this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project (awesomekling.github.io)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I found that the SerenityOS project also has a web browser with a completely new set of engines. It looks reasonably capable too.

Both LibWeb and LibJS are novel engines. I have a personal history with the Qt and WebKit projects, so there’s some inspiration from them throughout, but all the code is new. Not to mention, hundreds of people have worked on the codebase since I started it, all adding their own personal influences, so it’s definitely its own thing.

Edit: Here's a recent interview with the creator Andreas Kling talking to Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell about the browser https://www.igalia.com/chats/ladybird

Edit 2: Here’s their August 2023 update video of the browser https://youtu.be/OEsRW3UFjA0

Edit 3: Looks like the project was recently sponsored $100k USD from Shopify https://awesomekling.substack.com/p/welcoming-shopify-as-a-ladybird-sponsor

It’s quite impressive!

Note: I don't know anything about the politics of the SerenityOS project or the people behind it.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

SerenityOS and Ladybird are extremely impressive. Andreas comes across as very likeable and the community he's built seems cool.

There's a pervasive idea in the programmer community that it's impossible to make a modern web browser unless you're a top 10 tech corporation. I love that they're challenging that and showing that all it takes is a handful of volunteers with good programming chops and a bunch of elbow grease.

A worrying number of people in engineering don't seem to think software is worthwhile unless you can expect to compete for majority market share with the incumbents. If "hacker" is to be taken as a title of honour, I think it belongs to the ones who make things without expecting to take over the world.

And the project has seemingly helped Andreas stay sober, which is pretty heartwarming.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I enjoyed listening to that interview. He seems humble and the project grew from the right place of necessity and it's good that it's keeping him sober. I like how he said that building the OS is easy compared to building a web browser engine.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There’s a pervasive idea in the programmer community that it’s impossible to make a modern web browser unless you’re a top 10 tech corporation.

A worrying number of people in engineering don’t seem to think software is worthwhile unless you can expect to compete for majority market share with the incumbents. If “hacker” is to be taken as a title of honour, I think it belongs to the ones who make things without expecting to take over the world.

agreed, I wish hacker culture was more like this instead of the capitalism fan club it actually is

there’s a weird parallel between large software projects like web browser engines being considered impossible to accomplish without a gigantic corporation’s backing and the long-standing (but utterly false) belief that it’s impossible to do semiconductor manufacturing without a gigantic, expensive factory. the motivation for pushing these claims seems fairly obvious — if folks think these core pieces of tech infrastructure can’t be replicated without corporate control, they just won’t try.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I've never thought about it from this perspective. I wonder whose voices I'd find if I put on my tinfoil hat and do some digging on the impossible narrative.

Here's a thread on the orange site about the project from 5 months back with plenty of opinions™ on the matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35521704

Edit: there are many threads https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ladybird

also updated the OP with a link to the news that Shopify recently donated 100k to the project

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There's a vast difference between a page being degraded by all browsers in a consistent manner per W3C specs (especially the critical parts of a webpage such as JS execution or malformed HTML) vs the damn thing breaking in such a unique way that the web devs will never be able to fix the page for this new browser while getting it to work the same for others. Worst case would be security is compromised and that is a very long list of things to implement in both the HTTP layer and browser behavior before you even get started trying to render a page.

it’s kinda amazing how fast the comments started getting fractally wrong as the orange site scrambled to justify why it’s too mediocre to do this work (clearly it’s the fault of the work)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I couldn't read much further past that one, so much "but, actually" dick waving

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I made a vid of it loading awful.systems https://peertube.io/w/buMQfhKiYcCm18evK3n6z1

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

that’s surprisingly close to perfect already, at least to my eye! and the bug with CSS not wanting to load initially is something I’ve seen safari and Firefox do too

by the way, how was the experience of uploading this to peertube? I’ve been meaning to check them out, and I’m really surprised at how quick and smooth watching that video was on my phone

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It was easy but I only have a 5mb daily upload quota with peertube.io - not sure if that can be increased somehow. Otherwise it uploaded and transcoded all within a couple of minutes

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

huh, that’s interesting. I know bandwidth and storage costs are a big difficulty in hosting a peertube instance (and this is also a reason why an awful.systems peertube isn’t on the table, unless we somehow get frankly suspicious amounts of money for infra). I should make an account there and fiddle with it — maybe they allocate more quota to older or more popular accounts?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I found this https://peertube.io/about/instance#description

If you need a higher video quota than provided by default please email "[email protected]".

Although PeerTube.io does allow for video uploads. We often cannot support the upload size and moderation required by many video creators. A list of of other PeerTube instances is available here.

I guess there are beefier instances for the bigger uploads. I'll play around with it on the weekend and see what's out there. I created my account today to upload that video.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Dang, I remember seeing this many years ago when it was still at like 1998-browser levels of functionality, really cool to see how much progress they've made! It'd be awesome to have more non-commercial browser engines out there.

I really love the serenity os project as well honestly, glad it's not just me who likes that old style of UI (though I'm sad they seem to have dropped the classic Mac style universal menubar...)