[1GZ0]

Ladybird has garnered a level of mainstream attention that SerenityOS never really managed to.

The browser has the potential to impact many more people, and the project is well funded by large investors.

It makes sense that Andreas would shift his focus to LadyBird at this point.

While Safari is busy being Safari and Firefox is busy eating glue in the corner, I'd love to see LadyBird become a real contender in the browser market.

[culi]

> I'd love to see LadyBird become a real contender in the browser market

At this pace it would likely take decades just for them to be complete enough to show up on MDN or wpt.fyi

But I agree. With Microsoft ditching their independent Edge and becoming Chromium-based and Opera doing the same we're really down to 3 real engines. The best fourth option we can get are Goanna-based browsers like Pale Moon which are themselves just an early fork of firefox

A completely new and fresh often can go a long way in safeguarding the openness of the web. Even if there's not a powerful company behind it

[Zetaphor]

> At this pace it would likely take decades just for them to be complete enough to show up on MDN or wpt.fyi

The important thing to keep in mind with this announcement is that the glacial pace was previously a restriction of being attached to SerenityOS. Everything needed to be built from scratch with no reliance on third party libraries. Now that they're detaching from Serenity they can start reaping the benefits of the existing work in the FOSS ecosystem, which should enable a faster pace of development.

[destructionator]

> Now that they're detaching from Serenity they can start reaping the benefits of the existing work in the FOSS ecosystem, which should enable a faster pace of development.

now they could embed chromium LOL

[admax88qqq]

Indeed! Now they can use chromium and get a big running start /s

I’m not sure what in the FOSS ecosystem will actually help them if they’re trying to take a fresh set of eyes on implementing a web browser.

EDIT: ga sibling comment beat me to the joke

[lcouturi]

Well, they could build their UI using an existing toolkit, like GTK or Qt. Though, when I previously tested Ladybird it seemed to be using GTK and the current AUR package lists Qt as a dependency, so it seems they're already doing that.

They could also rely on existing multimedia libraries for audio/video (ffmpeg). Those are the main things that jump out to me. There's so much ground to cover that there's probably more, though. Maybe SDL for gamepad support?

[mrdoob]

harfbuzz

[qingcharles]

It depends what the end goal of Ladybird is. I'd be happy with a browser that just had literally zero telemetry and I could install plugins to block ads.

Some things in other browsers could be used without much pain, e.g. image renderers, JavaScript engines. Things that are totally self contained and can be used until someone writes a suitable replacement.

[nottorp]

> and the project is well funded by large investors.

Hmm, why is there no mention of that in the splitting announcement?

Did said large investors trigger the drop of SerenityOS because they don't want to waste their resources on a niche hobby platform?

[awesomekling]

Ladybird does not have investors, only sponsors/donors. We have received some really generous donations in the past, for example $100,000 from Shopify in 2023 which allowed me to hire a few of our contributors to work full time on the project. :)

Sponsors have no direct influence over the project, but I obviously feel a strong moral obligation to put 100% of the funds towards improving Ladybird and nothing else.

[nottorp]

100k is not "well funded by large investors" anyway :)

[lukan]

Sadly it is, when we are talking about independent open source projects.

[ykonstant]

That could fund my research for 5 years :(

[nottorp]

Yeah but one person working 5 years or 5 persons working 1 year isn't likely to be enough to make a modern browser that is feature complete enough to be able to replace the likes of Firefox, Chrome etc.

[1GZ0]

Apologies, I did mean "well sponsored" not well funded, my mistake :') You're doing awesome work and I'm really excited for you and the project! All the best :)

[The_Colonel]

I agree (apart from the popular hate on Firefox). Ladybird is promising and has a much bigger chance to make an impact than SerenityOS.

But it's a bit disappointing to see that it's still pretty much a one-man project. Especially to have a chance to get close to the performance of Chrome and Firefox, it will need a large investment.

The amount of engineering resources poured into just making JavaScript fast is mind-numbing. But even "just" providing a light, mostly standards-compliant browser with a sorta-good-enough performance would be great.

Edit: Just saw a video from a few days ago talking about JS performance. Apparently the target is reaching JavaScriptCore performance, without JIT enabled. Disappointing, but understandable.

[kelnos]

I don't think that was intended to be hate on Firefox itself, but hate on the general mismanagement of the project by Mozilla. Firefox itself may not be in the corner sniffing glue, but it often feels like much of the decision-making at Mozilla is glue-sniffing-fueled.

(Happy Firefox user here; I still don't understand why anyone who cares even the tiniest bit about privacy or an open web is using Chrome.)

[nextaccountic]

Yeah, Firefox is expert on shooting its own foot, but Chrome is just sociopathic.

I will take the glue sniffing kid over a bully any time.

[hurutparittya]

I think the Firefox hate is completely justified. At this point the only positive thing about Firefox is that "at least it's not Chrome".

[nacs]

As a Firefox user, this exactly.

The amount of things that now need to be toggled off on a new install are approaching Windows “telemetry” levels: disable sponsored shortcuts on homepage, disable experimental “Studies”, sponsored suggestions in search bar, “suggested extensions”, Pocket, and the list goes on.

I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF..

[HeckFeck]

> I really need to look into a privacy friendly fork of FF..

I'd love to make the jump too, just that I rely upon FF sync too much. It's handy getting your bookmarks and other details on mobile devices. The other forks look to be desktop only.

[cassepipe]

True, it's very handy... but can't Chrome do it with a Google account ? (I really don't know)

To me the really seeling point of firefox is being able to switch off search suggestions. Now the bar only searches opened Tabs, history, bookmarks and I can tab into them quickly. If nothing turns up, pressing Enter will still launch a search. Being able to do casual navigation without having to go through a search engine is a killer feature (and it's better for the planet).

Not only tab but you can search directly into opened Tabs/history/bookmarks with the right %/^/* symbols !

EDIT : Almost forgot, it only really shines with that extension that prevent searches to turn up in your history --> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/history-autod...

[metasaval]

FYI, you can use a desktop fork and mobile Firefox with Firefox sync.

source: I do that with floorp and Firefox for android.

[MrAlex94]

Not to hang around like a bad smell every time they come up, but just think it’s worth noting they are not open source anymore, instead being “source available”. Really gives me the old school “greenwashing” vibes Microsoft used to do with their Shared Source licenses. Poor showing considering they used others work to get to where they are, then shut the door when others started doing the same.

I would say feel free to give Waterfox a try - I’ve tried to strike the balance of useable web and privacy, with the added enhancement of Oblivious DNS enabled by default.

[metasaval]

also just realized that waterfox does have an android version [1], if you want you use the same fork on desktop and android

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.waterfox.a...

[CRConrad]

> I rely upon FF sync too much. It's handy getting your bookmarks and other details on mobile devices.

I would love to use that functionality, but... How?!? Once you have a gazillion tabs open on your phone, the “Open tabs from other devices” (or whatever it's called) menu item on the desktop just shows an endlessly spinning spinner. :-( So maybe via bookmarks... But where's the “Bookmark all open tabs” menu item in FF for Android???

Anyone got any tips?

[skeaker]

This is an extremely uncharitable view of Firefox and an outrageously generous view of Windows. The things you listed take 2 checkboxes in a new tab window, 2 checkboxes in settings (which has a search bar that takes you right to them by just searching "studies" or "data collection"), 2 checkboxes in settings (search "suggestions"), 2 clicks (right click the pocket button and click hide)... The only tricky one is the recommended extensions but that's tucked at the bottom of a page nobody uses anyways (everyone just googles the extension they want and grabs it from the web), but even that takes like 15 seconds once you know what setting it is in about:config. I actually don't even disable the two telemetry checkboxes because they're transparent about the data they take and what they do with it, so I'm happy to share it. You can easily do all of this in one or two minutes and it won't roll itself back.

With Windows you would be lucky to even have a supported method to disable their telemetry, and if you do get one it will probably be through an obscure series of registry edits that will ultimately get rolled back during a system update.

[Aurornis]

> This is an extremely uncharitable view of Firefox and an outrageously generous view of Windows. The things you listed take 2 checkboxes in a new tab window, 2 checkboxes in settings (which has a search bar that takes you right to them by just searching "studies" or "data collection"), 2 checkboxes in settings (search "suggestions"), 2 clicks (right click the pocket button and click hide)... The only tricky one is

It’s wild to me that this is being presented as if it’s not a big deal.

Shows how far the goalposts have moved in this conversation.

[shiroiushi]

How big a deal it is depends on what you're comparing to. Yeah, at first, when I read his post, I was wondering if it was a joke or something, with so many checkboxes in different places. Then I got to the point about Windows and realized he's right: compared to Windows, all those steps in Firefox actually aren't that bad, and actually stay unchecked unlike Windows which happily changes things back.

[skeaker]

It's not a big deal. They're easy to disable and easier to just ignore. It just doesn't matter in the way that you want me to panic over.

[eviks]

"by just searching "studies" isn't "just", to have to remember the option names and be certain you remember them all (and not miss the newly added ones), it's not that trivial of a hurdle

[adastra22]

I cannot tell if this is sarcasm or not.

[skeaker]

It isn't. I can without any sarcasm disable all of that in about a minute or two, and for the most part see no reason to do so in the first place (the worst bit is probably sponsored links on new tabs but that's also the easiest to remove). Acting like this invalidates the existence of the whole browser is what makes no sense to me.

Also Windows configuration is terrible.

[worble]

I don't use it myself, but Librewolf is a pretty popular fork that attempts to be private out of the box and is usually updated pretty quickly.

[Propelloni]

Yes, or Waterfox [1].

[1] https://www.waterfox.net/

[EasyMark]

I will definitely second this. I moved over to librewolf last year and love it. I’m glad Mozilla is staying in business though. I know not every organization has my beliefs and I can live with that

[nacs]

Thanks. Finally got around to installing Librewolf and it works great.

Sensible defaults as Firefox should be.

[intelVISA]

Agree, hopefully King Andreas can carry the torch ignited by Old Mozilla that was lost a few years back.

[bachmeier]

> The amount of engineering resources poured into just making JavaScript fast is mind-numbing. But even "just" providing a light, mostly standards-compliant browser with a sorta-good-enough performance would be great.

We're long past the time that we should be using one type of app for text plus a bit of Javascript and another for running apps that are hosted on a remote server. I would definitely use a fast, lightweight, privacy-oriented browser for sites like HN or viewing local HTML files.

[bgribble]

> But it's a bit disappointing to see that it's still pretty much a one-man project.

I don't know much about this project and I have never used it. But in my experience as a developer and user of software I couldn't disagree more.

The longer something can stay a one-person project, the better! Nothing kills creativity, innovation, and velocity faster than having to make every decision by committee.

Big communities are great when a project is in its maturity and mostly needs tending and slow evolution. They mitigate the risk of a single developer getting bored and walking away, or turning into a murderous wacko, or attempting to monetize the project to death. Not naming any names.

But when something is being built from scratch? Give me a single developer with a fat internet connection, alone in a cabin in the woods with a shed out back full of Red Bull :)

[The_Colonel]

> The longer something can stay a one-person project, the better! Nothing kills creativity, innovation, and velocity faster than having to make every decision by committee.

One person can get surprisingly far, but there's a limit beyond which no single human will scale. Getting to the v8 performance is IMHO such an example. You might be OK with a browser which has a noticeably subpar performance, but it will likely stifle mainstream adoption (which again, might be OK for you and that's fine).

[tredre3]

> Getting to the v8 performance is IMHO such an example.

There's no doubt in my mind that Andreas could achieve that by himself. He's worked professionally on webkit, and implemented a JS interpreter, a JS bytecode interpreter, and a JS JIT all by himself after all. Also let's not forget that V8 is open-source, all their optimizations are available for others to see and implement.

But to be clear this isn't a one man project, he hired a few contributors to work full time on it. Sure, it's a small team, but as said in sibling comments a small team has much more velocity.

[The_Colonel]

Seems like Andreas doesn't have the same delusions of ridiculing the army of (pretty smart) Chrome/V8 devs by doing the same job just on his own. His own goal is to achieve the performance of non-JITed JavaScriptCore - i.e. an optimizing interpreter.

[sterlind]

Matching V8's perf would be infeasible, but couldn't a small team get within an order of magnitude of V8's perf for a decent chunk of websites? How much slower is Fabrice Bellard's QuickJS?

[materielle]

Andreas isn’t targeting V8’s JIT performance. The goal is to be roughly in line with WebKit’s performance with the JIT turned off.

The theory is that JS JIT compilers don’t actually improve real world performance on the majority of websites. This was apparently per the advice of the authors of Chrome’s and Safari’s JITs.

[shiroiushi]

>or turning into a murderous wacko

A good example of truth being stranger than fiction.

[1GZ0]

Have to admit the Firefox hate is mostly irrelevant. its from a place of disappointment with Mozilla more than hate really.

I agree that the amount of work and competition LadyBird is facing from Chrome alone is staggering, but at the same time, I'll always root for the little guy in tech, since imo thats where real innovation comes from.

[bambax]

On recent hardware, how much "performance" do we really need? Wouldn't almost any compliant browser be basically good enough?

[jerf]

There's several decades-old sayings to the effect of what Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away, or similar observations about the software side of computing spending all the hardware improvements and more.

To this general principle you can add browsers and websites; what the browser giveth, the websites taketh away. You may think browsers are slow... they really aren't! There's a staggering, even arguably insane, amount of optimization in there. But then we write websites that are barely adequate, and load them up with ad scripts that aren't even barely adequate, and blame the browsers for being slow.

Write yourself an old-school 1998-style static website without a big pile of fancy features, give yourself solid .css and .js caching and use it judiciously, and the browsers can blast content to the screen blazingly fast, for all the work it is doing.

If you even could feed a 2024 web site to a 1998 browser, you'd probably be able to eat a meal while it was trying to render facebook.

[bambax]

> You may think browsers are slow

I don't. I use uBlock Origin which blocks "ad scripts" and the like. My everyday machine is an old PC (older than 10 years) still on Win7, and everything is running just fine.

I also use a top of the line, recent PC on Ubuntu, mostly for development. Websites there feel instantaneous. I sometimes wonder what a subpar browser would feel like on that machine.

Maybe I should just try to run Ladybird on this to see how it goes.

[skissane]

So many apps have low-hanging fruit performance issues that don’t get addressed because they are judged to perform adequately in practice. Addressing them takes developer time, and not all developers have the skill set to do so (especially in a methodical way).

But, what if we had an AI agent dedicated to improving performance? It doesn’t need to be capable of solving every problem, but it could address the low-hanging fruit problems which aren’t hard to solve but nobody has time to look at.

[ChrisRR]

As an embedded developer it always makes me sad to see physicists and engineers pushing the limits of physics to make faster hardware, just for devs to squander that power with lazy programming.

[luplex]

No, that's actually the point of faster chips: To make software development less challenging and cheaper.

[The_Colonel]

Exactly. What people also miss that the complexity grew considerably because of the need to cover many more "edge" cases. 30 years ago, you could assume a rough display size (fixed layouts) and DPI (no scaling needed), assume ASCII / ISO-8859-1, assume that the user is able-bodied and doesn't need accessibility features, target just DOS etc.

There is also a lot of accidental complexity which you might be able to get rid of only by BC breaks, unfortunately.

[shiroiushi]

Don't forget, back in the early days of the WWW, web pages weren't mostly annoying ads. These days, this is very, very important, so we dedicate a lot of computing resources to it.

[account42]

No, it really isn't. The point of faster chips is for the user to be able to do more things and do them faster (without having to wait for the computer). This may mean more complex software that uses the added capabilities to do actually useful stuff that would not have been feasible before. It does not mean meaninglessly squandering performance on layers of abstractions because that takes slightly less developer time.

[Qwertious]

The point of faster chips is to make computer programs faster. We've increased performance a thousandfold and yet programs almost always take more than a frame (16ms) to update. Once everything is rendering at absolute 60FPS (and actually, 144FPS would be nice), and the hardware is reasonably cheap (Raspberry Pi cost perhaps), then the point is to make software development cheaper.

[spookie]

One would think so, but some browsers do not handle well repaints or do it prematurely. I've been testing a fediverse platform against a plethora of browsers, and I'm always surprised at the differences. It's not terrible, but some do take their time.

[The_Colonel]

LadyBird author posted a couple of days ago a demo of twitter and he himself admitted that it's painfully slow.

[account42]

To be fair, Twitter is painfully slow on other browsers as well due to only fetching and rendering the content after the page and javascript have loaded.

[shiroiushi]

That sounds like a feature, not a bug.

[Kiro]

As someone developing web games, my answer is no.

[account42]

Web games are squarely outside "what do we really need" territory.

[Kiro]

That's not up to you to decide.

[niutech]

> I'd love to see LadyBird become a real contender in the browser market.

Definitely Ladybird, but I'd also love to see Servo and Netsurf being developed.

[teekert]

Yeah I agree. Would be nice to see a browser option that is not 20+ years old. People say it’s not doable but this here is a real opportunity.

[niutech]

There are also: Servo, Netsurf, Ekioh Flow.

[rascul]

> Would be nice to see a browser option that is not 20+ years old.

Chrome is less than 20 years old.

[ZiiS]

KHTML+KJS released in 1998, via WebKit from 2001, in 2008 it gained the Chrome name, but the code has more than 20 years of legacy.

[rafram]

There’s very little WebKit / KHTML code left in Chrome.

[wizzwizz4]

There's very little NT 3.1 code left in Windows, but it's still clear how old that project is.

[trustno2]

All unixes are descendants of original Unix from PDP-7 days. Why does it matter?

...ok the /bin /usr/bin nonsense still stays after decades, maybe you have a point

[robertlagrant]

> KHTML+KJS released in 1998, via WebKit from 2001, in 2008 it gained the Chrome name, but the code has more than 20 years of legacy.

Why do you want the oldest code to be less than 20 years old? Why is that "nice"?

[ChrisRR]

Because 20 years is like half the history of modern computing. A lot has changed in a small amount of time

[robertlagrant]

So what? Code doesn't rust.

[svnt]

The last time a major browser originated, RAM was measured in MB, CPU freq in MHz, and the iPod was the thing that the one trend hunter your friend knew was about to buy.

The major browser platform today, smartphones, did not exist. PDAs did not even have wireless internet yet.

The basis for the functionality of the browser is due for a reimagining.

[KwanEsq]

Chrome forked from Webkit, which forked from KHTML, which apparently dates from 4th November 1998, so Chrome's base is 25 years and 7 months old tomorrow.

[paulryanrogers]

KHTML was born in 1998 and became the foundation of Chrome and Safari. All major browsers are over a decade old, or just skins of decade+ old engines.