Hot take: Since it's a BSD licensed browser at some point in the future, there's going to be a company that funds it brings it to mainstream with their flavor, and then will over throw chromium in time. Replace an 'evil' with another 'evil'.
this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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All hail the cuck license, ensuring we end up back at the same place every single time.
Good intentions and all that
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I like this project and just hope it was gplv3 or some similar copyleft license
Ladybird is licences under BSD-clause 2. Which allows privatization of the code.
IMO a web browser should be GPLv3, specially to not allow DRM bullshit in the browser.
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It's nice and all but usage of Swift is kind of not great.
Why is Swift bad?
Also, I noticed the project has taken donations from mostly non-foss companies. Let's hope they stand by their principles
Shopify (i.e. Shittify) being their top donor already has me looking sideways at this project. They'll invest in anything they think they can get an edge with and if something starts to happen they'll fuck it up and wallstreet-ify it as fast as possible if they can.
Their (Shopify's) guru founder Tobi made a huge NFT play that went absolutely nowhere while I still worked there. They spent a lot of time and money on it, right before they laid several thousand people off.
Oh great. Now I'm losing hope in this project even more.
I mean I hope Ladybird devs do a great build and go their own way without being corrupted by their donors and all that, don't get me wrong. But whenever I see that dumb shopping bag logo I get the no feelings.
You can also read up on how the vast majority of Mozilla's funding has been coming from Google for a very long time, and draw your own conclusions from that fact.
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While I agree shopify has a kind of "mierda touch", I still see it as if it goes sideways with them someone will just fork the code.
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Welp, I haven't seen anyone learn Swift other than for Apple stuff these days. So I wonder how many can actually contribute to the code. It's also made by Apple, so yeah. It would have been more performant and secure (both of which are pretty important in a browser) if it was written in a more low level language. For example Rust.
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As someone insecure in their masculinity I don't know if u would use ladybird. Now if it was MANbird I would.
Consider Edge you edgy man.
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Sounds fun, but I wish there were more people who'd invest in making Firefox's Gecko more easy to use (stretch goal: revive Proton, which is Electron but Firefox) instead of pushing a ton of effort into inventing a new thing.
That said, this is coming from SerenityOS (specifically, the founder and basically the entire community concentrating on building its browser instead of hacking the OS, resulting in a split), so I understand that it might be a lot harder to port large codebases to a new OS instead of than starting a new one.
Edit: It's Positron, not Proton
Well we wouldn't want Proton, it would be 2000x less lightweight than electron! /s
It seems to me that Tauri is maybe a better direction to invest resources in than a direct electron-but-Firefox. Its lighter weight and better sandboxed, and can presumably be configured to run with a Gecko engine instead of a chromium-based webview. I have no idea its status, but geckoview does seem to exist.
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The devs have some problematic views, mainly transphobic and misogynistic.
Also, the use of AI-generated images on their website.
So?
For many small project is AI/copied images or no images at all.
When you do not have money you are not hiring a 2000€/month artist to do imagery for your website. You go online to copy something or nowadays you can use AI to wrap it up. It's a tool at people's disposition like any other.
And before anyone comes talking about copyright laws... shall I present them my 10 TB hard drive of pirated media? Human culture is to be shared, not gatekeeped.
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Is this because they used "he" instead of "they" in the build instructions? ... They changed that and acknowledged the mistake. Surely that's enough. It's the fucking build instructions. I think we can probably find it in our hearts to forgive them.
[edit] Just in case people think I'm joking. I'm not. As far as I'm aware, the critical incident that that has resulted in people calling Ladybird devs anti-trans is that they wrote 'he' instead of 'they' in the build instructions. That's what caused the original outrage. And as far as I'm aware, there have been no other incidents. But please, if there is something of substance that I'm not aware of, post about it here.
To be clear, nobody was outraged by the devs using gendered language. The outrage was because they rejected multiple PRs to correct it under the guise of it being "political".
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It's interesting to see a new browser engine aside from Gecko and Chromium, especially with all the conundrum surrounding the Manifest v2 support.
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There was a gpl licensed browser engine someone by hobby is writing from scratch. I think theese companies supporting ladybird just do so because of license that they can proprietarify(like chromium)
How is it progressing so fast compared to Servo? Isn't Servo being developed for a longer time?
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What's the problem with the gecko engine?
What's the problem with the blink engine?
Multiple implementations is good for everyone.
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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.
This is how you make “critical mass” adoption that much more difficult.
As much as I love Linux, if you are creating a program to be used by everyone and anyone, you achieve adoption inertia and public consciousness penetration by focusing on the largest platform first. And at 72% market share, that would be Windows.
I hope this initiative works. I really do. But intentionally ignoring three-quarters of the market is tantamount to breaking at least one leg before the starting gate even opens. This browser is likely to be relegated to being a highly niche and special-interest-only browser with minuscule adoption numbers, which means it will be virtually ignored by web developers and web policy makers.
Linux users tend to give much better bug reports than Windows users (if they do at all). That alone is probably a good enough reason to do Linux first. There are many more good reasons when the first goal is getting it functional and not getting as many users as possible (who will probably hate it if they're not a technically skilled user because there will be bugs).
You're making an assumption their first priority is the number of users. I would suspect that isn't true, and they're aware Windows has more users.
LadyBird is an unusable pre-alpha-quality web browser. The fact that they haven't bothered porting to Windows yet is both thoroughly unsurprising and entirely meaningless. In its current state, it wouldn't become popular either way. But I guess Linux users have this weird inferiority complex where everything must instantly be dropped to port to Windows even when it makes little sense to do so.
Ladybird was originally started as a browser for SerenityOS, a POSIX operating system. Well into the project, they decided to make it cross-platform but that still meant POSIX ( Linux and macOS ). As interest ( and sponsorships ) came in from outside SerenityOS, focus moved more and more to the browser and away from SerenityOS.
Just recently, Ladybird decided to split from SerenityOS, allow more outside code, and in fact has dropped SerenityOS as a supported OS.
The project is fairly pragmatic. I am sure they will add Windows support as the core browser engine matures.
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