GitHub - LadybirdBrowser/ladybird: Truly independent web browser

Once Servo is finished, we might have a browser rennaisance (I hope)
- That would be nice. I know lately I've been playing around with gopher sites with command line browsers. It's been fun seeing what others have made.

Just installed it on void. Still not quite usable for daily use but it's not bad.

Join our Discord server
crying in decentralization efforts
- Hell, even worse, crying in the lost information. Discord is a black hole where community knowledge goes to die.
  It's the worst.
  
  I hate it so much, even when I NEED to go there for help and support, I know I'm likely the tenth person to ask the same question. I honestly don't know why so many people love this way of support, just document it!
- The Discord-based "support" makes it a "meh." The main devs alt-right BS makes it a "hard pass."
  
  Lemmy was created by a tankie, many of whose opinions I abhor.
  As long as it's FOSS and doesn't inherently promote their beliefs, I will use the software.
  I agree it's not great and I'd prefer if it weren't made by imbeciles
  
  Is there any source for this?
  
  Alt right bs?
- Why always discord.... Why!!!!
  
  because a turn key platform they don’t have to self host and maintain frees them up to do the work.
- Oh shit. I despise Discord, why not a normal forum?!
- What's the worst - Discord doesn't seem to provide any particular convenience over Mumble for voice calls while playing games or anything else. Just being in one app in one place is its advantage.
  It's like Telegram, just better quality, worse optimization, more moderation.
- I’m with you. I install Legcord now so that I don’t have to install that shitty application on my actual computer. I highly recommend it for those communities that refuse to use anything else!
  
  You don't have to install anything. It's a website. I don't understand why people install the app (or any app that is a website in a wrapper).
  
  I use it in a browser tab because I refuse to have them snoop around on my running processes.

The main issue I have right now: the jurisdiction of this is in the US, and to be honest, I don’t trust the US that much when it comes to privacy laws regarding the (near) future.
- the EU wants backdoors to encryptions, so eu not any better.
  
  It certainly is the lesser evil though.
- what r they gonna do if it's open source and doesn't collect data. worry more about ur OS
  
  I'm pretty sure my Debian doesn't collect personal data either
  
  I’m not naive enough anymore for this kind of trust.
  
  Ask Mozilla

I donate to Ladybird and Servo, and I hope they succeed. We need serious competition and a check on Mozilla (not to mention Chrome and Safari).
That said, I'm sad that neither Ladybird or Servo are licensed under strong copyleft licenses. We need user-oriented browsers now more than ever, and strong copyleft enables that. I worry that, even if these engines are successful, they will be co-opted by proprietary browsers and eventually superseded by them.
This happened before - both Chrome and Safari ultimately derive from KHTML, Konqueror's browser engine. If KHTML had been licnesed under the GPL instead of the LGPL, Chrome and Safari (and not just their engines) may have been free software today. Or, at the very least, it would have been much more difficult for Apple and Google to get started.
That said, I wish Ladybird the best. There donation = no influence policy is excellent, and I really, really hope they can stick to it in the long term.
- No.
  If khtml had been GPL, it simply never would have been used for chrome or safari, some other engine would have been picked.
  Anything but real open source for these types of companies
  
  To be fair, kubernetes comes from Google.
- How does one have a donation = no influence policy?
  Huge companies donate to make open apps like this reliant on them. Then they threaten to pull the donation if that doesn't happen...
  Strong Copyleft licenses protect from this by allowing others to fork and keep an app going without being taken advantage of.
  If Google donates 1 billion dollars tomorrow, and over several months, Ladybird will expand to use that money. Then Google can threaten to stop the donations unless LB does something like "make ad blockers worse"
  It's a web browser. The only money they will make is from donations. Unless they do something wonky with their business model, like charge. Then no one will use it anyway.
  
  Frankly at this point I'd be willing to contribute to a strongly copyleft, privacy focused browser even if it meant yet another fucking 'subscription'
- in my mind it's kinda the point of Ladybird to have a permissively licensed implementation of web standards, I like permissive licenses if only because they reduce legal risks
  
  I prefer permissive licenses but how do they reduce legal risks?
- That would not have changed much, since browser engines are million-manhours projects and a small group of devs doing that voluntary, just isn't enough.
- Isn't servo mostly a Mozilla-led project? I thought servo would probably just replace gecko as the engine firefox used if it ends up succeeding
  
  Iirc it started its life that way but Mozilla abandoned it and the community picked it up
  
  Servo is developed by Igalia at this point. Mozilla is not involved.

To go along with the alt right stuff, one of their major donors is Shopify.
- So what?
  
  Shopify willingly hosted and sold Kanye's swastika shirt.

Good, the world is in dire need of competition in this arena.

Transphobic main dev ruined the project for me
- Looks like a confused Swedish dude that when questioned about his use of English pronouns defaults to not wanting to get political. Is there more besides a misguided decision to avoid relevant political topics?
  I think we should chastise people that insist on not getting political, but not necessarily boycott everything they do. Or at least we should apply the same moral demands to Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft or Google when choosing which browsers to support. Which of them is the least bad?
  
  There is nothing political about acknowledging peoples' existence.
- ugh transphobia rots people's brains
  it's not too hard to just be a decent person ppl
  
  Sure, but there's no transphobia here. Stop spreading nonsense.
- Again this shit. This have been debunked many times, yet people still write this nonsense.
- I see zero reason to out the "transphobic" label on the dev.
  Think and read before labelling people.
  
  Calling pronouns political is a straight up dog whistle
- I can't see anything about this on DuckDuckGo. Do you have a link?
  
  https://mkultra.monster/tech/2024/07/03/serenityos-and-ladybird
  This was a little „write-up“ back when everything became more public.
  
  It was a niche story, I’ll have to dig through the GitHub issues. Basically someone tried to change the documentation pronouns to be gender neutral rather than masculine and the lead dev had a freak out and refused. Really soured me on the project
  
  “Don’t Be Evil” happily indexing while Bingcrosoft sleeps
- Totally excessive in view of the facts.
  There are so few alternative browsers and the collapse of the privacy is so global. That seems to me a minor point in relation to the goal.
- Transphobic main dev […]
  Do you have a source?
- Under that POV stop using Volkswagen because Hitler invented it.
  
  11 day old pro transphobia account, hmm
- Don't be a dick. The dev is not transphobic, and you know it.
- Here we fucking go again.
- I didn't know anything about this, but it doesn't sound as bad with context.
  edit: Removed link to a site which shouldn’t be receiving more traffic. I should have vetted it more thoroughly.
  
  What is this blog, it reads like a right wing child’s ramblings
  
  That blog post is pretty ridiculous, IMO.
  You'll see the alt-right do that a lot, for some reason.
  There's real criticism, but they always mix it in with some made-up complaints like the slavery thing, which is some of the most obvious sarcasm I have ever seen on the internet, but somehow taken literally by the author of the post.
  IDK if he's a transphobe or whatnot, but his reaction to the change in language was indicative of, at the very least---with the most charitable of interpretations---, a disregard for inclusive language and, more realistically, some philosophy that doesn't allow for "others" to participate because the existence of those that aren't male is "political," somehow.
  You might not see it, because you haven't seen it enough times to recognize it, but it happens again and again and again... But it's always quiet.
  "Don't make this political," "ideology isn't welcome," stuff like that. Statements that sound reasonable, but are only wielded to quiet those aiming for inclusiveness and acceptance of marginalized people.
  It might sound like a less-than-generous interpretation, a bit callous and over-zealous, but it's just patterns. I hear wolf, I say wolf.
  Also, I thought that article had a really funny passage:
  One activist ("cafkafk") seen below, within the GitHub repository for the developer being attacked, celebrating the fact that other activists -- organized on "The Fediverse" -- had arrived to harass the Ladybird developer.
  This alone made me think that it might be satire, but I don't think it is... The Fediverse, huh? OK.
  
  Lunduke is an alt-right shithead.

Alright, read up on it a bit more. Sadly the language choices (C++ now, maybe Swift later) rubs me the wrong way for something that needs to be incredibly secure against attacks. I really really support additional browser engines, but likely not this one.
Thus I think Servo is a better choice for those looking to contribute. IMHO.
- Quite happy to see Servo coming along again. I am still excited for Ladybird and it seems more likely to deliver a truly viable browser sooner.
  I am not a Swift dev but I think it has decent memory safety as well. I think it is one of the reasons Ladybird is moving to it. They evaluated Rust and decided it lacked the OOP features they needed.
  The C++ that Ladybird writes is also very good. They have their own standard library (written for SerenityOS) which is very modern including memory safety and security. Still C++ though of course.

same slogan everywhere, plant pictures for a strong greenwashing aesthetics, old white men smiling reassuringly. 5/7 homepage.

I'll be great. The big question is how long it's left until a stable release
- Ladybird says 2026. Given the current state and progress, I believe it may be quite usable by then. I use it sometimes for basic surfing and leaving forum comments. It works surprisingly well often though it is still far from general use. I think the dev team tries to use it themselves for things like Discord and GutHub. They did a demo last month where it “almost” ran Gmail.
  I am not sure that Servo has set a timeline. I expect it to take longer.
  
  If you don't mind my asking, what forums do you use? I'm trying to find new communities.

A good breakdown on their progress: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200604

We definitely need more competition in the browser space, I just wish it wasn't using such a permissive license as the BSD.
- You're free to fork and use a more restrictive license, that's one of the cool things about BSD licenses. It's not like it's something dumb like the CDDL, which is incompatible with the GPL (and many other licenses) and the reason ZFS can't be directly included in the kernel.

You can compare the WPT test results of many different browsers here. Its surprising to me that Servo lags behind Ladybird in successfully passed WPT tests.

Totally not related to recent events

I've been testing it out, it's pretty fucking rad.

Politics aside, I'd be curious to see how far something like this can go. Can't not think of Opera Software - even they were not successful while they were using their own proprietary tech.

I love it when I see Ladybird come up! ESPECIALLY now with the ongoing enshittification of FF lmao

So keen for this.

Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine.
- Congratulations on completely misunderstanding the comic.
  Ladybird is not a new standard. It is a new implementation of existing standards. Nobody has to change or adapt anything.
  
  It still has some of the same problems as the comic, though not to the same extent, it doesn't need to be a standard for the comic to make sense, it's also about market share. Having yet another browser has the potential of diluting the market and making people just go for the default.
- Excellent edit. Did you make it?
- Currently there are 3 browsers available and one of them is only available on overpriced disposable hardware.
  
  If the latter is Safari, then WebKit-based browsers are available for Windows and Unix-likes too.
  Actually WebKit is often used in the same role Gecko would be used, until Mozilla decided they don't want alternative browsers on Gecko.
- That is not the point of making another browser.