We need more browser engines, especially those that are under NFP ownership. WebKit and Chromium have become too dominant.
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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I used to follow Ladybird/SerenityOS stuff but their takes on "political stuff" is just... too bad.
For sure going to use a webbrowser from some random programmers/organizations.
Ladybird is extremely amazing project. Andreas is a good person, with great community around him. The only thing I didn't like is the new logo - it is very meta-ish. Looks very corporative, and doesn't really resemble browser :(
It’s great to build a completely open browser from scratch and I want to follow updates from the project. They have a Twitter account but not Mastodon sigh
And Discord for communication
The other day I was reading some GitHub issues involving an issue I was also having and the maintainer of the project was directing people to their discord server to talk about and hopefully resolve the issue. On top of that, they came back to the GitHub issue and just posted that after some discussion (on Discord) the issue had been resolved. Totally useless to me and anybody else who might be searching for that thing.
I am still trying to decide what I think about the Ladybird / SerenityOS split.
Short-term, this is going to make it a lot easier for Ladybird to make progress. So good.
Long-term, I feel like a lot of the values that Andreas used to express about SerenityOS have been compromised.
I very much liked the, everything from scratch and complete harmony within and complete control over our whole stack idea that came with the mono-repo.
I also thought that the energy from Ladybird was greatly contributing to SerenityOS. That is lost now, as is their chief architect, technical steward, and community organizer.
Much of the low-level performance work that went into Ladybird benefited the whole OS. Did SerenityOS even post a monthly update on YouTube this month? The community engagement has already been dampened.
SerenityOS was certainly benefiting from the networking, codec, and image format work. The biggest impact will obviously be the loss of what was emerging as an amazing native web browser. They cannot even use Ladybird now due to the reliance on so many third-party components. I guess it forks from where it was?
How is error handling done in Ladybird now? It was beautifully consistent before. What now?
I don't think there really is a need or use case for Serenity OS outside of a hobby project. However, having a new web engine would be great for the open web. I just hope they take privacy seriously.
Don’t get me wrong, I am very excited by the possibility of having an independent browser engine. Firefox was that. Mozilla as an organization has compromised that. I hope Ladybird can avoid the same issues.
The rationale for SerenityOS beyond therapy and fun was precisely the “being responsible for everything ourselves” aspect of the project. Andreas has previously described it as a form of accountability. He has also described it as a kind of freedom in contrast to the Linux model with its inevitable politics, bike-shedding, and inefficiency as you try to get dozens of projects to agree on direction and merge code. Ultimately, the mono repo allowed the project to do things right in the right place in the stack ( in the code ). It allowed the project to move quickly, to avoid legacy, and to continuously improve and modernize. It allows harmony across the entire developer AND user experience.
Linux is famously fragmented. There is no open source desktop OS that provides “whole system” design and user experience harmony. Haiku comes close but it has never gotten much native app momentum. On Haiku, you are going to run the Falkon browser, use GIMP, and run LibreOffice. None of those are developed in concert with the OS.
SerenityOS held the promise of Ladybird, and Hack Studio, and the userland utilities ( and everything else ) all being developed in concert. The same GUI toolkit was used for everything. The same standard library. The same error handling and code level security measures.
This was the “need or use case”. Not anymore.
And it is not just SerenityOS. Ladybird is not as independent as it was. Not just the sponsorships but the code. SerenityOS is no longer a dependency but 8 other projects are. No more mono-repo and goodbye to all the reasons it was considered a good thing.
The problem with doing it all under one project is that it leads to labor sprawl and duplicate efforts. I support Ladybird but I think trying to recreate every single existing project is silly from a technical perspective. From a educational perspective it can be very useful.
"I know what a lot of you are thinking" Yeah what about Firefox? "It's impossible to make a new web engine" Um... No ... Probably not that hard really with pretty decent standards these days. Performance JavaScript is probably pretty hard and a lot of the fancier protocols.
Seriously, what makes you better than Firefox?
Whatever, another choice isn't bad I guess.
Firefox has its own set of issues. It is the best we have right now but we could benefit from another choice.
A reminder that the Servo project has resumed active development since the start of 2023, and is making good progress every month.
If you're looking for a serious in-progress effort to create a new open, safe, performant, independent, and fully-featured web engine, that's the one you should be keeping an eye on.
It won't be easy trying to catch up to continuously evolving and changing web standards, but that's the only effort with a chance.
Though I am a big Rust fan, I think Ladybird is evolving fast enough that my money is on Ladybird to become a true daily driver first. The biggest obstacle to that is JavaScript as Ladybird still uses its homegrown engine ( very slow ) and Servo is integrating SpiderMonkey.
Ladybird just got a million dollar shot in the arm. We will see what becomes of that.
Despite the Mozilla origins, I do not think you can say Servo is backed by Google. The claim from Ladybird is that it is the only browser not financially supported by Google.
I would say that Servo is corporate backed at this point and Ladybird still is not ( backed by donations only ) but with large donations by a single donor, we will see if Ladybird is able to stay completely independent over time.
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