Mozilla) https://servo.org/ - that and Ladybird are still very underdeveloped compared to every day browsers.

It's a huge shame that there are no nightly builds of ladybird to try out but I assume that's because they just don't want the bug reports (if everything doesn't work it's pointless getting random bugs filed).

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#94

Post by TheCoreh »

fersarr wrote: post #82
gkbrk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."?

When you open sites on other "new" browser engines you typically get a really butchered visual result, with layouts completely broken, elements missing, wrong colors, etc. For example, Servo didn't support floats until recently, and IIRC even simple sites like Hacker News look "wrong".

Ladybird's approach has been to start with a somewhat naive implementation of features, then choose popular websites and apps and just continuously iterate to make them gradually look better, by fixing the parts that stand out. This pragmatic approach means that their supported feature set, while nowhere near 100%, can decently render 90% of websites due to being aligned with the most commonly used features.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#95

Post by marginalia_nu »

webprofusion wrote: post #93

Great to see some competition still alive in browser engine development. See also Servo (previously part of Mozilla) https://servo.org/ - that and Ladybird are still very underdeveloped compared to every day browsers. It's a huge shame that there are no nightly builds of ladybird to try out but I assume that's because they just don't want the bug reports (if everything doesn't work it's pointless getting random bugs…

Last I tried Ladybird didn't take very long to build. This was admittedly sometime last year and it's likely slower now, but still. It's very far from a 9 hour chromium build.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#96

Post by jillesvangurp »

rjh29 wrote: post #65
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 writing a browser today is in fact easier than both writing AND maintaining a browser a decade back. Probably not. Yeah we have web standards and some idea of how to architect it, but the total set of APIs and HTML/CSS features a browser supports is probably changing faster than the Ladybird team can actively implement it. The API surface is just impossibly large compared to 10 or 15 years ago. Look at all of th…

It's a lot of work but most of it is very doable for several reasons:

- standards are really detailed at this point and a large reason why the three remaining browser engines (chromium, safari, and firefox) largely do exactly the same things.

- There are a lot of open source components. It's not necessary to start from scratch on things like wasm and javascript interpreters for example. There are some nice low level graphics libraries out there as well. And of course things like Rust are now pretty mature and there's a lot of rust code out there that does stuff that a browser would need.

That being said, it's one hell of a hobby project to take on and I don't see much economical value in an independent implementation of something provided by free by three independent browsers already; two of which are open source.

Which begs the question: why?!? Is there qualitative argument here of doing the exact same thing but somehow better?

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#97

Post by jefozabuss »

rjh29 wrote: post #65
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 writing a browser today is in fact easier than both writing AND maintaining a browser a decade back. Probably not. Yeah we have web standards and some idea of how to architect it, but the total set of APIs and HTML/CSS features a browser supports is probably changing faster than the Ladybird team can actively implement it. The API surface is just impossibly large compared to 10 or 15 years ago. Look at all of th…

Not to mention the number of possible vulnerabilities that will be needed to be pentested and fixed.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#98

Post by harha_ »

szehe wrote: post #10

i love these progress screenshots: https://serenityos.org/happy/1st/

Looking at the timestamps, the pace of progress just him working alone in the beginning is nothing short of amazing. He seems to be a true jack of all trades when it comes to programming.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#99

Post by jraph »

martypitt wrote: post #86
jraph wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 communi…

I'll grant this to you.

My opinion is that he didn't explicitly ask for the podcasts to be on Spotify or Apple. That Spotify and Apple Podcast are the main way of consuming podcasts is not of his making. And maybe he requests podcasts not to be hosted on those platforms. Maybe not.

But I can see how you may find that there can be some contradiction here.

To me this would be a "you still need to be part of this imperfect world" thing, or a "imperfect activism" thing, but I would totally understand someone disagree with this / find that it's not coherent.

Re: The Ladybird browser project

#100

Post by AndyKelley »

Is it just for fun or not? I think it's important to face this question, because users should not trust a just-for-fun browser with their security, and we should not look to Ladybird as a meaningful contribution towards competition in the browser space if it's just for fun.

If it's just for fun, we need to temper our expectations accordingly.

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