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that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect.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.
c++ is adding memory safety features… it’s still modern and frequently updated
It’s not the C++ that I find strange hah
deleted by creator
that is actually really goofy, didn’t know about that
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.
Everyone knows links2 is the best browser.
#links2gang
Comic review closed: please don’t advertise identity politics
Yess more pmv2q…x…?
You misspelled curl. The keys are right next to each other so it’s understandable.
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.
Well… according to ladybird, at this point they are more conformant than servo in web standards…
Servo is still making quick progress though.
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.
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.
…I have no idea what this is referencing. Duckduckgo?
Its a new Browser build from the ground up. I think its called ladybird.
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
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
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.
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
What is the problem with a BSD-license? I’m not familiar with the different open source licensing models and their problems.
Basically, it allows you to steal all the code and use it in your closed-source programs, giving a green light for corporations to use open-source code without giving anything back.
GPL doesn’t allow that, forcing you to open-source anything that was produced using other GPL-licensed code. That’s, for example, why so much of Linux software is open-source - it commonly relies on various dependencies that are GPL-licensed, so there is no other legal option other than sharing the code as well.
It’s not “stealing”. It’s explicitly allowed. Using IP according to its licence is the opposite of stealing.
Unrelated to this exact discussion, but like, the law does not dictate morality nor the other way around. If I believe that using someone’s hard work to make a profit without paying them or contributing some work of your own is morally wrong, I can reasonably say it’s ‘stealing’. Even if the person who did the work fully understands that the license under which the work was released makes it not actually stealing.
I am judging someone as a thief, not legally but morally.
I never stated what was or wasn’t moral; I stated what was legal, and stealing is a legalistic term. How can you enforce property ownership, intellectual or material, without law, and legal rights to property?
For the record, I want the abolition of property and of law. I do not believe stealing to be wrong. “Stealing” can only be a legal category if you believe it to be morally neutral.
That definition also makes no sense. If I gift you a laptop I worked hard to afford and you use it, no sane person would call that stealing, even to those to whom stealing is a moral category. That is the same thing as someone using MIT code according to the licence. The original coder gifted the code to the public and said “I explicitly want you to use this however you like, under the sole condition that you credit me.” Just like if I gifted you a laptop I’d be saying “I want you to use this laptop however you like.”
Ok, then call it “plagiarising”.
That is definitionally not plagiarising. It follows IP law, which is the opposite of plagiarism.
There’s more than a legal definition of plagiarism.
Plagiarism is when you sell the work of others as your own without attribution. There are bucketloads of examples of legal plagiarism.
I’m pretty sure that everything H. Bomberguy discussed in his plagiarism video was legal, for example.
No, actually, plagiarism is a legalistic term. If IP law did not exist, neither would plagiarism.
And if you give someone permission to use your IP, and they go ahead and use that permission, it is not plagiarism neither legally nor by any colloquial understanding of the term. That is what happens when someone uses BSD or MIT code in their proprietary software. It is explicitly allowed, by design, by intention.
without attribution
BSD/MIT also don’t allow you to not attribute the author of the BSD/MIT code, so that doesn’t even make sense. You are perhaps thinking of code released public domain, in which case, again, the author specifically chose that over BSD/MIT, and the main practical difference is not needing to give attribution, so that must be what the original author wanted.
I think your legalistic view of the world is quite limiting.
It’s not illegal to rephrase what someone wrote in a book and pass it off as your own work. You can’t “own” a cultural analysis. It’s still plagiarism.
It’s not really an issue for the end user. But it’s basically made for companies to take advantage of free hobbyist developers without needing to give anything back in return.
So if you’re the kind of person who runs to foss software to get away from corporate tech bull, having a license that benefits companies more than users just kinda feels scummy.
It’s not a viral copyleft license, so you’re free to use the source code without giving anything back.
This has pros and cons over something like GPL, but people like to circlejerk GPL and pretend it’s always the best option 100% of the time.
For situations where you have to sign an NDA and are unable to release source code (eg; console game dev), MIT and BSD licensed projects are a godsend.MIT/BSD also makes the most sense for small/minimal projects where GPL is likely overkill. A 100 line script does not need to be GPL’ed. A small static website does not need to be GPL’ed.
Apple, Sony, N*****do, Netflix all use BSD but they don’t contribute any code to the BSD project itself, because of the BSD allow other people/company to close source their code when using with BSD
TBH, considering those corporations, most of that would be DRM stuff, and they can’t let that leak in any format. Others are drivers.
Sony actually does contribute. https://christitus.com/sony-playstation-and-freebsd/
Remember the Minix operating system that runs on your processors ? It’s a proprietary spyware now because of BSD licencing
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
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
Should’ve written it in python, smh
This is such a non-issue
removed by mod
Dammit, again? What did this developer do…
I’ve only tangentially picked up things about this but this is an example for it
(For some context, if you didn’t already know this, Ladybird originated from a SerenityOS component and the first reply is from the lead dev)
mastoqueerz
Wow 😳
was that nukeop? that Guy is a known asshole. He was also quoted Saying licenses don’t matter and threw a huge fucking hissy fit when someone forked his project and gave it a copyleft license because of making such a stupid statement. Unfortunately the website archiving the drama is down, and I could only find an archive if the first iteration of it (it had at least 2 more paragraphs after this) https://archive.is/UT9Xe
Oh… That’s… Disappointing. Firefox it is, then, for now.
It’s weird… It makes “business” sense, too. If you want people to use your stuff and you can choose to appeal to more people, why wouldn’t you? I think we’ve reached the stage of normalcy now where using “they” and “them” are not in itself something that would necessarily scare away right-wing users (given you want to keep appealing to that attractive market, too.)
Well, in that case, I hope it gets forked into a super gay version in the future lol
At least there’s other projects too…
This is the way 🌈
_They_dybird
Is he the one constantly spewing hateful shit in the Issues on GitHub whenever people ask him to not use only “he” and “him” in the docs?
Yeah that was the thing that alerted me.
That dev definitely doesn’t seem like the best human around, but this is all around terrible to me. Calling the project “dehumanizing” and “vile” because of this is ridiculous. Are people really willing to have their browsing tracked and sold rather than using a browser that has an assumed gender in the documentation? Not saying that they shouldn’t use gender neutral language, but as the original issue said, it’s a minor nitpick, let’s be honest. It’s also something that’s representative of one dev as a person, not of the project as a browser. Additionally, it could be something as simple as the dev coming from a gendered language, where the word “user” itself is masculine, and doesn’t see it the same way as English speakers asking for neutral language.
Can you elaborate ?
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.
BSD license is the only thing that annoys me. Chrome not by google.
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.
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)
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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