This "From Scratch" Browser Will Take On The World

People have bugged me to talk about the Ladybird browser and the work of Andreas Kling for a very long time and this is as good a time as any, just a few days ago the Ladybird Browser Initiative with plans to develop this browser into something amazing.
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[@erb34]

No mention of the million dollar donation. Sorry to hear your viewers are bugging you.

[@BrodieRobertson]

I didn't spot that until after the upload, I should pin that actually

[@shiningstar7481]

Tried to find some reference for this. Anyone having a link?

[@BrodieRobertson]

@@shiningstar7481 Defunkt the treasurer posted it to his Twitter

[@AntonSlavik]

Wow, dude. Relax.

[@vintprox]

@@AntonSlavik I think it's the most chill mention of what is worth mentioning.

[@wsippel]

Blink is based on WebKit, which in turn is based on KHTML, originally developed by the KDE project to display documentation. But things quickly got out of hand, KHTML was the first browser to pass the ACID test for advanced CSS, and it also had its own lightweight and fast JavaScript engine. So Apple forked it to create Safari. There was lots of drama because Apple rewrote KHTML in Objective C, didn't upstream anything and instead released their fork as a massive undocumented archive with no history or documentation. That event really demotivated the KHTML team, and the project ultimately died. And a few short years later, Google did pretty much the exact same thing to Apple, and Chrome was born. But yeah, Servo and Ladybird are rather interesting projects. Servo has a lot more industry support and is part of the Linux Foundation, but it's fun to root for the underdog.

[@BrodieRobertson]

I should do a history video on the evolution from KHTML

[@starmechlx]

@@BrodieRobertson This would be really cool. +1

[@wsippel]

@@BrodieRobertson You should, it's a fascinating story. And it happened during the big browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft. Two big corporations fighting each other, and along comes this scrappy crew of enthusiasts showing everybody how it's done. And even though the project ultimately fell apart, it's easy to argue that KDE won the browser wars. All Blink and WebKit browsers identify as "KHTML, like Gecko" to this day.

[@seansingh4421]

Yeah provided that majority of Apple depends on BSD codebase. That was a pretty shitty move to not contribute anything upstream

[@sanctionedforce1868]

@@seansingh4421 one of many such moves by Apple.

[@wido1085]

Actually, some people are genuinely interested in Servo. For example, the Tauri people who want to move away from WebKit GTK as quickly as possible. In fact, most projects that want an embeddable rendering engine for the web are interested in Servo, as it's one of the few engines that were built with embedability in mind.

[@twenty-fifth420]

GTK almost scared me away from UI development until I found out about immediate guis. Or even just Qt. I have no idea why there even is WebKit GTK, since SwiftUI exists and Apple doesn't care that much about Linux. I am definitely lost somewhere. Also what is Servo exactly?

[@fuseteam]

Servo is a webengine; the thing rendering html, css and js for your browser. Projects use it to render the web in their app ;)

[@SussyBaka-nx4ge]

@@twenty-fifth420 Apple kept WebKit as a community project even though most of the community followed Google's fork to Blink aka the Chromium rendering engine. GTKWebKit predates Blink and is mostly maintained by GNOME people even though it lives in the Apple WebKit source tree. Servo was Mozilla's next generation browser engine written in Rust, they took parts of it and bolted it onto Firefox and then stopped development on it and fired the Rust and Servo teams, though it lives again as a Linux Foundation sponsored project.

[@TheOPtmal]

why do they "want to move away from GTK as quickly as possible"? isnt the goal of tauri to utilize the browser engine native to that platform?

[@iXPilot]

For me it's a bit amusing, that all these years Wine uses Gecko as the embedded engine (to mimic MSHTML :) )

[@billeterk]

It’s fantastic this exists. I had a look several weeks ago. Pre-alpha is fair. It ran and resolved pages but couldn’t run the JS heavy stuff I was looking at.

[@DryPaperHammerBro]

Report bugs, lol

[@billeterk]

@@DryPaperHammerBro yeah, that’s the issue. I just don’t have enough spare anything for that. If I’d come across Linux now rather than in the early 90s I doubt I’d use it

[@ManuFortis]

Isn't that a good thing though, from a security standpoint at least? It wouldn't be too far fetched to say that most browser vulnerabilities stem from use of Javascript being as widespread as it is. If anyone feels like arguing that point, please, pray tell; why is it that most security checklists for 'securing' your browser, include blocking/disabling javascript entirely? To be clear, it's not Javascripts fault per se, not entirely at least. But, it is a fact that most browser vulnerabilities stem from Javascript now and a days. Back in the day, it was stuff like that ActiveX with Explorer. Then Chrome came along. And now we can't wait for it to leave, permanently. We, as in, all those of us who refuse to let Chrome touch our computers.

[@MechanicaMenace]

​@@billeterkluckily for us Linux now isn't the Linux we had in the 90s.

[@BAD_CONSUMER]

Js ruined the web. It might just be sloppy js.

[@emperorarasaka]

So…the next browser wars would be Servo vs Ladybird?

[@GafftheHorse]

The next war will be whatever is forked in the future from Blink/Chrome and Blink/Chrome.

[@prophetzarquon1922]

Any "next" browser forked from Chrome is on the wrong track before it started.

[@The-Cat]

Ladybird isn't available for windows so it will never go mainstream ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[@julioau]

Proud 'knower' of Ladybird before watching the video

[@SianaGearz]

KNOWER is a petty cool band.

[@slendi9623]

yaya

[@a_wild_Kirillian]

​@@SianaGearz, true

[@gehenna14]

same

[@yeppiidev]

​@@slendi9623 yo nice

[@L..24]

With all due respect I think the reason why any corporation provides funding for a non profit is extremely important

[@marioprawirosudiro7301]

It is, but nowhere near as important as the obligation said non-profit legally has as a consequence of receiving said funding. As in, as long as there's no legal obligation that states we have to do this and that because we get money from you, then whatever. You can brag about it, virtue signal all you want, or say you care about our cause when you clearly don't. Money is money, as long as there's no strings attached.

[@pollywops9242]

I want to give this comment multiple likes

[@L..24]

@@marioprawirosudiro7301 I think that is true, though at the same time, a legal obligation is not going to make me less wary of the intentions of business people

[@jamesphillips2285]

Yup: that is how the finance industry and/or CIA sabotaged Bitcoin. Started funding 1MB block initiatives as far back as 2014. By 2017 the transaction backlog was weeks long as the Core Developers refused to scale to meet expected transaction demand.

[@anewrafael]

Money always* has strings...​@@marioprawirosudiro7301

[@torspedia]

I'm looking forward to seeing how this browser develops, as we really do need another browser to break the duopoly.

[@davidfrischknecht8261]

They need to get it to run on Windows natively in order for there to be any chance of success.

[@whohan779]

@@davidfrischknecht8261 As long as it runs under WSL2 and supports regular solutions for X-window or Wayland, most Windows users that can run "wsl --install" and some "curl -s [url] | sh" should be perfectly fine.

[@lucyinchat]

@@davidfrischknecht8261 why support a nonfunctional operating system?

[@Adam-326]

Safari…

[@linux2420]

​@@davidfrischknecht8261sad but true :(

[@ingikjartansson]

WebKit started as a fork of KHTML, an Chrome started as a fork of Webkit

[@onlinezwang]

its all KHTML

[@AngelsSilhouette]

@@onlinezwang Kits kall KHTML

[@sprockkets]

Actually no, chrome used to be webkit at the start, then forked later

[@georgesb3388]

"bugged me to talk about the Ladybird browser" I see what you did there :)

[@rolandixor]

Well actually, ladybugs are not true bugs, they are beetles 😂🏃💨

[@cyrus01337]

@@rolandixor i will uninstall your package manager

[@TheSulross]

It’s a pretty decent name - lots of projects suffer from bad naming

[@pessimus]

​@@rolandixor are beetles not themselves bugs?

[@rolandixor]

@@pessimus nope lol - not in entomology. Beetles are coleoptera, and bugs are hemiptera

[@fluffy_fluffinity]

Massive props to Andreas for first developing an OS and then a web browser on top of that. Nowadays the latter might actually be the harder one to build, given how much they actually have to support. Imagine them as entire operating systems on their own

[@XenHat]

ChromeOS Would Like To Know Your Location 🤣

[@kreuner11]

@@XenHat ChromeOS is just linux running Chrome

[@__christopher__]

"Imagine them as entire operating systems on their own" where the only thing lacking is a decent browser. :-)

[@pikaskew]

It’s kinda like Carl Sagan’s “in order to make a pie truly from scratch, you must first create the universe”

[@maxmouse3]

If they want to build a browser with wide adoption, the move towards using 3rd party libraries was excellent. they were able to delete 100k+ lines of code and they don't have to write a video decoder, local database etc. Having ffmpeg sqlite etc helps a LOT. I wish we had both (OS + browser) but it's too ambitious, I think now it has a way higher chance to become a full featured browser. Less effort to implement things and less effort to support serenity OS (which is an amazing project but it would require way too much effort).

[@turtlefrog369]

i just hope they dont try to implement their own password storage like other browsers and instead support some password managers.

[@JacksonNick-j6i]

​@@turtlefrog369 That would create inconvenience for regular users who don't use password manager. I know it's not the right way, but it's the default way so many people store their passwords.

[@marioprawirosudiro7301]

@@JacksonNick-j6i Very true. What we need is not the same password manager used everywhere, but a common format. Something that is standardized, secure, and can make interoperability between different password managers possible. So if we're tired of one pass manager, we can just ask it to give us our passwords in a file, and then let the new pass manager import said file. I don't know if there's something like this in widespread use.

[@Nelo390]

@@JacksonNick-j6i make it an easy extention?

[@trajectoryunown]

@@turtlefrog369 Just allow extensions. Anyone can create one to integrate with a desktop application or online service. Software devs can provide official support for extensions too. No need to over complicate things on their end. Integrated password managers are a bad idea all around. Security aside, far too many users actually _rely_ on their browser's ability to remember passwords for them. If they cleared their cache and passwords, many would outright lose access to multiple online accounts. I think if someone needs a password manager, it should be its own thing. Web browsers do too much as is.

[@Its-Just-Zip]

As much as I understand that it's still really early in its life, I think you may have missed a golden opportunity to record this video using the Lady Bird browser for reading their webpage.

[@MarkusHobelsberger]

A browser is the holy grail of software development. There's basically nothing more difficult to create from scratch. I wish the project much success :)

[@poondaddy9992]

I'd say an OS is the hardest thing to build from the ground up from scratch

[@mjouwbuis]

My first thought: just opensource and resurrect the Presto engine, which was the best until Opera got lazy. But on second thought, fromscratching might not be a bad idea.

[@256shadesofgrey]

Opera 12 is ♥.

[@SGresponse]

I miss Presto.

[@iXPilot]

Well, there was a leak of Presto's sources plus people wrote some patches for it, but... Would it be really worth it, even if it was an official release? IIRC, Opera's engineers were complaining about the need of carrying a bunch of hacks as part of browser distribution, because sites like GMail were introducing artificial issues for the engine...

[@SianaGearz]

Opera has industrial customers on the engine so they don't want to open source it for a variety of reasons. Your car probably runs QNX (Blackberry OS) and probably has Presto on it, not Chrome.

[@leap123_]

@@SianaGearz Yes but that was years ago. There's no reason to use Presto nowadays, and car stereos have since switched to other browser engines like WebKit. I don't think industrial customers would even want to use Presto in 2024, it was simply outdated and unmaintained since Opera switched to Blink.

[@cerulity32k]

There are five "magnum opus" projects I can think of right now. Browsers, due to just how many standards and features exist, and how many edge cases come with them. Operating systems, you start from quite literally nothing and have to build up everything. Compilers, requiring so much parsing and conversion, not to mention standard libraries. Emulators, which simulate an entire computer with a completely unique instruction set. And physics engines, which require probably the most math you'll come across while programming.

[@prophetzarquon1922]

Strange that I do not find rolling all of those into one project, much more unreasonable than doing one on its own...

[@Your_Degenerate]

That Serenity OS screenshot looks similar to my XFCE setup. Looks nice.

[@Calajese]

I'm a sucker for independent browser(Still pissed at opera for killing Presto), I knew of the OS effort and the browser but didn't know it will be available elsewhere, definitely going to keep an eye

[@Qyngali]

Not that it actually matters, but Blink is a fork of WebKit. Not that they have much in common nowadays. :) Presto also deserves a mention, a part of me still want it to be Open Sourced but that train has long departed. Probably would be so far behind Ladybird would be more usable by now anyway lol, as well as Servo if you limit the discussion to engines.

[@BrodieRobertson]

WebKit is also a fork of KHTML lol

[@SianaGearz]

There was never a train. Opera's industrial customers value security by obscurity, and they still use Presto.

[@moetocafe]

@@SianaGearz don't they realize, the thing that is keeping them safe is their ultra low market share and not worth the efforts, and not the obscurity?

[@Qyngali]

@@SianaGearz Train? what? Steam, diesel, or electric? Nuclear?

[@SianaGearz]

@@moetocafe Well i never claimed their decision was all too smart, but market share doesn't matter in this regard. See market share is only valid between equivalent targets, so say an Apple OSX computer and a Windows computer give an automated bulk attacker the same benefit once backdoored, but there's a lot more Windows computers around, which makes them a much more viable target; similarly it would make sense for malicious webpages to attack Chromium or common libraries such as libwebp used by all modern browsers. But industry customers have to consider the likelihood of attacks targeted towards them in particular.

[@Beryesa.]

I'm still looking forward to servo but eh, more choices, noice

[@trajectoryunown]

I _just_ learned about Ladybird the other day, and I've gotta say: I'm super hopeful. Glad to see a more popular channel talking about it. There's almost _no_ information on KZbin.

[@cocacodes]

I'm also excited about Servo, but it's pretty far from being a full fledged browser right now

[@johnterpack3940]

Firefox touts itself as the "privacy" browser. But if I want it to do little things like save cookies so I can stay logged in to sites when I shut down the browser... I have to SIGN IN to Firefox. "Privacy" and "sign in" do not go together. It doesn't even keep the "default" settings when I close it. How are they "default" if they aren't the active settings when I open the browser?

[@33KK]

What even, you totally don't have to sign in

[@johnterpack3940]

@33KK click on the link, a log-in pop-up opens. What am I supposed to think?

[@amynagtegaal6941]

The funny thing is... Blink derived from webkit and both webkit and Gecko (at least partially) derived from KHTML

[@BrodieRobertson]

KDE is to blame for Chrome

[@Azarilh]

@@BrodieRobertson Noooooo

[@bubbles581]

Arnt chromium and webkit both based on khtml from the konqueror browser?

[@netkv]

and now konqueror is just chromium

[@turtlefrog369]

@@netkv true it uses qtwebengine which uses chromium.

[@balala7567]

chromium is based on webkit is based on khtml gecko is based on netscape's engine both engines date back 20-30 years ago

[@fuseteam]

_sees title_ Servo servo servo _brodie mentions servo_ Yay~

[@alexpyattaev]

Ladybird is not the future, sadly. It is really hard to make something like it actually fast, as it was never designed with performance in mind (unlike servo). So it is unlikely that it would ever be a competitive option performance wise.

[@iodreamify]

Why not fork from Gecko or Servo if you don't like Mozilla and want to develop it in another direction, why go completely from scratch? I thought the main problem why there weren't any other engines was because no team could actually keep up with how quickly web tech and security were evolving compared to Mozilla, Apple and Google. Is there really that much technical debt in the established engines that they want to go it alone?

[@StupidusMaximusTheFirst]

Yeah, web rendering engines is the most important component of a browser. Building a browser is not as difficult as building a rendering engine. I'm sure if Servo is good enough, we'll get browsers based on it. Mozilla is awesome, and atm the only open source trustworthy browser who can really compete with the rest, even if Gecko, no matter the massive improvements, is a bit slower than webkit, and is based on a really old codebase. Hopefully Servo is super fast, and it is built from scratch on Rust, it's still very early for it though.

[@Zeioth]

Servo has always been the future. Google retired funds because otherwise they would have lost their monopoly.

[@crash.override]

Um actually, Servo was a Mozilla project

[@pro_gemer]

@@crash.override correct me if im wrong but majority of mozilla's funding is from google to avoid officially being a monopoly or smth

[@miavelvet]

@@crash.overridethey probably mean that google is controlling Mozilla via these big donations and tell them how to manage it. So their idea is that Google told Mozilla to drop the project and focus on something else. At least i guess?

[@turtlefrog369]

servo is a beta male project.

[@HJ-gg6ju]

@turtlefrog-tn3ek Beta male comment.

[@demipy]

Following Andreas for over 4 years now great to see these projects mature

[@metaturso]

Well, hello friend!

[@slendi9623]

WHF :^)

[@TheSulross]

The ethos of the project about not using code from else where is that they are about implementing themselves as a means of learning how to do it (and it avoids IP disputes)

[@felipemarins160]

When I saw the title, I thought Brodie was going to talk about the NetSurf web browser (an independent open source browser for RISC OS).

[@Sebanisu]

I've heard interviews from Andreas I think I saw talks from him too. Serenity is cool. I'm glad something useful might be coming from that project. :)

[@kuhluhOG]

4:58 Especially considering that the web standard is pretty much an operating system at this point.

[@TwinechoesEntertainment]

this is bringing back IE6 trauma, as a web developer

[@jernaugurgeh451]

[@BAD_CONSUMER]

Wish opera continued their presto engine

[@samuellourenco1050]

Andreas Kling is nothing short of a genius. Finally a browser that is not Chromium based and that makes possible to break from stupid decisions from those Firefox maintainers.

[@QUINTIX256]

Too bad he’s a bit of a milkshake duck, and does silly things like denying that the singular “they” exists.

[@miller42]

@@QUINTIX256 That's normal, not silly.

[@CodecrafterArtemis]

@@QUINTIX256 Yeah sadly you can be a genius and an ass. As proven by the likes of Stallman. At least Torvalds recognized his assery at some point and (I think) strives to do better.

[@QUINTIX256]

@@miller42 “Roses are red, violets are blue Singular ‘they’ predates singular ‘you’”

[@miller42]

@@CodecrafterArtemis Torvalds went through a struggle session.

[@anon_y_mousse]

Cloned the repos, and yeesh, Servo is huge. Including the hidden folders, such as .git, Servo is 2.1GB while Ladybird is only 326MB. Eschewing the various hidden folders, Servo is still 928MB and Ladybird drops to a mere 87MB. This is why we need to wipe out the entirety of the preexisting internet infrastructure, all of HTML/CSS/JS, and replace it with a better design that doesn't take nearly so much bloat to get working. I'm just going to keep saying it until it gets in everyone's head and they can't help themselves but to bring this idea to fruition. Wipe it out, all of it.

[@curatedmemes9406]

the truth that nobody wants to hear, but sadly i don't think it's ever going to happen

[@babybingus]

Could someone explain the appeal of the Ladybird browser? It's independent but... why is that beneficial? I've heard of Servo before which picked up attention, not only for being independent, but also for being embeddable, memory-safe, etc. While it's cool to have another browser engine option, I'm not sure what the real world benefit of Ladybird is supposed to be beyond that. At first I thought it could mean more competition, but doesn't Servo and forks of the big 3 browsers/engines (Chromium, Firefox, WebKit) already sort of fill that role? Furthermore, if there is a tangible benefit to having a fourth browser engine, why shouldn't everyone be putting their resources behind Servo to become the fourth engine? As mentioned before, it seems to have additional benefits beyond just being independent. If I'm not mistaken, it has also been in development for longer. (Not trashing Ladybird, just genuinely asking)

[@JanVerny]

There is basically no competition at the moment. Google won, Firefox will likely die in the near future, as it struggles to at least keep it's current users, and the Apple browser is well... Apple browser. To keep the scales balanced you would probably want to have at least 5-6 evenly matched rendering engines at the same time. We need at least 4 extremely succesful newcomers then.

[@IkarusKommt]

Hipsters like to be different just for being different.

[@bltzcstrnx]

​@@JanVernythe problem is browsers aren't profitable. Not even that, they can't even break even with the development costs. Hence why no companies in this world are willing to compete with existing solutions. Making the code available for both Firefox and Chromium exacerbate this issue. Other companies would just prefer to fork or re-skin existing solutions.

[@testacals]

@@IkarusKommt Do you really have to miss the point that hard ? There is practically no competition in the browser industry. Also, one of their goals is to test web standards and make sure they can be implemented.

[@IkarusKommt]

@@testacals No one needs competition in browsers. We have had that c*p already, thanks. Every browser relies on the same libraries which do the correct things, and we don't need bugged homebrew PoC code.

[@r4dius]

So there's nothing yet and there'll be nothing for a long time and there's a high chance there will never be anythong at all, best video

[@mattkeith530]

I'm hoping the servo engine makes progress and is used at some point since rust has done well

[@methanbreather]

you could have said that webkit was a fork of khtml. You know, to be more correct and sound less condescending.

[@Vlad-1986]

This is cool! I dislike Firefox more with each update, but Chrome always manage to be worse. I use Gentoo, so I have nightmares when WebKit wants to compile. I would really, really love a new contender. I also discovered Serenity OS thanks to this video. Man, it is a good looking OS! Going to try it now

[@syzuna_]

As a dev that also has to do web dev this makes my toe nails curl. I hope this does not end up like another Internet Explorer thing. I am all for new js engines and especially if they are not linked to google in any way but it brings back bad memories man :D lets hope it does not come to that

[@elliottmarshall1424]

I can see wasm+canvas only browsers coming soon

[@beepbop6697]

20+ years of lessons learned being thrown out.

[@QuesoDePalo]

I care about servo since it is rust

[@repkam09]

I've been following this project (and Serenity) for quite a while now, it's SUPER impressive. The browser hacking videos that Andreas has put out in the past were really fascinating to watch! Good luck to them!

[@X_Baron]

Shopify could develop this into a point of sale and/or self service terminal maybe. And a basis for other apps. 🙄

[@blarghblargh]

dang. I was more excited about the OS than I was the browser, and was more excited for andreas just working quietly and slowly on it until forever. but I'll go check out what he says about this project and his attitude towards it. maybe he's still not feeling pressured.

[@hamburger--fries]

7 full time coders means they have much more funding than we know about. This kind of money is easily $70k - $200k a month.

[@gotoastal]

We need to be careful about supporting projects that only support proprietary communications for their communities in the free software space.

[@marekkedzierski8237]

Another project that will be abandoned in couple of years because no-one uses it.

[@BrodieRobertson]

It's already been in development for years lol

[@GeorgesDupont-do8pe]

Whatever it is, if it becomes successful, it will be compromised. Remember Java!

[@wcdeich4]

What about GNOME web, formerly known as Epiphany.

[@Asdayasman]

Throw a thousand developers at a browser and you get Chromium. (Which sucks). Throw one developer at a browser and you get surf. (Which sucks). Maybe seven developers is the sweet spot. Maybe Ladybird's getting it right. Can we get a figure collection tour sometime? I think I see Pekora top left and Fubuki top right?

[@guai9632]

maybe that's because web standards suck and they have to implement them all

[@AntonSlavik]

This is one of the best pieces of news I've heard in a long time. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw the video title. I'm logging onto my PC right now to subscribe to their mailing list.

[@jamesrivettcarnac]

About 7 years ago i started scoping out making a web engine. I gave up because it's insane how much work it would be. Just legit error cases alone were insane.

[@tdi-dsg-0911]

Love the punch-glass on the desk.👍 Say it has not broken since the video.

[@softwarelivre2389]

0:03 Safari and GNOME Web

[@softwarelivre2389]

9:34 KHTML is the base from which Webkit was built on. And Webkit is the base Blink was built on. So everything comes out of KHTML in the end of the day hehe

[@AlanPope]

Woohoo! Ladybird is awesome.

[@noname-ll2vk]

It wasn't clear if Ladybird is doing their own js engine like Google's v8 or if they are doing that too. Supporting js abusing sites is not going to be trivial. Css 3 + HTML 5 is already very complex and a big step from older simple stuff. It definitely requires full time paid devs to start implementing those complicated features. The lineage is: KHTML > AppleWebkit > Webkit > fork to Blink. That's the power of the GPL. Ladybug is BSD licensed. That might become long term issue.

[@Bobbias]

It does indeed have its own js engine. It supports all the modern web standards to some degree (though things may be buggy or missing here and there). Andreas has experience working at Nokia and Apple on their browsers, so this isn't brand new territory for him.

[@noname-ll2vk]

@@Bobbias that's impressive. The world needs a free non corporate encumbered browser.

[@SianaGearz]

But both Webkit and Blink have been pretty bold rewrites. The original projects have not benefited from the "longevity" of the codebase lineage. So does it matter?

[@noname-ll2vk]

@@SianaGearz it most definitely matters because the code remained gpl as it developed and evolved. Apple could use khtml because it was gpl but had to give back changes so google used it then forked but still had to give back changes. Then most of the world used blink because code had to be published and shared. That's one of the more impressive gpl successes, though linux kernel is probably biggest success. Or Blink. Depends on how success is measured. There's a reason corporations don't like the gpl, it's a very strong license.

[@oglothenerd]

Ladybird is cool, but Serenity OS is insane!

[@YoniBaruch-y3m]

Arachne? And Opera. Exceptions to the duopoly.

[@JacksonNick-j6i]

Servo had and has an obese amount of potential. If only Mozilla wasn't dumber than my left ball servo would've been ready at this day.

[@zyklos229]

wonder how edge managed it, to be still one of the shitties browsers out there.

[@Azarilh]

If they want a wide adoption, they need a Windows version...

[@thebusinessfirm9862]

Nice video, mate. Thoroughly researched and presented. Greetings from Adelaide.

[@cryofwill1416]

Can You try it out? So we (the people who are not that tech savvy) can see how it looks and the current state, something to spect or anything else. Good video 😊😊

[@ai-spacedestructor]

would be cool to see a competitor to google and firefox thats not based on some already established engine.

[@toreopp]

KHTML🙂

[@MarcCastellsBallesta]

Thank you, annoying person on Discord.

[@Spartan322]

Ladybird vs. the world

[@AlexanderAhjolinna]

I do like to see other web browser project like Ladybird, as mentioned in the video Firefox does has some BS that people ignore just because there is no other competing option from Chromium based BS ....but I do hope that Servo does become something as as it seems promising project as Rust based browser, and KDAB has been working on embedding Servo within Qt which would be nice if it ever becomes usable/stable enough

[@McDuffington]

Finally they are getting some attention!

[@PragandSens]

New project with no rust and no zig? No interest

[@PragandSens]

Pls give love to Servo instead

[@auslegungssache]

404 on the site links lol also mothra / charon will once rise from the plan9 ashes and rule the wwworld

[@marcsfeh]

plan9 sisters, rejoice, mothra is back in town

[@BrodieRobertson]

He moved some files around overnight

[@karituurihalme1007]

How can using a linux kernel be ok if external code is not allowed?

[@Mad3011]

SerenityOS has its own kernel. It is completely from scratch with the one exception being GCC.

[@karituurihalme1007]

@@Mad3011 Wow. I did not realize that. That's ok then I guess. Thanks for correcting me.

[@stickinthemud23]

So what plans are in place to ensure against purchas by Microsoft or Google Earth if this browser becomes successful?

[@HyuLilium]

They should make a browser that is not compatible with old legacy BS modern browsers have. Bonus if they make HTML strict, since only web developers do HTML anyway, not normal people.

[@elzabethtatcher9570]

"Do you like web browsers?" I do! In fact, I am writing this from one of them!

[@TheRailroad99]

A bit sad that it's written in C++. Don't get me wrong, I love C (and also C++), the syntax and "low-level-ness" are fantastic. I also think the hype about mem-safe coding has been a bit too much lately. However, especially for a browser (which should STRICTLY be sandboxed) I would always go with rust/go nowadays, especially if it should not use many dependencies anyway. But I guess - like me - Mr. Kling knows C(++) far better than Rust and doesn't like Rusts Syntax.

[@luziferius3687]

Dropping the no-external-libraries policy is the only way forward to get something usable created at all. Otherwise, they'd have to write all the SSL/TLS encryption algorithms from ground up for HTTPS in a safe and fast way. Also a fast video decoder library that can decrypt at least H264, VP9 and AV1 (including HDR, tone-mapping, color space transformations, etc), a basic Matroska container demuxer and other components for video streaming support, all written ground up from file format and algorithm specifications. On the Linux side, how about DE integration without using their support libraries? Handling raw X11 events by digging through the documentation to re-implement everything instead of using decade old stable libraries? Good luck with that.

[@stevenhe3462]

Imagine if servo got that money.

[@privacyvalued4134]

I don't know if this project is all that useful or even a good idea. Isn't there something better this guy could spend his time (and money) on? If this were simply a pluggable web engine that didn't require a GUI and could run on CLI (e.g. render screenshots of URLs, replace Lynx), then maybe it serves a purpose. But we already have Chromium and Gecko. I don't see what the point is of making yet another browser engine that will be dead in a few years due to lack of interest/support. People find the mental strain of managing a large project like that to be too taxing and drop out pretty fast. PhantomJS was hot stuff until the lead dev gave up under the mental strain from the deluge of bug reports.

[@j7ndominica051]

The cloned Windows GUI of SerenityOS looks nice and refreshing after current flat designs. But that's just the face and not what makes OS good, reliable, fast. Firefox forks are a dime for a dozen, Palemoon, Basilisk, RoyTam's forks of those for old Windows.

[@emanuellandeholm5657]

Constantly reading comments about the Chromium reskin du jour, this gives me some hope. Firefox needs competition.

[@CMDRSweeper]

Firefox doesn't need competition, Google does... I have to admit I would support Firefox until their positions reversed, at that point however, it is time to stick Firefox on the pitchfork and get something way friendlier to replace it. We sadly have to fight the battle on one front at the time, and currently Firefox is our best bet to get somewhere against Google.

[@emanuellandeholm5657]

@@CMDRSweeper Sure, but I really think Google is now at a point where they cannot meaningfully be competed against. We need to regulate Big Tech, not compete with it.

[@blarghblargh]

@@emanuellandeholm5657 quibble: we need to compete with big tech, and cannot unless regulation happens

[@FiredAndIced]

@@emanuellandeholm5657Asking politicians to regulate tech is like pouring oil to stop the fire. I ain’t libertarian, but I have dim hopes for American politics to make any meaningful steps unlike the EU regulators. Even then, EU member nations have Hungary to deal with, vetoing any form of meaningful market control efforts.

[@UltraZelda64]

Serenity OS is awesome. I just wish it had a proper installer and could easily be run on real hardware. Hell, I'd probably be happy with a port of the interface and its main applications to Linux to fill in the hardware support void as Andreas once joked about in an April Fools' video. I love its "90s-style" design.

[@I_Was_Chrispy_Kreme]

Issue for me Brodie is that a new browser is already a niche within a niche. We know that most people use Chrome (because of google accounts, Chromebooks whatever) or Safari (as it's inbuilt in iPhone/iPad). Given the poor number of Firefox users a new browser I think stands zero chance of getting anywhere.

[@TommyCrosby]

Since you guys don't like Google and Chromium/Blink was the death of closed source Presto and Trident/EdgeHTML engines is still a good thing since they were killed by their owners move to Chromium?

[@JanVerny]

It's not about hating Google. It's also not about hating closed source. It's about not giving nearly absolute control over the entire web to a single already very powerful company that is known for not playing nicely with others. So, no, killing the last few remaining competitors isn't good.

[@ivanmaglica264]

How are they planning to implement all esoteric CSS features, especially those obscure ones? HTML rendering with basic 90s styling is (relatively) trivial compared to rendering with all modern styling features.

[@TheCynysterMind]

I just hope a browser starts allowing/supporting 3rd party Toolbars again. Certain things just work better as a toolbar. Specifically Password managers. (And look I get it... back in the day ... everyone and their mother were making toolbars and bundling them in with software as a way of driving ad revenue) But if you handle it like they do now (disabled by default) it wont be such an issue (and ffs stop forcing limitations on me because other people are irresponsible)

[@Artoooooor]

I used Edge as long as M$ had balls to develop own browser engine instead basing it on Chromium. Now I use Firefox for that reason. Nice to see another player entering the game. It seems building a web browser is harder than building an operating system. Browsers became big and complicated OSes themselves. It would be very interesting to see hobbyist browser dev community, like the one existing for OS dev.

[@alternatuber6698]

"Will Ladybird work on Windows? 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." Lol this time Win users are gonna will look.

[@test-rj2vl]

Allowing external libraries makes it boring again - would have been fun to see them implementing svg or just even basic png rendering. But anyways competition is always welcome. I don't like how Firefox devs are like "We do what ever we want, and your feature requests doesn't matter because we are so big that we don't need to listen to our users anymore". Maybe some competition makes them a bit more interested in their users.

[@Whistler-007]

EU govts are moving to open source apps on open source Unix. Actively moving away from MS products. When your product is more complete & practical, it'd worth looking into.

[@grilsegrils9330]

I really miss some better bookmarking system where you logically can keep thousands of bookmark organized in a way that doesn't make you get lost, when you want to reuse your bookmarks. I think todays browsers are to simple for this type of task. Maybe this is something that could be added to this or other browsers, an enhanced browser tool within the browser. Nothing has really changed for lets say 30 years, that comes standard with your browser

[@AirBuilder]

The problem now is not that there are not enough different browsers, but that there is not a single free (freedom) one. Give me at least ONE that would support synchronization between mobile and desktop through my own self-hosted server. Otherwise, all this is dog sh

[@Daniel_VolumeDown]

Is it ahead or behind netsurf web browser at current state?

[@kreuner11]

Light years ahead

[@bltzcstrnx]

​@@kreuner11why did they project 2026 for alpha? Are there important specifications that are still unimplemented? How is it for browsing on a daily basis by average users?

[@kreuner11]

@@bltzcstrnx yes, it is better than netsurf for sure, but the browser nerds plenty of optimization work (it is slowwww!!) and many web APIs are still unfinished

[@max-mr5xf]

Websites should be markdown only with the capability of lazy loading. That SHOULD be enough.