Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder

Hello friends, Ladybird founder here!

Here's a short video from Chris Wanstrath announcing our non-profit yesterday, and kicking things off with a $1M donation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9edTqPMX_k

Happy to answer questions :)

>Why build a new browser in C++ when safer and more modern languages are available?

>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that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect.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.

For comparison, in 2022 Mozilla had $1.3B in assets and over $500M in revenue:

https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2022/mozilla-fdn-202...

I want ladybird to succeed and show the world how ridiculous the Mozilla situation has been.

Love the project, but that website is pretty cold and soulless (as mentioned by others).

I quickly put together a "cleaner" design for anyone interested, which also uses the original (and objectively better) logo:

https://ladybird-dev.netlify.app/

It is a great honor to see a website I designed and coded at the top of the Hacker News front page! A big thank you to Chris Wanstrath for allowing me to work on it. I hope Ladybird becomes a mainstream browser, and I feel this is a moment similar to when Firefox rebranded from Phoenix.

P.S. Check out my UI/UX portfolio at https://hipfolio.co

No talk of the license on the frontpage. Visiting the GitHub repo tells me it is 2-clause BSD license. It's high time we had a GPLv3 web browser, otherwise, this risks the same fate as the rest of the browsers with proprietary forks.

This of course comes at the cost of not being able to support non-free parts of the web standard such as DRM.

I think people in this comment section are too harsh on the website. I think the design is pleasing and functional, and the project is communicated about clearly. The AI laptop is a bit of a shame, and the logo being bland instead of clever is a bummer, though. But plenty of products have a similar front page style, and it doesnt make me feel like it's a soulless startup.

Nitpick (or is it?) but the website is soulless and just bad. The website design communicates that this is just another immature project, desperately looking for a VC funding, just following modern design trends where "design == aesthetics". Yuck.

I am happy to see the project thrive.

I love the idea of this project! I'm looking forward to giving it a try. I'm not your typical user (I'm more interested in what features a browser lets me disable than what it supports) and while right now Firefox comes out way ahead of everyone else in terms of empowering users to customize things to fit their needs it feels like with every update they introduce more features I need to disable and they're growing more aggressive about data collection.

I hope that as Ladybird grows you'll keep privacy, security, and customization in mind because our options in that space are very limited.

Best of luck. If these guys succeed medium to long term they also prove it’s actually possible to build a browser if you focus on building a browser and not anything else.

It would be a statement of hope that we are not condemned to Google’s corporate strategy and the absolute rot the Mozilla foundation has become.

I know pretty much everything is not in their favor but I truly believe it’s still possible for a couple of guys with their head between their shoulders to actually “change the World”. I need to sleep at night after all.

I really hope this will succeed. It's sad browsers became free and dependent on Google.

I loved opera to death in the early 2000s. I was young and broke and didn't want to pay for it, but even though there were cracked versions around I dealt with the officially free, ad-sponsored version (Google ads, ironically) because I wanted to support it.

Now I've donated to Firefox in the past, but they've disappointed again and again with questionable business decisions. Still, I'm exclusively using Firefox than anything Chromium-based out of principle and I think I will switch to ladybird as soon as feasible. I have no problem paying for a browser that's truly independent.

Discussed previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845951

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

Does awesomekling get to remain BDFL of Ladybird? I appreciated the project because it gave the impression that all the pork was stripped away and 100% focused on the engineering.

Meanwhile Mozilla spends a massive chunk of money on the organization and the philanthropy and the blog posts, and the activism, and the salaries of people who have little resemblance to engineers.

I'm too used to my Firefox with tree-style tabs and Vim controls to go back to a regular layout.

This also makes me a bit of a tab hoarder, though.

I'd say "I'll be keeping an eye on this," but I'm sure there'll be plenty of posts about Ladybird before the alpha even drops, haha.

It's wild to see how many people showed up here to tell Andreas what he should do with his passion.

I can't wait to see the absolute mountain of perfect pull requests all these people bring to the project!

Seriously though, congratulations Andreas and please keep the faith. We might not be the loudest voices, but almost all of us are cheering for you.

> No "default search deals", crypto tokens, or other forms of user monetization, ever.

Sounds good, but how would you make sure the sponsors won’t influence you in the future once it’s popular enough? After all, they are still corporations and are after profits, as opposed to crowdfunding.

Here's a question, will accessibility be considered? I fully realize my HN contributions are a bit of a broken record but also, if I don't bring this up, it appears nobody does so here we are.

Is this going to work with screen readers, magnification, speech recognition etc? I guess a more abstract version of that question is: Does Ladybird intend to offer some kind of feature parity with existing solutions where integration with OS-specific accessibility architectures (UIA, AT-SPI2, etc.) are concerned? If not, it's a non-starter for quite a few people, and I'd rather know so I know to even keep up with this project or add it to the "user first but oh not actually all users first" pile :)

I wonder what would happen if Ladybird matures well to compete with Firefox and Chrome (hope so), and it's just forked away by some company and completely closed down in a whim, because BSD-2 allows that.

Ongoing discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40854836

The redesign looks soulless

Apologies for the late question, I only just found this thread.

I work at Brave, VP of IT. I worked at Mozilla for 5 years. So have some experience with browsers.

I see our insanely high infrastructure bill each month, most of the cost comes down to CDN/distribution of updates, block lists, safe browsing etc. But we also have a bunch of other costs for staff to maintain said infrastructure and security.

If you get to scale, what is the plan here? Because $1M won't get you a very long runway and the moment browsers stop doing what they should be doing well, they die. Wishing you the best of luck.

Shopify is a platinum sponsor. Big respect.

If what is written in the article is true, then why not pursue a copyleft license for the web browser to keep it Free? Otherwise a for-profit competitor can fork it and all the bootstrapping would be for naught.

Even LGPLv3+ would be a good choice here.

It's crazy how complex browsers have become ... You practically fork an OS to make a browser

> At the moment, many core library support components are inherited from SerenityOS:

LibWeb: Web rendering engine LibJS: JavaScript engine LibWasm: WebAssembly implementation LibCrypto/LibTLS: Cryptography primitives and Transport Layer Security LibHTTP: HTTP/1.1 client LibGfx: 2D Graphics Library, Image Decoding and Rendering LibArchive: Archive file format support LibUnicode: Unicode and locale support LibAudio, LibMedia: Audio and video playback LibCore: Event loop, OS abstraction layer LibIPC: Inter-process communication

Is there any caniuse data for Ladybird? It would be helpful to see which standards Ladybird implements so Ladybird users can use my site. Building websites that use the supported standards seems like a good way to support the project.

> Notice to users in Brazil

> Because of Brazilian government demands to remove creators from our platform, Locals is currently unavailable in Brazil

> We are challenging these government demands and hope to restore access soon

Does anyone have access to it?

"built on web standards" - I believe it needs critical mass of both websites and installs for this to be a feature when the mainstream browser has hardcoded quirks.

Also, I am very curious why is someone like Shopify sponsoring this.

This is great and a truly independent web browser is surely one of the most important software projects we need today.

Can anyone explain like I'm an idiot concrete reasons how Google Chrome's dominance is bad for the web? Preferably things that have actually happened, not what might happen

First "alpha" in Summer 2026. Ouch.

I can imagine how hard it is to develop a browser. However, I can't imagine how much the landscape will change in the next 2 years... LLM, privacy, etc.

> 501(c)(3) non-profit

How come a european project becomes an american foundation?

I feel like the public perception of this project will become significantly more harsh now that it has upgraded from a hobby project, and I’m not sure they’re prepared for that

As much as I would love to see this succeeded, I simply cannot believe that you can sustain a browser development without millions of dollars. Web got so complicated. And it's perfect for all these huge ads companies owning browser engines. Nobody can catch up with this.

There's only one way we can make sure we can get really independent browsers:

SIMPLIFY THE WEB

- Limit the platform to absolute minimum - give way to render things, fetch stuff from the network, etc.

- Get rid of CSS - leave just some basic rendering primitives, so libraries can be created to paint on the canvas. We don't need 78 new animation primitives. We'll build them ourselves if we have a sensible canvas and execution platform.

- Move JS out of the browser to a WebAssembly compiler and make browsers run only WebAssembly

- Or keep JS in the browser but don't add any new features, features should be in libraries outside of the browser. Language should be as simple as possible.

- Get rid of all semantic html junk. We only need some basic blocks to move things around.

This way we can have simple browsers and move all complexity to client libraries, which you can pick and replace when needed. Just keep things as simple as possible and let people build on that.

(updated whitespace)

[dupe]

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

Probably merge these discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845951

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

It's a Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation. So that means it must have raised $500k from other people, each of which cannot have given more than $30k. That's pretty impressive. I wonder who the other sponsors were.

I don't get what this has that Servo doesn't.

Or what Firefox is doing wrong.

Or what sets this apart from existing browsers, besides the funding model.

As a end user, what should I be excited about?

As a developer, what should I be excited about?

After mozzila turned itself into a advertising agency, is good that theres a new open source alternative. Been looking at ladybird for a while now. Can wait to see it grown.

I have high hopes Ladybird will remain truly neutral and avoid any infringement on user integrity/privacy. Please never let the money dictate.

For anyone looking for a package to install, there are, sadly, none yet:

> Ladybird is in a pre-alpha state, and only suitable for use by developers

Please see https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814 If you want to use and/or contribute to such a project that's fine! And if not, that's fine too. But people should know.

They should put out pre-compiled packages, because the compilation instructions are not that very clear, and required a lot of dependencies (vcPkg?)

This is awesome news!

Ironically for a story about a webbrowser, the screen is showing 404 comments as I type this. :-)

[dupe]

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

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845951

Are you running the web platform tests?

Is this based in Texas? As in, was this named after Ladybird Johnson? Having lived in Texas almost half my life, and having thought of Mrs. Johnson every time the wildflowers bloom alongside the highways, I have to wonder...

What an intriguing name for a web browser.

> What's more, they are confident [building a new browser from scratch] can be done without taking any funding from corporate deals or advertising revenue.

And what if you succeed? Best of luck on this bold endeavor, and try not to break our hearts.

Would be really nice if this browser would work on RISC OS https://www.riscosopen.org/content/

It was nice to get to the end of one of his articles and it to stick to the tech.

> Their goal? To have a fully functional "Alpha" version of the Ladybird browser ready sometime in 2026.

Mmmmmmh, I don't think this is a good goal. I would expect quicker iterations even with the web browser complexities.

Could Ladybird become a symbolic phoenix for Mozilla before the org was hijacked? That would really be amazing, as there is now a void.

It would give hope we're not doomed to Google’s corporate strategy of cannibalization.

Why choose CPP to develop this instead of Rust? How do you fix all the bad security bugs? I fear you’ll just leave users vulnerable to completely new attacks, it’s a huge surface area

I really want this to succeed, rooting for Andreas and the team!

Laughing at the amount of armchair lawyers in the comments.

What does Spotify gain by funding this project with $100K?

I’m disappointed in the fact that the main ambition here is only to recreate a browser for the sake of independence. There is so much potential in creating a modern browser that could for instance focus on performance, privacy, access to lower level APIs, etc. rather than carrying the eternal burden of backwards compatibility.

I would love a browser that lets me disable/enable any browser or JS features a la carte. All fingerprinting for example.

Never thought about how all the browsers out there are forks of Google. Excited to see what Ladybird does in the future

I looked at the build docs and it mentions 'chromes' does this mean it uses the google chrome web engine?

Haven't we seen a post about Ladybird just last week already? Or am i confusing my independent broswers now?

1. Would it have possibility to load extensions written in C by dlopen?

2. Would it have the features of the Line Mode Browser?

Firefox user here... if you can do good on tree style tabs like the Sidebery add-on, let us know!

This is wonderful news and I'm all for more diversity and user choice in the world of browsers, but this text...

> preparing to become the only major web browser which does not treat the user like the product being sold.

...is either ignorant or a deliberate slam on Mozilla. Whatever else you might say about Firefox, it has never tried to "sell" me to anyone. The fact of the matter is that Mozilla has done the impossible for decades and gets no end of grief for it.

(I expect we'll get a zillion complaints about search engine placement & Pocket recommendations because that always happens on this site)

I'm just not trusting a small browser dev team.

The risk of exploits is too high

Just remember, https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814#issuecommen...

Do you have a roadmap?

WebGL, WebGL2, WebGPU, WebNN, WebXR, WebAudio, WebRTC, WebAssembly? Etc....?

Each of those seem like a multi-year project for a team on their own if you're not going to take code from any other browser

Is Ladybird going to be a member of the WHAT-WG?

So this guy was the secret sponsor.

Hrrm.

   legacyPackages.x86_64-linux.ladybird (0-unstable-2024-06-04)

Cool! Let's see if I can read HN.

  nix run nixpkgs#ladybird

  ...

  502144.831 Ladybird(1297933): WebContent process crashed!
  502144.831 Ladybird(1297933): WebContent has crashed 5 times in quick succession! Not restarting...

  ...

I didn't expect it to work very well yet in a distro, so that's ok. It's cool enough that nix(os) has already started tracking it.

I'll check back every few months and see how it's going!

excuse my ingnorance, but firefox is also an open source browser afaik. The only advantage that ladybird us is that it turns the duopoly of browser engines into a tri-opoly- so what is the point? Why wouldn't this money be better spent enhancing another browser engine like whatever midori runs on? Why does Ladybird need to exist, and why are so many companies becoming sponsors? Not trying to ruffle feathers, genuinely curious

2026? It’s so far away it will prob be forgotten by the time anyone can use it…

I'm curious how they will work. The lead dev made briliant coding / self-work videos, and I'm really wondering coding will happen on this project. I hope we can see more streams :)

good luck

Not the little spout! Please, any picture but the little sprout.

OTOH feature ideas: Formal Verification, Process Isolation, secure coding in Rust,

- Quark is written in Coq and is formally verified. What can be learned from the design of Quark and other larger formally-verified apps.

From "Why Don't People Use Formal Methods?" (2019) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18965964 :

> - "Quark : A Web Browser with a Formally Verified Kernel" (2012) (Coq, Haskell) http://goto.ucsd.edu/quark/

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37451147 :

> - "How to Discover and Prevent Linux Kernel Zero-day Exploit using Formal Verification" (2021) [w/ Coq] http://digamma.ai/blog/discover-prevent-linux-kernel-zero-da... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31617335

- Rootless containers require /etc/subuids to remap uids. Browsers could run subprocesses like rootless containers in addition to namespaces and application-level sandboxing.

- Chrome and Firefox use the same pwn2own'd sandbox.

- Container-selinux and rootless containers and browser tab processes

- "Memory Sealing "Mseal" System Call Merged for Linux 6.10" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40474551

- Endokernel process isolation: From "The Docker+WASM Technical Preview" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33324934

- QubesOS isolates processes with VMs.

- Gvisor and Kata containers further isolate container processes

- W3C Web Worker API and W3C Service Worker API and process isolation, and resource utilization

- From "WebGPU is now available on Android" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39046787 :

>> What are some ideas for UI Visual Affordances to solve for bad UX due to slow browser tabs and extensions?

>> - [ ] UBY: Browsers: Strobe the tab or extension button when it's beyond (configurable) resource usage thresholds

>> - [ ] UBY: Browsers: Vary the {color, size, fill} of the tabs according to their relative resource utilization

>> - [ ] ENH,SEC: Browsers: specify per-tab/per-domain resource quotas: CPU

- What can be learned from few methods and patterns from rust rewrites, again of larger applications

"MotorOS: a Rust-first operating system for x64 VMs" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38907876 :

> "Maestro: A Linux-compatible kernel in Rust" (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38852360#38857185 ; redox-os, cosmic-de , Motūrus OS; MotorOS

From "Industry forms consortium to drive adoption of Rust in safety-critical systems" (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34743393 :

> - "The Rust Implementation of GNU Coreutils Is Becoming Remarkably Robust" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34743393

> [Rust Secure Coding Guidelines, awesome-safety-critical,]

Good luck.

I mean it both in a sarcastic way and not.

Honestly, I still love Firefox and I'm a bit skeptical about rewriting everything from scratch when you have a fairly decent codebase. What's the point? Just burning money? You still need to implement the specs.

Looks like the website of a startup that wants my email so they can "get back to me with a quote".

Such soulless corpo design is not befitting of a project this nice.

It will be eventually sold.

Seems a bit ambitious for only less than a dozen full-time engineers in two years.

Please don't post content from `locals.com`. For one, it's not accessible in many countries such as Brazil.

Why would you start a project in C++ in 2024, especially a web browser?

Will it have multi-account containers, like Firefox? If not, I won't be using it.

What's stopping this from going the way of Edge?

Why not fork Firefox or Chromium?

Can you point to an example where Mozilla's funding model led it to make a bad decision?

We are entering new era of building new competitive things "from scratch" and building them really fast. Powered by LLMs, increased personal productivity, ease to access knowledge, it's just inevitable a lot of better things will be created.

I really appreciate someone taking a stab at a project of this scale, but is it really worth discussing for like the 70th time when even the alpha is two years away?

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ladybird

Open source is great and new things are great and pursuing your passion is great. The rhetoric here however is lacking. Specifically the argument is "google money bad" but the authors don't provide specific examples where google money has caused a technical decision they disagree with.