I want to follow updates from this project. They have a Twitter account but not Mastodon sigh
RSS is not even enabled on the Newz page on the website.
I share the disappointment.
I found they have a newsletter, that sounds like an acceptable middle ground, not good, not terrible.
Im glad to see this. Discord is a nightmare. It's the same as a Facebook only group to me.
The website makes it sound like all of the code being bespoke and "based on standards" is some kind of huge advantage but all I see is a Herculean undertaking with too few engineers and too many standards.
W3C lists 1138 separate standards currently, so if each of their three engineers implements one discrete standard every day, with no breaks/weekends/holidays, then having an alpha available that adheres to all 2024 web standards should be possible by 2026?
This is obviously also without testing but these guys are serious, senior engineers, so their code will be perfect on the first try, right?
Love the passion though, can't wait to see how this project plays out.
W3C lists 1138 separate standards currently, so if each of their three engineers implements one discrete standard every day, with no breaks/weekends/holidays, then having an alpha available that adheres to all 2024 web standards should be possible by 2026?
Yes, that is exactly the plan: "We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version"
a Herculean undertaking with too few engineers and too many standards
Yeah, as a layperson this is my take. If mozilla is struggling to stay in the game then I just don't really see how an unfinanced indie team has a shot.
You are assuming that they only started now from point 0. They have probably been working on it for a bit before announcing everything.
Love the idea! Shopify as the highest tier sponsor? Not so much.
I mean if they're gonna give money without demanding anything I'm sure no complaints from the devs.
Shopify or an exec there might find some value in avoiding Google owning the web, could maybe bring goodwill for the company, or they could just be looking for a write off.
I'm curious what issue you see with that? It seems like the project is only accepting unrestricted donations, but is there something suspicious about shopify that makes it's involvement concerning (I don't know much about them)?
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I've had more than a handful of people bitching at me that it's impossible to make a new, open web browser in this day.
I think it's less that it's "impossible" but rather that it's expensive.
Honestly we've in general shoved too much shit into the browser that's not strictly related to just browsing web sites.
And you "have to" support all the layers and layers and layers of added stuff, or you can't "compete".
But, at the same time, the goals of making a good-enough browser that mostly works and isn't completely enshittified and captured by corpo big tech interests is a very worthy project and 100% support what they're doing.
JavaScript was a mistake.
And it went downhill from there.
It was fine when it was contained to an actual web site instead of infecting desktop software too. To me, using JS for that purpose feels like using PHP to write a 3D video game.
using PHP to write a 3D video game.
Somewhere, someone just had a really bad idea.
It’s a general language (though primarily adopted by web as backend engine), so you can basically expect people already have had this idea.
Eh, scriptable content was probably fine.
Techbros going 'holy shit, we should make EVERYTHING a website!' was the curse that doomed us.
Pushing for bloated web apps instead of having optimized and perfectly functional websites was what killed it for me.
Their rendering engine is already pretty solide (see penultimate video in their channel). Now that their "no third party code" restriction is lifted, they can actually focus on building a browser engine instead of recreating 30 years worth of technologies from scratch.
C++
If they're starting a browser from scratch, why would they not have chosen Rust? Seems very short sighted to not have learned from Firefox.
They used c++ initially since it was spawned from SerenityOS, which was designed to be a mashup of win2000 and unix.
now that Ladybird is its own project, it's not constrained to that goal, and they have said they will incorporate modern languages.
Funny how in the video the guy say that all other browsers are based on Google's code. But Firefox is also independent right?
He says "powered by or funded by Google". Firefox depends on Google financially, most of the income of Mozilla comes from Google paying for being the default search engine.
They try to diversify their income (Firefox VPN, email alias service, etc.), but anything they try gets a huge backlash from the community, and still small compared to the the money from google.
Google is Mozilla's biggest source of income, and google developers have actively contributed code to the Firefox engine.
So you decide for yourself what level of independence you assign to it.
Firefox gets tons of funding from Google, and their code is quite frankly humongous. From what I understand, it's extremely hard to get the gecko web view engine to work. In another browser, unless it's a fork of Firefox, unlike Chromium where you can just redesign an entire browser around it.
They’re making a new browser engine from scratch in an open way, absolutely amazing!
I do have several questions:
Why would they use BSD instead of GPL? If you care about open-source so much, why would you make it possible for a company to run away with your fancy new engine?
Why are they creating a new browser, when even firefox has to struggle to keep some semblance of market share? I get that not every project needs to aim to be “the biggest”, and that even a smaller project (in terms of users), can be fun. It’s just that writing a browser engine that can handle the modern web seems like an almost Sisyphean task; which makes me wonder what their motivation(?) is.
Why the FLOSS are they using closed-source proprietary discord as their main communication channel?
As someone who uses BSD licensed modified code at work and relies on it quite a lot, it's crucial to me choosing which projects I'm able to use in the first place.
Personally, I prefer a license that allows for commercial use in the way that companies need them to, and if my own work ever can provide a patch back upstream I'd be happy to do so, but most of what I do is just tweaking things that exist to suit my purposes which doesn't really help anyone but my business rivals which I personally am not interested in doing if I don't have to.
I prefer to have the freedom to do as I wish with the code, as compared to being bound to do as the author wishes and essentially just not using that code in the first place because I can't. I'm not in a position to change what I can and can't do because of the requirements of the business I work for, and I'm grateful to those that choose licenses that allow me to use their work.
They're creating a new browser because they want to. It started as an OS building project that the lead dev did to help stay sober.
They use discord because it's popular. Insert Ouroborus argument here, and at the end of the day it's still the most popular app.
Best of luck, I guess, but seems like a doomed project to me. Forking WebKit, Gecko, or even Servo would seem much more reasonable, and even that is a huge undertaking.
Contributing directly to Firefox and reducing the dependence on Google should be three best bet
I do not understand the urge to start from scratch instead of forking an existing, mature codebase. This is typically a rookie instinct, but they aren't rookie so there's perhaps an alternative motive of some sort.
Because there are only like 3 browser engines: Chrome’s Blink, Firefox’s Gecko and Apple‘s WebKit. And while they are all open source, KHTML, the last independent browser engine got discontinued last year and hasn’t been actively developed since 2016.
There’s need in the space for an unaffiliated engine. Google’s share is far too high for a healthy market (roughly 75%), WebKit never got big outside of Safari (although there are a few like Gnome Web, there’s no up to date WebKit based browser on Windows) and Gecko has its own problems (like lack of HEVC support).
So, in my book, this is exciting news. Sure it‘ll take a while to mature and it is up against software giants but it‘s something because Mozilla doesn’t seem to have a working strategy to fight against Google‘s monopoly and Apple doesn’t have to.
Also Gecko's development is led by people thinking that it being usable outside of Firefox\Thunderbird is a bad thing. There was a time when Gnome's browser was based on Gecko, not WebKit. And in general it's influenced by bad practices.
SerenityOS is an amazing project, of course. To do so much work for something completely disconnected from the wider FOSS ecosystem, and with such results.
So it's cool that they've decided to split off the browser as its own project.
Because software monocultures are bad. The vast majority of browsers are Chromium based. Since Google de-facto decides what gets in Chromium, sooner or later the downstream forks are forced to adopt their changes. Manifest V3 is a great example of this. You can only backport for so long, especially when upstream is being adversarial to your changes. We need an unaffiliated engine that corrects the mistakes we made with KHTML/Webkit.
There is currently no implementation of web standards that is under a more permissive license than LGPL or MPL. I think that is a gap worth filling and if I recall that is what Ladybird is doing.
I can't understand how people can continue relying on chrome and derivatives like electron, CEF etc. and not see it as a problem.
Kudos to them. Opera gave up on this dream being unable to accommodate all the nuances of web standards and accounting for out of conformance behaviours that many websites rely on the daily.
I reckon this browser will need to be at least on par with reasonably recent version of Firefox to see significant adoption.
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