Welcome to Ladybird

This is great to see either way, but does anybody know if Ladybird's engine is being designed with embedded use in mind?

One of the big missteps that led to Blink/Chromium and to a lesser extent WebKit overtaking Gecko was Mozilla's choice to remove embedding support from Gecko and effectively make Firefox the only modern Gecko browser. It'd be great to get a new browser but it'd be even better to get a new web engine to embed that's not the hulking behemoth that is Blink.

Video announcement by Chris Wanstrath (GitHub co-founder) of the 501(c) non-profit and $1,000,000 donation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9edTqPMX_k

This is really awesome. I deeply admire what they're doing and hope it works out.

What I'd really love to see with this is some kind of monetization model outside of just relying on sponsors to a non-profit. Although I'm not a huge fan of their specific license, I think maybe the FUTO model might be something to look at: The user is fully free to inspect, modify, and redistribute copies of or modifications of the source code of the application, and the full features of the application are available at all times to all users, but there is a way to "pay for the application if you like it" built into the interface that is easy to access and convenient to use, that gives people some kind of "lifetime license" that just adds a rewarding cosmetic thing to their account or something. Maybe with a one-time notification reminding the user to pay after a certain amount of time using the application that can be permanently dismissed with a button that's part of the notification.

The old logo looked cute, the current one looks like a meta copycat. I wish they went for something with more personality, not this type of corporate logo.

This is exciting. Reminded me of the launch of Firefox and the New York Times ad with all the names from those of us who donated at the time. I wonder if Ladybird could do the same thing again.

I also cant believe 20+ years later we have to fight another Browser war.

This new homepage/logo lost the late 90s, early 00s charm that originally attracted me to Serenity. Instead, it looks looks not too different from hyped up, short-lived products that I've learned to avoid.

On a side note, I wonder if the constraints they've lost when decoupling from Serenity may impinge direction and, by definition, velocity. 2026 is a long way away for an Alpha.

> Singular focus

> We are focused on one thing: the web browser.

It is great that this was put first

I'm glad to see this and hope it succeeds. A proper challenge to Chrome's dominance is long overdue, and though I love and appreciate Firefox, it doesn't look as if it will come from that quarter under the current management's drift.

Personally, I think it would've been better to keep Serenity OS support but drop the no 3rd party code rule. While I realise it would've gone against Serenity OS's write everything philosophy, it would've kept the browser as a rallying focus for the OS. Thinking about what actually happened, if the Serenity OS now treats Ladybird as a port, then I think the result will be the same minus the social effect.

We no longer have an open web. We have a Google web. No amount of coding will change that. Nothing will change until enough people stop using Chrome that devs can get paid to support other browsers. People won't stop using Chrome as long as they keep up the current pace of glomming on more complex APIs and syntax. No other team can compete. Well, a couple could but they quit for short term cost cuts

Finally! Congrats to Andreas and the dev team that made it happen!

I hope a portion of the funds to go in Jakt's [1] development as it's a very promising language that looks both clean and elegant AND it's a memory-safe systems programming language.

[1] https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt/

I hope it works, we need something like that, not just a new wrapper around chromium.

Andreas Kling has been making videos about its development for some time now: https://www.youtube.com/@awesomekling

I miss the old, cute logo :(

Love the effort but...

> We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version on Linux and macOS. This will be aimed at developers and early adopters.

this is frighteningly far out for a prototype...

> Ladybird is currently in heavy development. We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.

It kinda sucks that it takes this long for an alpha release (I know that browsers are extremely complex). On the other hand, it also seems like this is quite quick for an alpha release of a browser that does not use code from any other browser before it. I can’t wait for 2026.

In a way, this reminds me of the early days of Phoenix (which is now Firefox).

  > Question: When is it coming?
  >
  > We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version on Linux and macOS. 
  > This will be aimed at developers and early adopters.

From watching awesomekling's livecoding videos, this seems rather far out on the timelines, but godspeed. We need something outside the scope of the current browser models.

I have never built a browser so pardon my ignorance, but is the Ladybird browser team blazing a new trail in browser tech instead of following the same old path of KHTML/WebKit/Gecko?

The constraints of 1990s are no longer there in 2024, and many new novel breakthroughs are available that might not have existed back then.

This is the last working archive of ladybird old website: https://web.archive.org/web/20240630172605/https://ladybird....

Amazing news! It would be great to read how did it come to attract such great sponsorships. Was that actively searched for by Andreas?

Annoucement post: https://ladybird.org/announcement.html

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845954)

I am very happy to see this. I'm also excited to see what successor language they choose. I wasn't expecting them to integrate with another language, I'm curious to see what they go with.

The AI generated MacBook threw me off a little.

"Backed by non-profit" .... shudders

I'm being unfair, but am I? Have been stung a few too many times by those words

Single file packaged web browser will be just what the internet needs. Like QTWeb which is no longer supported.

I personally wait for Servo to mature and power a decent browser. Especially with Vulkan renderer.

Will ladybird be fundamentally different enough that my browser can’t be fingerprinted?

I have this totally hyperbolic belief that the most important part of the World Wide Web today is just CSS 2.1 and a few extra modules on top.

If anyone can implement a sane, readable, cleanly extendable CSS 2.1+ C library that gives you enough exposed metric information to do your own rendering, or maybe even expose a backing layer assisted abstraction since web rendering can be very expensive, you've solved what most people care about with making their own desktop software.

CEF is definitely not the answer for this, nor is Electron, and the people around Servo are deluding themselves or outright lying that they care about creating a solution that helps people rasterize web content. The latter most seemed to be all about self-promotion and false governance.

The WWW is great and all, but I think a lot of developers honestly want more direct control over their own apps.

I'm honestly surprised there's no popular alternative to CSS 2.1 that has come out because people realize that it's a lost cause trying to implement all of these worthless standards that get added to web browsers.

No one is using the joystick API. No one is using WebUSB. Just awful, worthless ideas.

From https://ladybird.org/why-ladybird.html

    The world needs a browser that puts people first, contributes to open standards using a brand new engine, and is free from advertising's influence.
     
    This is why I've co-founded the Ladybird Browser Initiative with Andreas and my family has pledged $1M to support Ladybird's development. I believe in Ladybird and I believe in Andreas' vision, and I hope you'll help us support an open, independent browser that supports you.
     
    Chris Wanstrath
    GitHub Founder & former CEO

Mildly disappointing, though understandable, that this is C++. (Would have been interesting to see a from-scratch Rust or even Zig implementation.)

Repo here: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird

Edit: From the FAQ...

> Ladybird started as a component of the SerenityOS hobby project, which only allows C++. The choice of language was not so much a technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain.

> However, now that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect. We are actively evaluating a number of alternatives and will be adding a mature successor language to the project in the near future. This process is already quite far along, and prototypes exist in multiple languages.

I’m confused. One paragraph says it’s grownn into a cross platform browser. Next that it is in heavy development with an alpha release in about a year and a half from now

Sounds interesting, but the lack of planned Windows or mobile support makes this DOA.

There are already Linux browsers with their own independent engines (for example, Konqueror uses KHTML), so what about this makes it special beyond having a Daddy Warbucks to fund its development?

I was very excited about this but I must say I lost a lot of that excitement when I found out it's written in a non-memory-safe language (C++). Browsers are one of the few things we use every day that really need to be as safe and secure as possible so it was a huge disappointment.

The past 20 years of seemingly endless browser vulnerabilities due to memory management issues has left me... Skeptical. We're still seeing vulnerabilities based on memory management bugs in Chrome and the non-Rust parts of Firefox!

The sooner we stop making stuff like browsers in unsafe languages the better.