This post reminded me of gaming emulator updates that I also love to read. "Fixed X bug to make Y behave correctly, which means game Z works now." (One of the things they fixed was CSS Doom, so I guess there is some legitimate overlap to gaming at any rate.)
Good call! I’ve heard Andreas say multiple times building a browser is like building an emulator. Each website uses different features in different ways, and he likens websites to roms.
There is a difference tho between being'pretty usable' and actually being usable with your passwords, data and just being reliable enough for everyday.
I think the gap between having nothing to having a prototype is way smaller than between having something 'pretty usable' and something that is usable.
To whoever had the evangelion r/unixporn as a way to test out ladybird reddit. I respect you so much as I really liked reading about evangelion (I haven't watched it as much BUT I have watched countless documentaries explaining it and had evangelion as my wallpaper for sometime)
Now coming to the point, the fact that reddit is working in ladybird sounds crazy good, I am not sure if youtube is working or not but I hope that youtube works too and Ladybird sounds to really work.
Also, thanks to https://jakubsteplow.ski/ for donating the money to ladybird. I mean I would like to actively promote people who donate to open source projects as a better way than what google ads or others too and jakub I wish you nothing but the best and I hope other people donate to projects like ladybird too (Independent donors/donations), also thanks to human rights foundation https://hrf.org/program/ai-for-individual-rights/
It's amazing how browsers had an almost mono/(duo or trio?)-poly yet it took a single guy to do all of this. Its really inspiring.
If you want to use no-Javascript browser as well, this browser prototype [0] is getting pretty good too. It's developed by Dioxus, a GUI framework in Rust, as part of its native renderer which seeks to create their own alternative to Skia, similar to Flutter, but it'll work on the web as well with HTML and CSS standards unlike Flutter web which is just a canvas.
It's also a from scratch implementation, sort of, using existing Rust crates like stylo (which servo also uses) and taffy, but it doesn't rely on any code from existing browsers such as Chromium, Gecko or WebKit.
> Human Rights Foundation ... “AI for Individual Rights” program
That sounds quite dodgy. Ladybird doesn't have AI, why would such a program support its development?
But even before that: "Human Rights Foundation" sounds like "The Human League" which George makes up in Seinfeld as a fake charity. And promoting AI as a "human right" is quite suspicious. If I had to, I might be that this is something backed by one of the corporations burning through Billions of dollars and Gigawatt-hours on LLMs.
Looking at their annual report summaries and their huge staff, my guess slants a bit towards either bodies like the CIA or some ideologically-motivated billionaires (e.g. talk about the "dictator Maduro", focus on Iran etc.)
Interesting, I've checked the LinkedIn link of Jakub Stęplowski, a software developer proudly presenting himself as "from Poland" - 10 years of working outside of Poland in Italy and Switzerland. Yep, that checks out. I was wondering where he could have gotten $1,000 to generously burn on this project as a sponsor, with Polish salaries.
Nothing bad about it, of course. It's just it's long time overdue to move to Switzerland as well, I see.
The hardest part for browser development has always been "artificial" web compatibility, as you know a lot of websites are forcefully blocking specific browser from loading, only allow Chromium to load their websites, that is the reality check for Ladybird, and seriously what stopping new web browsers from being able to compete, same with DRM Widevine, it's REALLY hard to acquire (unobtainiumware) for new browser, even big browser like Zen Browser with 10M users failed to acquire it
Ladybird is coming along so well. I am a long-term Firefox user and I'll definitely be an early adopter of Ladybird when it enters very early alpha and precompiled builds start being released.
So basically, it will be useless. How many use epiphany please? That thing has been so extremely ineffective. It's like 1999 (not that everything was bad in 1999).
> follows GNOME’s design guidelines: no menubar, a hamburger menu
Oh. my. god.
So Ladybird worships uselessness now. Also, GTK progressively gets worse and with GTK5 they will (try to) kill of xorg-server too. Some people disagree with that - https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver and https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng; I get it that there are not that many folks using that, but the point is that the GNOME corporate mindset has a tiny bit of competition. Perhaps that seed of competition grows over time until the corporate gnomeys have to change course (won't happen, as they are paid to abolish what is "old", but more competition is good, if only to try to "reason" with mr. ebassi and other hardcore gnomeys; sadly KDE also goes that way with wayland-only, thanks to anti Robin Hood Nate and his donation-pester daemon. Oldschool KDE devs didn't waylay people for money, now it is "pay or get nagged", thanks to Natey Nate).
We kind of need competition in the browser landscape, so in some ways having Ladybird is good. I don't really have much hope that ladybird will be able to challenge the evil Google empire though. But perhaps more people realise that Google controlling so much of the www-ecosystem (again, just look at how they nerfed google search in the last years) is a huge problem.
Too bad LadyBird is being translated to LLM generated Rust.
It's nice that Rust is so beginner friendly but it would be nicer to have a pure C++ browser for the more experienced developers, to use as a basis for their projects like Chromium is used.
In my opinion, Chromium has already filled that market.
I actually think Ladybird should lean into Rust more so it can compete on speed but still stay safe and friendly to contributors (as hopefully the compiler will prevent most bugs).
My hope is this will help them compete with tenets of "safe, fast, contributor-friendly and NOT owned by a corporation"
I thinkk it's about time Ladybird got some official prebuilt binaries - I'd love to try it, but I'm not going to install its whole dev environment and build it from source.
Is pdf.js the renderer that VSCode uses? You know, the one where everything becomes extremely blurry when you zoom in for absolutely no reason at all except (I would imagine) developer incompetence?
I don't want to dampen the positive vibes around this project in any way, in fact I'm very glad such projects exists. But it just struck me that my immediate associations with the "non-profit" label - which in this project's context is clearly being positioned against Mozilla's for-profit subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation - don't quite match reality. Even though it is indeed a non-profit, the website features a not exactly short listing of sponsors, including platinum-tier sponsor Cloudflare.
Platinum, per Ladybird's own sponsorship page, means $100,000+ per year. Money that, per the site, comes from "just people and companies who believe in an open web." Cloudflare, then.
Worth noting that at this point, it's still somewhat trivial to find exploitable remote code execution bugs in Ladybird using AI tools.[0]
The userbase of Ladybug users is so small that it's probably not worth the attackers' time, but keep in mind that it's an enormous step down in security from the mainstream browsers who are actively searching for bugs using the latest tools and paying bug bounties on external reports.
I managed to build this the other day. Looking good!
As noted by other authors, there does seem to be a wide surface area for attacks so, security remediation does seem to be a top-of-queue thing to be handled.
29 comments
[ 14.6 ms ] story [ 568 ms ] threadThis post reminded me of gaming emulator updates that I also love to read. "Fixed X bug to make Y behave correctly, which means game Z works now." (One of the things they fixed was CSS Doom, so I guess there is some legitimate overlap to gaming at any rate.)
I think the gap between having nothing to having a prototype is way smaller than between having something 'pretty usable' and something that is usable.
To whoever had the evangelion r/unixporn as a way to test out ladybird reddit. I respect you so much as I really liked reading about evangelion (I haven't watched it as much BUT I have watched countless documentaries explaining it and had evangelion as my wallpaper for sometime)
Now coming to the point, the fact that reddit is working in ladybird sounds crazy good, I am not sure if youtube is working or not but I hope that youtube works too and Ladybird sounds to really work.
Also, thanks to https://jakubsteplow.ski/ for donating the money to ladybird. I mean I would like to actively promote people who donate to open source projects as a better way than what google ads or others too and jakub I wish you nothing but the best and I hope other people donate to projects like ladybird too (Independent donors/donations), also thanks to human rights foundation https://hrf.org/program/ai-for-individual-rights/
It's amazing how browsers had an almost mono/(duo or trio?)-poly yet it took a single guy to do all of this. Its really inspiring.
It's also a from scratch implementation, sort of, using existing Rust crates like stylo (which servo also uses) and taffy, but it doesn't rely on any code from existing browsers such as Chromium, Gecko or WebKit.
[0] https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz (in /apps/browser)
what’s Strava want with my battery level?
That sounds quite dodgy. Ladybird doesn't have AI, why would such a program support its development?
But even before that: "Human Rights Foundation" sounds like "The Human League" which George makes up in Seinfeld as a fake charity. And promoting AI as a "human right" is quite suspicious. If I had to, I might be that this is something backed by one of the corporations burning through Billions of dollars and Gigawatt-hours on LLMs.
Looking at their annual report summaries and their huge staff, my guess slants a bit towards either bodies like the CIA or some ideologically-motivated billionaires (e.g. talk about the "dictator Maduro", focus on Iran etc.)
Nothing bad about it, of course. It's just it's long time overdue to move to Switzerland as well, I see.
However, the screenshots for "List markers in RTL text" are the same it seems. The list markers are on the left in both cases.
So basically, it will be useless. How many use epiphany please? That thing has been so extremely ineffective. It's like 1999 (not that everything was bad in 1999).
> follows GNOME’s design guidelines: no menubar, a hamburger menu
Oh. my. god.
So Ladybird worships uselessness now. Also, GTK progressively gets worse and with GTK5 they will (try to) kill of xorg-server too. Some people disagree with that - https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver and https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng; I get it that there are not that many folks using that, but the point is that the GNOME corporate mindset has a tiny bit of competition. Perhaps that seed of competition grows over time until the corporate gnomeys have to change course (won't happen, as they are paid to abolish what is "old", but more competition is good, if only to try to "reason" with mr. ebassi and other hardcore gnomeys; sadly KDE also goes that way with wayland-only, thanks to anti Robin Hood Nate and his donation-pester daemon. Oldschool KDE devs didn't waylay people for money, now it is "pay or get nagged", thanks to Natey Nate).
We kind of need competition in the browser landscape, so in some ways having Ladybird is good. I don't really have much hope that ladybird will be able to challenge the evil Google empire though. But perhaps more people realise that Google controlling so much of the www-ecosystem (again, just look at how they nerfed google search in the last years) is a huge problem.
It's nice that Rust is so beginner friendly but it would be nicer to have a pure C++ browser for the more experienced developers, to use as a basis for their projects like Chromium is used.
I actually think Ladybird should lean into Rust more so it can compete on speed but still stay safe and friendly to contributors (as hopefully the compiler will prevent most bugs).
My hope is this will help them compete with tenets of "safe, fast, contributor-friendly and NOT owned by a corporation"
I think they should be first focusing on getting to a first stable version before re-writing parts of the browser.
Nice! Looks good. I prefer GTK UI/UX over Qt. Looking forward to seeing the development progress on that.
Platinum, per Ladybird's own sponsorship page, means $100,000+ per year. Money that, per the site, comes from "just people and companies who believe in an open web." Cloudflare, then.
The userbase of Ladybug users is so small that it's probably not worth the attackers' time, but keep in mind that it's an enormous step down in security from the mainstream browsers who are actively searching for bugs using the latest tools and paying bug bounties on external reports.
[0] https://blog.calif.io/p/mad-bugs-rce-in-ladybird
As noted by other authors, there does seem to be a wide surface area for attacks so, security remediation does seem to be a top-of-queue thing to be handled.
All in all, keep up the good work!