Projects To Watch Out For: Ladybird Browser
Ladybird
Finally, another web engine is being developed to compete with Chromium and Firefox (Gecko), and they're also working on a browser that will use it.
Hot take: Since it's a BSD licensed browser at some point in the future, there's going to be a company that funds it brings it to mainstream with their flavor, and then will over throw chromium in time. Replace an 'evil' with another 'evil'.
All hail the cuck license, ensuring we end up back at the same place every single time.
Good intentions and all that
Isn't that the road to hell? Paved with good intentions
Yeah not a good licence at all for an independent browser. Idk if Servo MPL is a good license either. Do you know of any web browser that is GPL?
WebKit/Blink are mostly LGPL.
Definitely not what you want, but Gnome web (Epiphany) is GPLv3 according to flathub.
Its better than a BSD style license which is what I was mainly critiquing
Luckily Gecko still exists. And who knows, maybe Servo will make it one day (but the odds are stacked against both them and Ladybird anyway).
I feel you.. Fingers crossed dude. It's gonna be a bumpy ride
Servo hype
verso is the web browser, servo is the web engine
It's nice and all but usage of Swift is kind of not great.
Why is Swift bad?
Also, I noticed the project has taken donations from mostly non-foss companies. Let's hope they stand by their principles
Shopify (i.e. Shittify) being their top donor already has me looking sideways at this project. They'll invest in anything they think they can get an edge with and if something starts to happen they'll fuck it up and wallstreet-ify it as fast as possible if they can.
Their (Shopify's) guru founder Tobi made a huge NFT play that went absolutely nowhere while I still worked there. They spent a lot of time and money on it, right before they laid several thousand people off.
Welp, I haven't seen anyone learn Swift other than for Apple stuff these days. So I wonder how many can actually contribute to the code. It's also made by Apple, so yeah. It would have been more performant and secure (both of which are pretty important in a browser) if it was written in a more low level language. For example Rust.
Shoulda built it in Julia.
Sounds fun, but I wish there were more people who'd invest in making Firefox's Gecko more easy to use (stretch goal: revive Proton, which is Electron but Firefox) instead of pushing a ton of effort into inventing a new thing.
That said, this is coming from SerenityOS (specifically, the founder and basically the entire community concentrating on building its browser instead of hacking the OS, resulting in a split), so I understand that it might be a lot harder to port large codebases to a new OS instead of than starting a new one.
Edit: It's Positron, not Proton
Well we wouldn't want Proton, it would be 2000x less lightweight than electron! /s
It seems to me that Tauri is maybe a better direction to invest resources in than a direct electron-but-Firefox. Its lighter weight and better sandboxed, and can presumably be configured to run with a Gecko engine instead of a chromium-based webview. I have no idea its status, but geckoview does seem to exist.
Sounds like fun, but I wish we had a real multiplatform GUI framework that does not look like ass and does not perform like ass, so we can put the whole shameful electron era behind us.
That's never going to happen, and the reasons are twofold:
Brands want to push their own style on people, to make themselves recognizable, and to push their ideas about UX to their users (because they obviously know better than the OS/DE/compositor/whatever people).
It's easier and cheaper to build a web app, because there are so many web developers. It also usually allows you to give an "app" to people who want that, while giving a (perhaps somewhat limited) browser version to everyone else, reaching the maximum amount of users while maintaining only a single codebase and keeping everything more or less cohesive and looking the same.
It just makes too much sense... The only way to get past electron is a better electron. Or just fix electron
We've been going after this concept for decades now. That's what java swing was supposed to be, what python gtlk was supposed to be, and I'm sure there were others before that and there's been a hell of a lot since then
It's all trade-offs between flexibility, ease of use, and performance. Also between maintenance cost, portability, and existing library support
Electron is a good compromise. The execution could be better, but it's come a long way. There is no one size fits all solution, but there are some decent options that handle that compromise differently
These people started it and are doing it for fun.
Fixing few decades of technical debt is not fun and a big question would be if their code would even be considered for existing engines.
It us so much fin it already has over 1000 contributors. It got us 1k more people that understand browsers deeply. I think that's a huge win whatever happens with browser itself
You don’t have to fix technical debt to just incorporate the engine unless you’re porting it to an entirely new operating system.
As someone insecure in their masculinity I don't know if u would use ladybird. Now if it was MANbird I would.
The devs have some problematic views, mainly transphobic and misogynistic.
Is this because they used "he" instead of "they" in the build instructions? ... They changed that and acknowledged the mistake. Surely that's enough. It's the fucking build instructions. I think we can probably find it in our hearts to forgive them.
[edit] Just in case people think I'm joking. I'm not. As far as I'm aware, the critical incident that that has resulted in people calling Ladybird devs anti-trans is that they wrote 'he' instead of 'they' in the build instructions. That's what caused the original outrage. And as far as I'm aware, there have been no other incidents. But please, if there is something of substance that I'm not aware of, post about it here.
To be clear, nobody was outraged by the devs using gendered language. The outrage was because they rejected multiple PRs to correct it under the guise of it being "political".
That's literally it. People are getting angry over unsubstantiated information for 0 reason
The problem was more the fact that the devs viewed using anything other than 'he' as political, not the presence of gendered language itself. The devs themselves made a big deal about changing it. The way I see it, it's not even about trans people. How about just women? Is including women in software developent considered political? One would hope not, but here we are...
Also, the use of AI-generated images on their website.
So?
For many small project is AI/copied images or no images at all.
When you do not have money you are not hiring a 2000€/month artist to do imagery for your website. You go online to copy something or nowadays you can use AI to wrap it up. It's a tool at people's disposition like any other.
And before anyone comes talking about copyright laws... shall I present them my 10 TB hard drive of pirated media? Human culture is to be shared, not gatekeeped.
What's wrong with that?
Such accusations should really be followed by a source.
It almost like a bot is posting this sentence every time SerenityOS is mentioned.
Using "he" insted of "they" is not enough to call someone transphobic or misogynistic. It's like you become fascist and are targeting people for one different opinion. Which is not even true.
There are real problems transgender people are having, ladybird browser must be low on that priority.
There are real problems transgender people are having, ladybird browser must be low on that priority.
Are you trying to tell me that Ladybird inadvertently referring to a computer process 'he' instead of 'it' is not a high priority problem for transgender people? What could possibly be worse? :p
(But seriously though. I find it really weird that people are still upset at Ladybird about this. It makes me wonder if there's some social manipulation going on. Like, is anyone actually upset about this, or is it just an excuse to attack the devs?)
It was changed to they later, to the lead dev, in german they/them is a neopronoun, and "he" is gender neutral is those situations, i assume he thought it was the same in english
So do you have any evidence for this instead of just dropping it with no source?
Meh, that just killed my interest in the project. I was really looking forward to their first release. Now I don’t care anymore.
I dunno friend, after reading a bunch of comments here it sounds like this may not be true, please edit this to include the context or a source to the claim
Sauce?
From last time. TL;DR real weird vibes. This is a PR where you say "oops, that makes sense", click merge, and go on living your life. Not whatever this ended up being.
Don't put all all Ladybird devs in the same basket, there's currently more than 1000 contributors.
Ok, Andreas Kling said some untasteful things a few years ago when it was mostly his project, but I don't think it's fair to dismiss the whole project for this reason now.
Like what?
Genuinely interested in knowing what he’s said.
This Lemmy thread is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.
I couldnt really care less about my chefs personal view as long as the meal is ok.
You'd be comfortable eating food prepared by a Nazi? I sure as hell wouldn't.
Cool. But some other people have morals, and wouldn't wish to give a chef some money if he, for example, wanted to exterminate minority groups.
Maybe you'd turn a blind eye and say "well, I'm not in danger from him, so why should I care? I just want food." but don't be surprised when people think you're a cunt because of it.
Maybe you're unaffected so you don't give a shit. Or maybe you view gay people as scum undeserving of equal rights.
But donating money to try to reverse gay marriage is disgusting. As is donating money to a politician who said AIDS was a good thing and gay people should be cleansed of the earth by it. That's tantamount to wishing for genocide.
It's honestly tiring how many people in the tech/FOSS community just straight up don't give a shit about certain demographics, or even hate them outright, and see any inclusion of them at all as "politics".
I'm so very sorry that my view that gay people are human beings deserving of equal rights, and that we shouldn't celebrate the idea of them all dying in agony, is so unpalatable to you 🙄
Making a donation to a campaign that the majority of Californians voted for is unforgivable.
Then it's good you won't touch it. Ain't it?
Where do you guys get the energy to keep up these smear campaigns?
There was a gpl licensed browser engine someone by hobby is writing from scratch. I think theese companies supporting ladybird just do so because of license that they can proprietarify(like chromium)
I want manifest 3.2
We don't have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment.
We would like to do Windows eventually, but it's not a priority at the moment.
This is how you make “critical mass” adoption that much more difficult.
As much as I love Linux, if you are creating a program to be used by everyone and anyone, you achieve adoption inertia and public consciousness penetration by focusing on the largest platform first. And at 72% market share, that would be Windows.
I hope this initiative works. I really do. But intentionally ignoring three-quarters of the market is tantamount to breaking at least one leg before the starting gate even opens. This browser is likely to be relegated to being a highly niche and special-interest-only browser with minuscule adoption numbers, which means it will be virtually ignored by web developers and web policy makers.
Linux users tend to give much better bug reports than Windows users (if they do at all). That alone is probably a good enough reason to do Linux first. There are many more good reasons when the first goal is getting it functional and not getting as many users as possible (who will probably hate it if they're not a technically skilled user because there will be bugs).
You're making an assumption their first priority is the number of users. I would suspect that isn't true, and they're aware Windows has more users.
LadyBird is an unusable pre-alpha-quality web browser. The fact that they haven't bothered porting to Windows yet is both thoroughly unsurprising and entirely meaningless. In its current state, it wouldn't become popular either way. But I guess Linux users have this weird inferiority complex where everything must instantly be dropped to port to Windows even when it makes little sense to do so.
Ladybird was originally started as a browser for SerenityOS, a POSIX operating system. Well into the project, they decided to make it cross-platform but that still meant POSIX ( Linux and macOS ). As interest ( and sponsorships ) came in from outside SerenityOS, focus moved more and more to the browser and away from SerenityOS.
Just recently, Ladybird decided to split from SerenityOS, allow more outside code, and in fact has dropped SerenityOS as a supported OS.
The project is fairly pragmatic. I am sure they will add Windows support as the core browser engine matures.
We would like to do Windows eventually, but it’s not a priority at the moment.
intentionally ignoring
I think you just read what you wanted to read don't you think?
One salty downvote from @rekabis@lemmy.ca :P
i'd like to see a revival of webkit and an open source browser that uses it
WebKit isn't dead and is being used by GNOME Web.
I used luakit for awhile. Really fun to only use keyboard, but definitely lacking features that makes "modern" websites not suck so hard
There was a gpl licensed browser engine someone by hobby is writing from scratch. I think theese companies supporting ladybird just do so because of license that they can proprietarify(like chromium)
I agree. However, things are so bad in the browser market that even a proprietary browser could be good news if they don't become a duopoly and actually compete.
I feel like this is a dumb question but why do web engines need constant development? I thought we had an established standard for HTML. Once a web engine matches that standard isn't that sufficient?
some reasons that I can think of:
HTML used to be a pretty set standard, maintained by the W3C. HTML5 was retired in 2018 (5.2 in 2021). Now it is a Living Standard that changes often and is maintained by a consortium of browser vendors.
It is also not the only technology being changed.
Some of the new features most people aren't aware of us that I used recently :
So... sure none of that really helps to read a 2D Web page (like this one on Lemmy) but they pretty much all help to achieve better cross-platform support. By using the Web rather than native to connect to hardware then it is instantly delivered without having any OS specific driver to build and install. Practically speaking it does make the browser increasingly complex but IMHO it is worth it.
PS: I probably also used some modern CSS so there also the engine (which is ridiculously complex by the way) has to be updated too.
established standard for HTML
That is constantly changing.
Like CSS or JS, or other modern web technologies nowadays browsers are capable of.
There are features that constantly get added. It's not only HTML (maybe the html part is stable, I don't know), but there's CSS and most importantly JavaScript.
Also, browsers don't always follow the standard exactly. Some features get added that aren't in the standard.
All the code is hosted on GitHub. Clone it, build it, and join our Discord if you want to collaborate on it! We're looking forward to seeing you there.
So much for freedom when everything is done thru proprietary services under US jurisdiction.
I don't know if it's a good idea to build a new engine from scratch... Maybe it is but I don't know, behind an engine you need to have support and development, so this thing needs to be improved and supported along the versions to be safe, so I don't know if it's a good idea or not 🙃
Repost but still cool
Also I am surprised at how many sponsors there are and how many industries are represented. The project isn't that old
