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Let’s see how ladybird writes docs in the future. Will they assume the user is a man and shut down any corrections for being political?
As far as i know, the pronouns were fixed
…I have no idea what this is referencing. Duckduckgo?
Its a new Browser build from the ground up. I think its called ladybird.
What happened to the logo. I swear like 2 years ago it was a picture of an actual ladybird
Accelerated Firefox timeline.
That used to have a picture of an actual Phoenix and then a red panda before it got streamlined.
If ladybird keep going at this rate, everyone will be trying to cancel them by the middle of next week
The Firefox browser logo still has the red panda, you’re thinking of the Firefox family logo, for stuff like Firefox send and their VPN. The browser never got rid of the red panda since it was added.
How hard is it to do some web searches first before you announce a new name for your project?
Good interview with the Dev for anyone who is interested in more of the details from this thread, like why Swift? What’s so hard about browsers? Etc. https://youtu.be/z1Eq0xlVs3g?si=v6ATjqGWC281FVwd
It’s a monumental effort really, building a browser engine from scratch and taking it to daily driver usable is probably among the most difficult programming challenges. It’s way easier to build a new Linux kernel from scratch than a browser engine lmao
Even Microshit tried and gave up because it was so hard
Even Microshit tried and gave up because it was so hard
Not exactly. Yes a browser engine is one of the most, if not the most, complex pieces of software.
But if it was almost impossible to create a web engine then this, or KDE’s KHTML, or Servo, or NetSurf, or Kraken, or you-name-it wouldn’t exist.
Then how come (one of) the most powerful tech company in the world couldn’t make it, you ask? They already had a “functional” web engine. But what they had from the beginning was absolute shit that did not respect any web standard. And oh boy we people who fought against that shit trying to support it do know. Its baggage was immensely huge and shitty that after a while and the speed Chrome was taking over they found it was easier to yeet it altogether, and I do hope that piece of shit is burning in hell because it made our lifes so miserable.
Note that Opera did the same thing with their web engine - they gave up with it mostly because they found easier to jump in the Blink bandwagon, without realizing they were making Opera just another Chromium skin without much value, contrary to what Presto was.
Kinda what could happen if one day Microsoft decided to try make Windows to be as functional, fast and permissive as Linux.
Even Microshit tried and gave up because it was so hard
They also failed at building operative systems, so not sure they are the best example.
And also said their AI isn’t actualizing in profitbility
Can someone eli5 why that is?
Because if a website doesn’t work in your browser, but it works in everyone else’s, no one will say “oh that website’s badly written”, instead they say “what a shitty browser”.
So you have a huge web standard you have to respect, and then all the websites with non standard code you have to make work anyway.
The W3C (The body that dictates web standards) specification, that describes what browser engines should handle, like CSS features, HTML5 etc and how is equivalent to thousands of pages long and there are huge standards to implement.
HTML5 is a big thing to implement, so is CSS and the JavaScript engine and probably even more technologies I’m forgetting
And that’s just implementation, it takes even more work to get them running well enough for the average end-user
Ladybird has been working on their from scratch engine for ~5 years iirc and they’re not planning to even have the first alpha out until next year lol
it is also written from the ground up wich means it also has its own engine
explaining the difference between a Toyota and a Honda
God forbid someone on the internet has less niche knowledge about browser engines than you.
Hey it could be worse. It could be the completely and utterly worthless MIT license.
Well how is MIT more worse than BSD? Both allows prorpietary right?
The only difference is that BSD defends a bit more the owner rights. Either of them defends the software or its users.
Everyone knows links2 is the best browser.
#links2gang
You misspelled curl. The keys are right next to each other so it’s understandable.
Yess more pmv2q…x…?
Comic review closed: please don’t advertise identity politics
I’m downloading this and contributing to prove the haters wrong. Y’all are gonna regret not being able to say “I toad a so” like me.
i’m sure they will appreciate your BSD 2 Clause contributions at Microsoft HQ
Not only C++ but also Swift, which just feels strange
Why build a new browser in C++ when safer and more modern languages are available?
Ladybird started as a component of the SerenityOS hobby project, which only allows C++. The choice of language was not so much a technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain.
However, now that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect.
We have evaluated a number of alternatives, and will begin incremental adoption of Swift as a successor language, once Swift version 6 is released.
Swift is a pretty fully fledged systems language at this point … however, it’s far from tried and tested for use cases like this and cross platform support is still garbage, so still a pretty questionable choice.
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It’s not the C++ that I find strange hah
that is actually really goofy, didn’t know about that
This is such a non-issue
with mandatory male pronouns for users in the documentation.
(and no politics allowed!)
note
this issue was resolved eventually by another dev;
afaikthe lead devstopped commenting on it after heclosed a PR and said people who wanted to remove the docs’ implied assumption of users’ maleness were “advertising personal politics”.edit: ok, i went and checked, here are the details:
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https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 is the first PR he closed in 2021 saying “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”
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https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/24648 is the PR where it was eventually fixed, after it was publicized in july 2024
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here https://xcancel.com/awesomekling/status/1808294414101467564 the day after the fix was merged, he sort-of almost apologized, while also doubling-down on his defense of his decision to reject the first PR 🤡
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladybird_(web_browser) was later spun out of SerenityOS in to its own project
This whole situation was a concern for me too, but with Ladybird being spun off into its own not for profit, these kind of things are much less likely to occur again going forward. The project is a lot more focused now.
can I get some context for this, what is the reference to? I stopped caring about new browsers and now just use Firefox 🤷♀️
it’s about the ladybird browser. i edited my comment to add details.
mastoqueers
That was a good laugh! thanks for the explanation ❤️
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BSD is freer than GPL. Fight me.
BSD is freer for programmers (or frequently their corporate overlords), but not for people using the software.
That’s false. Derivative software that doesn’t use the BSD licence has no bearing on the BSD-licenced software itself. For example, Sony using FreeBSD for the PS3 operating system has zero impact on the freedom of a FreeBSD user. The GPL, on the other hand, directly infringes on the user’s freedom to fork and redistribute the software.
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That’s also false. The GPL doesn’t only restrict non-free licences, it restricts any licence change on the derivative work. If I fork a GPL project and want to redistribute my changes with a free licence such as MIT, the GPL will prevent it to protect itself. It’s an authoritarian licence that doesn’t respect your freedom.
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You’re again assuming that the GPL only restricts non-free licences. This is not the case. If I add a feature to a piece of GPL software, I can’t use BSD on my new code even though the new code isn’t derivative work. Hell, if I write a completely independent piece of software that links to GPL software, my new software has to be GPL even though not a single line of GPL code was used. All of this also applies to free licences like BSD. The GPL doesn’t protect freedom, it protects itself.
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The GPL, on the other hand, directly infringes on the user’s freedom to fork and redistribute the software.
that’s plain bullshit. under GPL, you are free to fork it and redistribute it
You’re not unless you keep the licence.
well of course. you can’t betray the will of upstream: to not feed the rich. not a big ask.
but the user, as you said, has no reason to object to that, because it protects them from parasites
This argument only works if you assume everything that isn’t the GPL is feeding the rich.
Yeah but GitHub defaults to GPL, so checkmate nerd 😎
The GitHub owned by Microsoft? That GitHub?
I won’t fight you because I agree. But a lot of people think it’s more free to have freedoms end when it comes to proprietary forks and such.
To me, that’s just one less freedom.
It is one less freedom.
Copyleft protects the freedom of the user, regardless of who is the developer, I think that is way more important if what we want is to make software for humanity rather than pragmatic business choices.
It is a point of what you regard as real freedom, do you wish to eventually lock in your users or let who might fork/take over your project do that?
Copyleft is the true path
I’m never going to be one to dog on something before I try it. If it’s good and can offer the same or better experience as Firefox then sign me up. The biggest sticking point for me, though, is potentially losing Firefox’s massive add-in library. I really like my uBlock Origin and Restore YouTube Dislike and my VPN extension and Metamask and all the other crap I’ve got there.
you can try it now if you want and it does work surprisingly well, but their timeline is still “alpha in 2026”
Yes. Good filters and privacy/security are an absolutely vital requirement today. Unbreaking things and adding features via extensions or something are also good.
.
I think I could get by with Bitwarden/uBlock as a minimum. Addons like enhancer for youtube are super nice though.
BSD license is the only thing that annoys me. Chrome not by google.
As long as we’re filling out our fantasy browser brackets, I’m hoping that the Servo engine and browser/s can become viable. Servo was started at Mozilla as a web rendering engine only, before they laid off the whole team and the Linux Foundation took over the project. Basically revived from the dead in 2023, the current project is working on an engine and a demonstration browser that uses it. It’s years away from being a usable replacement for current browsers and the engine is certainly the main project. A separate browser which employs Servo as its engine is a more likely future than an actual Servo browser.
Still, you can download a demo build of the official browser from the web site. Currently, it’s only usable for very simple web sites. Even Lemmy/Mbin display is a little broken, and I think of those as fairly basic. YouTube is out of the question. One of the sites that’s been used to demonstrate its capability to render web pages is the web site for Space Jam (1996) if that gives you any idea of its current state.
Honest question, since I have no clue about web/browser engines other than being able to maybe name 4-5 of them (Ladybird, Servo, Webkit, Gecko, … shit, what was Chromium’s called again?):
What makes browsers/browser engines so difficult that they need millions upon millions of LOC?
Naively thinking, it’s “just” XML + CSS + JS, right? (Edit: and then the networking stack/hyperlinks)
So what am I missing? (Since I’m obviously either forgetting something and/or underestimating how difficult engines for the aforementioned three are to build…)
JavaScript alone is not a simple beast. It needs to be optimized to deal with modern JavaScript web apps so it needs JIT, it also needs sandboxing, and all of the standard web APIs it has to implement. All of this also needs to be robust. Browsers ingest the majority of what people see on the Internet and they have to handle every single edge case gracefully. Robust software is actually incredibly difficult and good error handling often adds a lot more code complexity. Security in a browser is also not easy, you’re parsing a bunch of different untrusted HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You’re also executing untrusted code.
Then there is the monster that is CSS and layout. I can’t imagine being the people that have to write code dealing with that it’d drive me crazy.
Then there are all of the image formats, HTML5 canvases, videos, PDFs, etc. These all have to be parsed safely and displayed correctly as well.
There is also the entire HTTP spec that I didn’t even think to bring up. Yikes is that a monster too, you have to support all versions. Then there is all of that networking state and TLS + PKI.
There is likely so much that I’m still leaving out, like how all of this will also be cross platform and sometimes even cross architecture.
Thanks for these explanations, that makes a lot more sense now. I didn’t even think to consider browsers might be using something else than an off-the-shelf implementation for image/other file formats…, lol
Sorry I didn’t mean to imply they don’t use shared libs, they definitely do, but they have to integrate them into the larger system still and put consistent interfaces over them.
Yeah I realize that. My go-to comparison would be PDF. Where Firefox has PDF.js (I think?), Chromium just… implements basically seemingly the entire (exhaustive!) standard.
Adding on to this, while this article is fast approaching 20 years old, it gets into the quagmire that is web standards and how ~10 (now ~30) years of untrained amateurs (and/or professionals) doing their own interpretations of what the web standards mean–plus another decade or so before that in which there were no standards–has led to a situation of browsers needing to gracefully handle millions of contradictory instructions coming from different authors’ web sites.
Here’s a bonus: the W3C standards page. Try scrolling down it.
What makes implementation so difficult is that browsers cannot just “work”, they need to be correct in what they do. And support all websites.
The standards of HTML, CSS and JS have developed over a long time, not only is the amount of stuff massive, over time sometimes strange features where implemented, that were then used by website developers, and now these all need to be handled correctly by all new browsers.
Emulating and reimplementing existing stuff is often more difficult, especially if you cannot leave out any feature, no matter how obscure, because that might break someone’s website.
Well… according to ladybird, at this point they are more conformant than servo in web standards…
does the ability to view websites other than Space Jam '96 really improve your life?
I will give you that
I won’t give you that. Ladybird is already quite a bit more capable than that. The JavaScript engine is not nearly fast enough but more and more real websites just work.
Servo is still making quick progress though.
Is it that difficult to implement a CopyLeft licence ? Well we do have Servo (A modular browser engine) in development & SeaMonkey is a thing too (Which is an entire internet-application suite)
