We've created a US non-profit to develop Ladybird into a truly independent web browser...
  • laxe@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    I want to follow updates from this project. They have a Twitter account but not Mastodon sigh

  • unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
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    4 months ago

    The website makes it sound like all of the code being bespoke and “based on standards” is some kind of huge advantage but all I see is a Herculean undertaking with too few engineers and too many standards.

    W3C lists 1138 separate standards currently, so if each of their three engineers implements one discrete standard every day, with no breaks/weekends/holidays, then having an alpha available that adheres to all 2024 web standards should be possible by 2026?

    This is obviously also without testing but these guys are serious, senior engineers, so their code will be perfect on the first try, right?

    Love the passion though, can’t wait to see how this project plays out.

      • Matriks404@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        4 months ago

        Exactly. They have been working on Ladybird Browser for few years already, before it was announced as standalone product (It was a part of SerenityOS).

      • JackbyDev@programming.devEnglish
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        4 months ago

        They say they already use it to manage GitHub issues so it’s definitely more than “point 0” right now.

    • merthyr1831@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      4 months ago

      Sure, but an individual website may use only a few of those standards. Ladybird devs will pick a website they like to use - Reddit, Twitter, Twinings tea, etc. and improve adherence to X or Y standards to make that one website look better. In turn, thousands of websites suddenly work perfectly, and many others work better than before.

      Ladybird is largely conformant to the majority of HTML standards now. It’s about the edge cases (and where standards aren’t followed by websites) and performance. This isn’t a new project.

        • merthyr1831@lemmy.worldEnglish
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          4 months ago

          Andreas Kling, the founder and lead dev, has a massive love for Twinings tea and spent a few Dev logs working on improving their website with the end goal being ordering his tea from them :)

    • 0x0@programming.devEnglish
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      4 months ago

      Let’s not do zomething because it’s hard pretty much sums up every new generation.

      Imagine if they said that when they had to program everything in assembly…

      • Holzkohlen@feddit.deEnglish
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        4 months ago

        Software nowadays is a lot more complex. You’d get nowhere using assembly. Are you also gonna call me lazy if I say making a smartphone from scratch is complicated? “But the Nokia 1234 only had 4kb of memory” Is what you will probably say.

        • 0x0@programming.devEnglish
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          4 months ago

          You’d get nowhere using assembly because people wanted to keep improving technology.

          The Nokia was actually build and freakin’ rock solid. Then came smartphones because people wanted to improve. It sure wasn’t easy and they didn’t go Geez, a phone from scratch? Why bother?

    • Diplomjodler@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      4 months ago

      They’ve been at it for four years and they plan to have an alpha by 2026. Maybe wait how it actually turns out?

    • weststadtgesicht@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
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      4 months ago

      W3C lists 1138 separate standards currently, so if each of their three engineers implements one discrete standard every day, with no breaks/weekends/holidays, then having an alpha available that adheres to all 2024 web standards should be possible by 2026?

      Yes, that is exactly the plan: “We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version”

    • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
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      4 months ago

      a Herculean undertaking with too few engineers and too many standards

      Yeah, as a layperson this is my take. If mozilla is struggling to stay in the game then I just don’t really see how an unfinanced indie team has a shot.

      • Scrollone@feddit.itEnglish
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        4 months ago

        Let’s not forget that Mozilla (the company) is largely mismanaged, so that doesn’t help.

        • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
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          4 months ago

          It might seem that way but it’s a fairly arrogant assertion. They’re a sophisticated organisation with a lot of well experienced people guiding them. As an outsider it’s easy to criticise their seemingly endless series of bad decisions, but I’m still confident that internally all of these decisions seemed like a good idea at the time.

          Besides which, this would be a good reason to fork their codebase rather than starting from scratch.

      • merthyr1831@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        4 months ago

        Mozilla has loads of projects, not just the browser. I doubt more than a 30 work exclusively on the engine nowadays.

  • merthyr1831@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    4 months ago

    It would be nice if people read the post and the project before randomly making assumptions such as implying the project started from scratch yesterday or its run by some amateurs, this is a 4 year old project! It’s founded by a former KHTML/Webkit developer for Apple!

  • ComplexLotus@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    4 months ago

    As Firefox will introduce Manifest V3 which will make ad-blockers unusable, I hope they will not implement that as well … But I forsee this will not have any add-ons at all

      • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
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        4 months ago

        that would just open them up to a massive anti trust lawsuit and they’re already under pressure with that as it is

      • ComplexLotus@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        4 months ago

        Lets hope they stay true to their words and do not deprecate Manifest V2 later, since firefox is an open source project, theoretically anyone could fork it and build this on their own, but I heard compile-times for firefox is long. And as complexity of the web increases maintaining your own forked web browser will become harder and harder. That is why projects like Ladybird are important imo.

        As more and more webpages do not support firefox anymore (Notion did not work for me today) the web will become unusable in a dystopian Manifest-V3 only future.

  • nixcamic@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    4 months ago

    Servo already exists and is independent and written in a modern language and way ahead of this.

    I mean, competition is good but they aren’t the only independent browser engine.

  • vsis@feddit.clEnglish
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    4 months ago

    The project management may have some obvious problems (jOin dIsc0Rd sErVEr; w0rD “thEy” t0o p0liTicAl). But we really need an alternative to browsers funded by Google (Chrome and Firefox).

    So I’ll do my best to actually build from sources and see what can I help with. Attacking the author is helping nobody.

    And for the folks who are saying “wHy n0t rUst”, you can always show me the (rust) code.

    • barsoap@lemm.eeEnglish
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      4 months ago

      And for the folks who are saying “wHy n0t rUst”, you can always show me the (rust) code.

      https://github.com/servo/servo

      I really wish they would publish flatpaks because I can’t be arsed to either build the thing or get a non-standard precompiled binary to run on nixos.

      • vsis@feddit.clEnglish
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        4 months ago

        Well, thank you for pointing me to this project. Didn’t know about it. I’ve just built it. So, the part of I’ll do my best to see what can I help with applies here to.

  • miridius@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    4 months ago

    builds a new browser from scratch without borrowing existing code

    still chooses to do it in C++

    Epic fail

      • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
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        4 months ago

        C++ is a very old, extremely complex language. There are arguably objectively better modern alternatives, such as Rust.

        • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
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          4 months ago

          Taken from the wikipedia page on rust:

          On February 8, 2021, the formation of the Rust Foundation was announced by its five founding companies (AWS, Huawei, Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla).[36][37] In a blog post published on April 6, 2021, Google announced support for Rust within the Android Open Source Project as an alternative to C/C++.[38]

          Four out of five founding companies are evil to the bone, with only Mozilla being somewhat reputable. That does not give me much confidence, sadly.

          On November 22, 2021, the Moderation Team, which was responsible for enforcing community standards and the Code of Conduct, announced their resignation “in protest of the Core Team placing themselves unaccountable to anyone but themselves[39]”

          How am I not surprised?

          In May 2022, the Rust Core Team, other lead programmers, and certain members of the Rust Foundation board implemented governance reforms in response to the incident.[40]

          At least that. However, I don’t care enough for the time being to spend my morning on reading what exactly they implemented.

          • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
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            4 months ago

            The Rust Foundation very deliberately does not control the development of Rust. There has been issues with the moderation team in the past but I think they’re actually resolved today. And let me just assure you that Rust is not the only language project with problems and the fact that they have been talked about and discussed in the open and resolved is a sign of maturity and trust, not a bad thing.

            • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
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              4 months ago

              I suppose there are problems in many teams, yes - the majority of humanity is just not mature enough to treat each other professionally :/

              Still - 4 out of the 5 founding companies being pure evil does not fill me with confidence :/

              • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
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                4 months ago

                The language existed long before the foundation. The foundation is purely there to support the language.

        • phlegmy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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          4 months ago

          Rust is great, but anybody developing something should have the ability to choose whatever programming language they prefer. If you want it made with rust, make it yourself.

          • miridius@lemmy.worldEnglish
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            4 months ago

            If were just a personal project that they’re building entirely on their own then sure, go nuts and do whatever you want. But they’re trying to gain adoption, asking for contribution, and wanting to replace other browsers. At that point it’s no longer just a personal choice if you’re asking the community to invest their time and money into it with you

            • phlegmy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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              4 months ago

              It originally started as just a fun side project.
              But even if it hadn’t, are you suggesting we should no longer start big/community projects in C++?

              Picking an unsafe language has the added benefit of distancing yourself from the toxic rust-or-die crowd, who can’t seem to mind their own damn business.

          • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
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            4 months ago

            Not everyone with the knowledge to identify this mistake is in a position to personally correct it. Do you have the time and resources to personally build a browser from scratch? No? Why do you assume a random commenter does?

            It doesn’t change the fact that Rust is similarly performant and much safer and will thus be faster to develop and less bug-prone. It’s not a difficult assessment to make. If you want to explain why they’re wrong you can talk about the issue on its merits, but you didn’t choose to, presumably because you can’t.

            • phlegmy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
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              4 months ago

              I just don’t think it’s fair to tell somebody with over 20 years of experience with C++ that their decision to use C++ in their next project is a ‘fail’.

              Learning a new language will probably not be faster than using one you’re already deeply familiar with.

              I’m not sure why you’re asking me about the merits of C++ over rust, that wasn’t my point. I was simply advocating for personal choice.

              Also, my first sentence was literally praising rust, but I guess I didn’t deepthroat it enough for you to notice? Presumably because you’ve taken the thought of somebody advocating for anything other than rust as a personal attack.

            • blind3rdeye@lemm.eeEnglish
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              4 months ago

              Their choice of programming language isn’t a ‘mistake’. It isn’t something that is ‘corrected’. It’s a development choice, nothing more. That’s the point. And if some ‘random commenter’ doesn’t like that choice, that’s their problem to fix - not the developers who are actually making the project.

              • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
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                4 months ago

                You said they “should have the ability to choose whatever programming language they prefer”. I have good news for you.

                You have correctly identified that the developers are responsible for their own decisions. They are, you will be very relieved to hear, quite free to make as many poor decisions as they will. Nobody is going to force them to stop.

                Other people are more than capable of identifying that those decisions are mistakes. Now, that could be argued with, you could explain how it’s not a mistake.

                But you haven’t. You just said they should be allowed to do it, but nobody was arguing that they needed to be stopped, just that it was a bad decision.

          • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
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            4 months ago

            Of course, but it still makes sense to think carefully about the advantages of disadvantages of the tools you use when starting any project.

        • hexabs@lemmy.worldEnglish
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          4 months ago

          I agree that Rust is the way to go, but calling something “arguably” & “objectively” in the same breath is a bit of a paradox innit?

          • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
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            4 months ago

            Well, it was more to recognize that there is no inherently better programming languages in theory, they all do the same stuff. And some languages are “better” at some stuff just due to the libraries available and nothing to do with the language itself. But yea I do think Rust is an objectively better language than C++.

      • miridius@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        4 months ago

        Sure :)

        There are a lot of downsides of C++ compared to more modern languages that make it not a great choice if you’re starting a web browser from scratch

        1. Complexity of the language leading to increased bugs and slower development
        2. Manual memory management is error-prone and leads to issues like memory leaks or segmentation faults. Modern browsers need to handle large amounts of dynamic content, making memory management complicated
        3. C++ lacks some of the built-in safety features of more modern languages, which has led to the majority of security vulnerabilities found in major browsers. It’s so bad that Mozilla invented an entirely new programming language just to deal with this
        4. Compared to higher-level languages, C++ can be slower to develop in, which may impact the ability to quickly implement new web standards or features unless you have a massive team
        5. While C++ is cross-platform, ensuring consistent behavior across different operating systems can be more challenging than with some other languages.
        6. Newer languages often provide built-in support for concurrent programming, garbage collection, and other features useful for browser development, which C++ lacks.

        So tl;dr: a browser but in C++ will take much longer to develop, have fewer features, more bugs, less concurrency and and more security vulnerabilities

        • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.worldEnglish
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          4 months ago

          Thanks for laying out your concerns. As a C++ developer who does not know the other languages you speak of (I assume Rust, Go), I can agree to some of your points, but also some of them I see differently:

          1. C++ can be complex, because it has a lot of features and especially the newer standards have brought some syntax that is hard to understand or read at times. However, those elements are not frequently used, or if they are, the developer will get used to them quickly & they won’t make development slow. As a matter of fact, most development time should be spent on thinking about algorithms, and thinking very well before implementing them - and until implementation, the language does not matter. I do not think that language complexity leads to increased bugs per se. My biggest project is just short of 40k lines of code, and most of the bugs I produced were the classical “off by one” or missing range checks, bugs that you can just as well produce in other languages.

          2. C++ no longer requires you to do manual memory management - that is what smart pointers are for, and RAII-programming.

          3. I can’t make a qualified comment on that, due to lack of expertise - you might be right.

          4. You’re somewhat repeating point 1) here with slow development. But you raise a good point: web standards have become insane in terms of quantity and interface sizes. Everyone and their dog wants to reinvent the wheel. That in itself requires a very large team to support I would say. As stated for point 1), I do not agree development in C++ has to be slower

          5. True, as someone who just suffered from problems introduced on windows (cygwin POSIX message queues implementation got broken by Win10, and inotify does not work on Windows Subsystem for Linux) I can confirm that while the C++ standard library is not much of a problem, the moment you interface with the host OS, you leave the standard realm and it becomes “zombieland”. Also, for some reason, the realtime library implementation on MacOS is different, breaking some very simple time-based functions. So yeah, that’s annoying to circumvent, but can be done by creating platform specific wrapper libraries that create a uniform API. For other languages, it appears this is done by the compilers, which is probably better - meaning the I/O operations got taken into those language’s core features

          6. I am highly doubtful of people relying on garbage collection - a programmer that doesn’t know exactly when his objects come into existence, and when they cease to exist is likely to make much bigger mistakes and produce very inefficient code. The aforementioned smart pointers in C++ solve this issue: object lifetime is the scope of the smart pointer declaration, and for shared pointers, object lifetime expires when the last process using it leaves the scope in which it is declared. For concurrent programming, I do not know if you mean concurrency (threads) or multiple people working on the same project. While multi-threading can be a bit “weird” at first, you have a lot of control over shared variables and memory barriers in C++ that might enable a team to produce a browser that is much faster, which I believe is a core requirement towards modern browsers

          As for your tl;dr: definitely not “less concurrency”, that makes no sense. The other points may or may not be true, keeping in mind the answers I gave above.

    • witx@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
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      4 months ago

      I’m not sure 10 years old are allowed on the internet. Isn’t it time for Coco and bed?

      I agree that Rust would be an interesting choice for this project but there’s a reason why this particular project is done in C++

      • miridius@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        4 months ago

        I wouldn’t go around accusing people of being 10 years old when your English skills are worse than a 10 year old’s. Glass houses and all that.

        • witx@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
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          4 months ago

          English is not my first language. I saw the mistake and left it here. You fixated on that simple mistake instead of answering the main point

    • Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
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      4 months ago

      The dev has 30 years of experience with c++ and a lot of it was on browsers.

      He tried to incorporate rust with the help of “JT”, one of the original rust designers/devs and it didn’t work that well due to the web being too objet oriented or something like that. They both worked together (well, mostly “JT”) to create a new safe programming language called “yakt” that transpile to c++, but the project is currently pretty much dead because nobody is really working on it anymore.

      • neclimdul@lemmy.worldEnglish
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        4 months ago

        The web being too object oriented for rust? Assuming that made sense, who wrote the dang language? If that’s true I’m even less confident they know what they’re doing then I was before.

        • Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
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          4 months ago

          You’re doubting someone’s ability to create a web browser knowing that they specialize in browser development since the early 2000s?

          If this isn’t enough to have confidence in them then nothing will.

          • neclimdul@lemmy.worldEnglish
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            4 months ago

            Using my decades of experience in how programming and compilers works and the fact Mozilla has used it to great effect and how it is being used for parts of the Linux kernel… Yeah just a general statement it doesn’t make any sense.

            Maybe they aren’t effective at designing software with the paradigms of the language or they don’t like it but the given explanation doesn’t track.

              • miridius@lemmy.worldEnglish
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                4 months ago

                Reading all of that it sounds mostly like a dev who has spent 20 years doing things the C++ way wasn’t comfortable learning something new. Like basically they’ve been using horrible design patterns that Rust bans because they’re horrible, and instead of learning better approaches they just say Rust is bad

                • Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
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                  4 months ago

                  It could be. But then again, he did have the help of a Rust designer/core dev. I believe they even wrote the first iteration of the “Jakt” compiler in Rust before rewriting it in Jakt itself, so Andreas isn’t against using Rust.

                • witx@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
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                  4 months ago

                  So someone who wrote their own functional operating system and browser from scratch which he is now targeting the public with, is not comfortable learning something new?

                  You are all assuming that the project will be c++ only when the authors haven’t said anything about the matter. Who knows if they aren’t open to moving to rust? The project is originally in c++, not only but, because that’s what the target OS supported. There are examples of other browser moving from c++ to rust (Firefox) who says they can’t do the same?

    • ticho@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      4 months ago

      The language choice was because Ladybird started as a component of SerenityOS, which is also written in C++. With this separation, they are free to gradually introduce other language(s) into the codebase, and maybe eventually replace C++ entirely, piece by piece.

      In Hackernews thread about this, the head maintainer mentioned that they have been evaluating several languages already, so we’ll see what the future brings.

      In the meantime, let’s try to be mature about it, what do you say?

  • katy ✨@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
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    4 months ago

    “Ladybird uses a brand new engine based on web standards, without borrowing any code from other browsers.” has the same energy as

    • blind3rdeye@lemm.eeEnglish
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      4 months ago

      Not really. They aren’t inventing new standards. They are implementing an engine that confirms to existing standards.

    • decivex@yiffit.netEnglish
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      4 months ago

      In this case having more browser engines not under Google’s control is probably a good thing. Although this effort might’ve been better spent working on Servo.

    • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.mlEnglish
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      4 months ago

      Why don’t ya’ll contribute some meaningful code instead of finding ways to deny those who do

      • wholookshere@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
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        4 months ago

        Please describe to me how someone who offered up changes to change “he” to “they” for them, and then the contributor getting pissy about “politics” is denying work.

    • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      All this because they won’t change a “he” into “they” ? Who gives a fuck about such rampant whiteknightism ? Why does a browser even need to know your gender ? In what context even is there a pronoun in the user interface ?

      • Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
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        4 months ago

        You could find out the context by reading the title of the thread, but then you’d have less to bitch about, so I can understand why you chose ignorance.

    • quissberry@lemmy.cafeEnglish
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      4 months ago

      Yeah, I saw this, and all my excitement for the project died. If it becomes successful, I might use it anyway though.

    • blind3rdeye@lemm.eeEnglish
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      4 months ago

      Hmm. I just read the github thread that this is about. The devs made a mistake on this; but it seems to me that there is a bit of an over-reaction here. The people in the thread seem to be discussing it calmly and politely; and the issue (i.e. use of pronouns in the build instructions) ends up being resolved. By contrast, the reaction outside of the actual thread… is extreme.

      Like I said, this seems like an overreaction to someone making a mistake of ignorance & indifference. It wasn’t an act of malice.

  • Logh@lemmy.mlEnglish
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    4 months ago

    Love the idea! Shopify as the highest tier sponsor? Not so much.

  • solrize@lemmy.worldEnglish
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    4 months ago

    It’s hard to understand the purpose of this. The difficulty of the project (i.e. complexity of the web) is the real problem that needs solving. We don’t need another fork of the browser-verse. We need a fork of the web itself.