6 ms·

While it's hard to know what comes of it, there is also https://ladybird.org/ https://ladybird.org/ to challenge to monopoly of Blink.

willi59549879 1y ago
I hope it succeeds. Now they allow direct donations, so people who want it to succeed can help. I am sure these donations go directly into the development of the browser unlike with mozilla.
- robin_reala 1y ago
  Worth pointing out that you can also sponsor Servo development: https://github.com/sponsors/servo https://github.com/sponsors/servo
YmiYugy 1y ago
I just don't get the point of ladybird. They have full time engineers and are soliciting donations, so it's clearly more than a hobby project. Maybe my assumptions are off, but I just can't imagine they could ever become competitive in terms of features, security and performance with the big engines. Blink is setting the pace, Webkit is barely able to keep up and Gecko is slowly falling behind. All of these teams are orders of magnitudes larger than the Ladybird team. If you think that Blinks dominance is a thread to the web it's not enough to have an alternative engine you need enough adoption of that engine so web devs make sure their site is compatible with that engine. Most of this also applies to Servo, but at least their technical project goals (embeddable, modular, parallel, memory safe) sound at least moderately compelling. Maybe Ladybird has similar goals, but at least their website doesn't really state any technical goals.
- f311a 1y ago
  What's wrong with Webkit? It's super fast. I tested Orion browser recently.
  - MrDrMcCoy 1y ago
    Good implementations are hard to come by outside Apple's ecosystem.
- sirwhinesalot 1y ago
  Not being funded by Google money is a pretty big deal. Some of the developers are former webkit devs so they have a good foundation to start from. It remains to be seen if they can pull it off. Orion adding Windows support (getting WebKit running on Windows again) would be pretty good too.
  - igrunert 1y ago
    WebKit runs on Windows, the Windows port just needs work to bring it up to the level of the Linux port. I got every JIT tier enabled in JavaScriptCore [1] and enabled libpas (the memory allocator). The Windows port is moving to Skia in line with the Linux port. Really just needs more people (and companies) pushing it forward. Hopefully Kagi will be contributing improvements to the Windows port upstream. [1] https://iangrunert.com/2024/10/07/every-jit-tier-enabled-jsc-windows https://iangrunert.com/2024/10/07/every-jit-tier-enabled-jsc...
- badsectoracula 1y ago
  Larger teams do not necessarily mean you get stuff faster. If anything after some point, a large team can be hard to get things moving and have tons of issues with communication.
- throw839340949r 1y ago
  Ladybird has better results in web rendering tests than Servo, and slowly is gaining on Firefox. They are already quite competitive.
  - fabrice_d 1y ago
    Ladybird is extremely slow, it's far from being competitive at all.
    - iotku 1y ago
      They're prioritizing correctness to the spec over speed and are still 'officially' in pre-alpha. It's still to be determined how well they can bridge the gap there. For casual web browsing it's plenty fast enough already to do a lot of things, but they're a relatively small team fighting against decades of optimization.
    - mrob 1y ago
      All browsers are fast enough once you block all the useless web bloat.
      - bowsamic 1y ago
        But Ladybird's explicit goal is to work on the "real web", i.e. without blocking all that bloat
    - ramon156 1y ago
      Very unfair to look at ladybird and call it slow, when its not even alpha and shouldn't be used yet
    - paddim8 1y ago
      What? No one is expecting Ladybird to be fast at this stage. No one is claiming that it is. Ladybird is competitive because of the speed of which it is improving.
    - snvzz 1y ago
      Remember you're experiencing a debug build of pre-alpha software.
- xdfgh1112 1y ago
  It is donation funded with no reliance on outside parties. They don't have to inject ads into pages like brave did or sell out to Google compromising their independence on web standards. They're ahead of Servo already anyway, and better funded.
  - YmiYugy 1y ago
    In the last 24h alone Chromium merged almost 900 CLs (their equivalent to a pull request) into the src/Chromium repo, Ladybird had 7. Yes a project that started fresh a couple of year ago with decades of hindsight can be more efficient than one started 16 year ago as the fork of a fork, but if I had to guess they'll sooner or later reach a point where they have implemented the low hanging fruit and chromium moves faster away than they can catch up.
    - galangalalgol 1y ago
      I'm not even proximal to webdev, can someone explain why people keep making pages using new stuff? I get why google keeps adding things, but why do people use it? Well over half the pages I go to look better without js. HN looks identical.
      - freddex 1y ago
        Many of the newer standards added to the web platform boil down to supporting development of web apps, not only web pages. For example, the current iteration of the File System API in Chrome (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...) allows web apps to request permission to read and write to the user's file system. This is great for many tools. Of course, this can be fairly controversial: More app-like capabilities lead to more complex standards and harder-to-secure browsers. There's also overengineering where people use web app techniques to develop web pages. You don't need (much) JS or even any of the new standards for HN, but for something like Google Docs or Figma, it's a different story.
      - qingcharles 1y ago
- keysdev 1y ago
  It was the similar sentiment with 0xide.
- materielle 1y ago
  I think there are two things to keep in mind. 1) Apple and Firefox have enough resources to implement the most recent web standards. When you see a feature which goes un-implemented for too long, it’s almost surely because nobody was even working on it because of internal resourcing fights. 2) Devs aren’t created equal. It’s possible for a team of 8 people to be 10x more productive than another team of 8.
  - bornfreddy 1y ago
    > When you see a feature which goes un-implemented for too long, it’s almost surely because nobody was even working on it because of internal resourcing fights. Or because they are reluctant to implement it for technical reasons? Not every "standard" that gets thrown on the table and implemented by Google is a brilliant idea.
- paddim8 1y ago
  Well Andreas Kling has worked on Safari and WebKit and (obviously) has talked to a lot of browser people. He knows what he is doing, and he frequently says that no one that has actually worked on a browser thinks it's impossible to create a new one, even with a small team (...of highly motivated and skilled people).
- beefnugs 1y ago
  I think the browser attempts are all wrong trying to "cover all edge cases" they should focus on being able to transform any and all dark patterns down into something simpler. Hell starting out as extracting text, pictures, video for all nightmare sites. Then slowly add whatever features dont actually lead to dark patterns
- gaazoh 1y ago
  If anything, Ladybird is an independent implementation of the web standards, and the devs have identified and helped solving quite a few bugs and and ambiguities in the standards, which benefits everyone, from browser devs including the big guns to web developpers and users.
Buttons840 1y ago
Looks interesting, but they're going to try writing it in Swift? If you're writing a browser engine in C++, I may not like it, but I can see that you're pragmatic and are focused on the end result rather than the language. If you're writing it in Rust, okay, you maybe have your eyes on that pie in the sky, but you've chosen a language that, at least potentially, has the ability to replace C++ in creating bedrock software. Any other language and I feel like someone with a lot of political capital at the company just has a personal preference for the language and so, "yeah, we're going to rewrite it all in Swift"[0]. I mean, you're writing a browser. Do you really want to build it in a language that is at the "it's improving" stage of support for the most popular operating systems? [0]: https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031 https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031
- jm4 1y ago
  You should look into why they chose it and what their implementation plan is. They evaluated multiple languages, including rust. There were some specific issues with rust that made it unsuitable for them. Swift was a bit of a dark horse candidate that the developers ended liking. There is no immediate plan to switch to anything so it’s still C++. They may not ever switch. Swift’s cross platform support isn’t there yet and that’s a prerequisite.
  - Buttons840 1y ago
    I couldn't find any information beyond that Tweet I linked.
    - jm4 1y ago
      I'll see if I can find it. I don't remember the specifics on rust, but it sounded like they gave it a fair shot. It was basically the one to beat until they figured out it wasn't going to work. The decision to adopt Swift wasn't made on a whim and, frankly, I'm skeptical it will happen any time soon, if ever. I think it's one of those situations where they want to make it more accessible to a next generation of developers the same way Linux is adopting rust. Swift is actually a really nice language, despite being associated primarily with Apple. It would be cool to see higher adoption. Ladybird has an interesting way of documenting web standards in code. They put a link to the reference doc at the top of a function and then each rule in a comment where it is implemented. It's very easy to follow and good quality code. Another project I recall having high quality code was KHTML. Not coincidentally, Andreas Kling worked on that one too. There are examples here: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/tree/master/Libraries/LibWeb/DOM https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/tree/master/Libr... Anyway, the point is what they are doing is working well and Swift won't be ready for a while. If it ever happens, it won't be a rewrite. It'll more likely be a situation where it's written in both the same way Linux is both C and rust.
jonkoops 1y ago
I have to be honest that I don't really understand the appeal of Ladybird from a purely technical perspective. It is written in C++, just like all the existing engines (yes there is some Swift, but it is negligible), so what benefit does it provide over Gecko or Blink? With Servo, I can see there is a distinct technical design around security and parallelism.
- BrawnyBadger53 1y ago
  There is more to a project this massive than its choice of language. For me though it's mostly about breaking from the monopoly and putting a check on Google's influence over browser space.
  - mdaniel 1y ago
    > There is more to a project this massive than its choice of language For writing a game, or Figma replacement, or some cutesy something that runs on your machine without requiring network access, probably. For one of the most impactful applications that downloads untrusted code from the Internet and executes it without any confirmation whatsoever, the language for sure does matter. "Chrome RCE" is a phrase that strikes fear, and it's not a rare occurrence. I'll point out that Google is not lacking some of the most skilled security researchers and tooling in the world, so I wish the Ladybird folks godspeed doing their own "does this build have vulns?" work
    - paddim8 1y ago
      Well that's why they're going to rewrite parts of the code where those things are more likely in Swift
- rollcat 1y ago
  Many many factors to consider. Simplistic take: KHTML was picked up by Apple because of its clean design and codebase; there's an extra 30 years of accumulated improvements in C++; you don't write stuff in Rust 1.0 either. Also: Andreas has worked on Webkit/Blink. He knew what he was doing when he started the project, even if it was "just for fun". Linux started under similar circumstances.

willi59549879 1y ago

I hope it succeeds. Now they allow direct donations, so people who want it to succeed can help. I am sure these donations go directly into the development of the browser unlike with mozilla.

robin_reala 1y ago
Worth pointing out that you can also sponsor Servo development: https://github.com/sponsors/servo https://github.com/sponsors/servo

YmiYugy 1y ago

I just don't get the point of ladybird. They have full time engineers and are soliciting donations, so it's clearly more than a hobby project. Maybe my assumptions are off, but I just can't imagine they could ever become competitive in terms of features, security and performance with the big engines. Blink is setting the pace, Webkit is barely able to keep up and Gecko is slowly falling behind. All of these teams are orders of magnitudes larger than the Ladybird team. If you think that Blinks dominance is a thread to the web it's not enough to have an alternative engine you need enough adoption of that engine so web devs make sure their site is compatible with that engine. Most of this also applies to Servo, but at least their technical project goals (embeddable, modular, parallel, memory safe) sound at least moderately compelling. Maybe Ladybird has similar goals, but at least their website doesn't really state any technical goals.

f311a 1y ago
What's wrong with Webkit? It's super fast. I tested Orion browser recently.
- MrDrMcCoy 1y ago
  Good implementations are hard to come by outside Apple's ecosystem.
sirwhinesalot 1y ago
Not being funded by Google money is a pretty big deal. Some of the developers are former webkit devs so they have a good foundation to start from. It remains to be seen if they can pull it off. Orion adding Windows support (getting WebKit running on Windows again) would be pretty good too.
- igrunert 1y ago
  WebKit runs on Windows, the Windows port just needs work to bring it up to the level of the Linux port. I got every JIT tier enabled in JavaScriptCore [1] and enabled libpas (the memory allocator). The Windows port is moving to Skia in line with the Linux port. Really just needs more people (and companies) pushing it forward. Hopefully Kagi will be contributing improvements to the Windows port upstream. [1] https://iangrunert.com/2024/10/07/every-jit-tier-enabled-jsc-windows https://iangrunert.com/2024/10/07/every-jit-tier-enabled-jsc...
badsectoracula 1y ago
Larger teams do not necessarily mean you get stuff faster. If anything after some point, a large team can be hard to get things moving and have tons of issues with communication.
throw839340949r 1y ago
Ladybird has better results in web rendering tests than Servo, and slowly is gaining on Firefox. They are already quite competitive.
- fabrice_d 1y ago
  Ladybird is extremely slow, it's far from being competitive at all.
  - iotku 1y ago
    They're prioritizing correctness to the spec over speed and are still 'officially' in pre-alpha. It's still to be determined how well they can bridge the gap there. For casual web browsing it's plenty fast enough already to do a lot of things, but they're a relatively small team fighting against decades of optimization.
  - mrob 1y ago
    All browsers are fast enough once you block all the useless web bloat.
    - bowsamic 1y ago
      But Ladybird's explicit goal is to work on the "real web", i.e. without blocking all that bloat
  - ramon156 1y ago
    Very unfair to look at ladybird and call it slow, when its not even alpha and shouldn't be used yet
  - paddim8 1y ago
    What? No one is expecting Ladybird to be fast at this stage. No one is claiming that it is. Ladybird is competitive because of the speed of which it is improving.
  - snvzz 1y ago
    Remember you're experiencing a debug build of pre-alpha software.
xdfgh1112 1y ago
It is donation funded with no reliance on outside parties. They don't have to inject ads into pages like brave did or sell out to Google compromising their independence on web standards. They're ahead of Servo already anyway, and better funded.
- YmiYugy 1y ago
  In the last 24h alone Chromium merged almost 900 CLs (their equivalent to a pull request) into the src/Chromium repo, Ladybird had 7. Yes a project that started fresh a couple of year ago with decades of hindsight can be more efficient than one started 16 year ago as the fork of a fork, but if I had to guess they'll sooner or later reach a point where they have implemented the low hanging fruit and chromium moves faster away than they can catch up.
  - galangalalgol 1y ago
    I'm not even proximal to webdev, can someone explain why people keep making pages using new stuff? I get why google keeps adding things, but why do people use it? Well over half the pages I go to look better without js. HN looks identical.
    - freddex 1y ago
      Many of the newer standards added to the web platform boil down to supporting development of web apps, not only web pages. For example, the current iteration of the File System API in Chrome (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System_API https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/File_System...) allows web apps to request permission to read and write to the user's file system. This is great for many tools. Of course, this can be fairly controversial: More app-like capabilities lead to more complex standards and harder-to-secure browsers. There's also overengineering where people use web app techniques to develop web pages. You don't need (much) JS or even any of the new standards for HN, but for something like Google Docs or Figma, it's a different story.
    - qingcharles 1y ago
keysdev 1y ago
It was the similar sentiment with 0xide.
materielle 1y ago
I think there are two things to keep in mind. 1) Apple and Firefox have enough resources to implement the most recent web standards. When you see a feature which goes un-implemented for too long, it’s almost surely because nobody was even working on it because of internal resourcing fights. 2) Devs aren’t created equal. It’s possible for a team of 8 people to be 10x more productive than another team of 8.
- bornfreddy 1y ago
  > When you see a feature which goes un-implemented for too long, it’s almost surely because nobody was even working on it because of internal resourcing fights. Or because they are reluctant to implement it for technical reasons? Not every "standard" that gets thrown on the table and implemented by Google is a brilliant idea.
paddim8 1y ago
Well Andreas Kling has worked on Safari and WebKit and (obviously) has talked to a lot of browser people. He knows what he is doing, and he frequently says that no one that has actually worked on a browser thinks it's impossible to create a new one, even with a small team (...of highly motivated and skilled people).
beefnugs 1y ago
I think the browser attempts are all wrong trying to "cover all edge cases" they should focus on being able to transform any and all dark patterns down into something simpler. Hell starting out as extracting text, pictures, video for all nightmare sites. Then slowly add whatever features dont actually lead to dark patterns
gaazoh 1y ago
If anything, Ladybird is an independent implementation of the web standards, and the devs have identified and helped solving quite a few bugs and and ambiguities in the standards, which benefits everyone, from browser devs including the big guns to web developpers and users.

Buttons840 1y ago

Looks interesting, but they're going to try writing it in Swift? If you're writing a browser engine in C++, I may not like it, but I can see that you're pragmatic and are focused on the end result rather than the language. If you're writing it in Rust, okay, you maybe have your eyes on that pie in the sky, but you've chosen a language that, at least potentially, has the ability to replace C++ in creating bedrock software. Any other language and I feel like someone with a lot of political capital at the company just has a personal preference for the language and so, "yeah, we're going to rewrite it all in Swift"[0]. I mean, you're writing a browser. Do you really want to build it in a language that is at the "it's improving" stage of support for the most popular operating systems? [0]: https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031 https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031

jm4 1y ago
You should look into why they chose it and what their implementation plan is. They evaluated multiple languages, including rust. There were some specific issues with rust that made it unsuitable for them. Swift was a bit of a dark horse candidate that the developers ended liking. There is no immediate plan to switch to anything so it’s still C++. They may not ever switch. Swift’s cross platform support isn’t there yet and that’s a prerequisite.
- Buttons840 1y ago
  I couldn't find any information beyond that Tweet I linked.
  - jm4 1y ago
    I'll see if I can find it. I don't remember the specifics on rust, but it sounded like they gave it a fair shot. It was basically the one to beat until they figured out it wasn't going to work. The decision to adopt Swift wasn't made on a whim and, frankly, I'm skeptical it will happen any time soon, if ever. I think it's one of those situations where they want to make it more accessible to a next generation of developers the same way Linux is adopting rust. Swift is actually a really nice language, despite being associated primarily with Apple. It would be cool to see higher adoption. Ladybird has an interesting way of documenting web standards in code. They put a link to the reference doc at the top of a function and then each rule in a comment where it is implemented. It's very easy to follow and good quality code. Another project I recall having high quality code was KHTML. Not coincidentally, Andreas Kling worked on that one too. There are examples here: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/tree/master/Libraries/LibWeb/DOM https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/tree/master/Libr... Anyway, the point is what they are doing is working well and Swift won't be ready for a while. If it ever happens, it won't be a rewrite. It'll more likely be a situation where it's written in both the same way Linux is both C and rust.

jonkoops 1y ago

I have to be honest that I don't really understand the appeal of Ladybird from a purely technical perspective. It is written in C++, just like all the existing engines (yes there is some Swift, but it is negligible), so what benefit does it provide over Gecko or Blink? With Servo, I can see there is a distinct technical design around security and parallelism.

BrawnyBadger53 1y ago
There is more to a project this massive than its choice of language. For me though it's mostly about breaking from the monopoly and putting a check on Google's influence over browser space.
- mdaniel 1y ago
  > There is more to a project this massive than its choice of language For writing a game, or Figma replacement, or some cutesy something that runs on your machine without requiring network access, probably. For one of the most impactful applications that downloads untrusted code from the Internet and executes it without any confirmation whatsoever, the language for sure does matter. "Chrome RCE" is a phrase that strikes fear, and it's not a rare occurrence. I'll point out that Google is not lacking some of the most skilled security researchers and tooling in the world, so I wish the Ladybird folks godspeed doing their own "does this build have vulns?" work
  - paddim8 1y ago
    Well that's why they're going to rewrite parts of the code where those things are more likely in Swift
rollcat 1y ago
Many many factors to consider. Simplistic take: KHTML was picked up by Apple because of its clean design and codebase; there's an extra 30 years of accumulated improvements in C++; you don't write stuff in Rust 1.0 either. Also: Andreas has worked on Webkit/Blink. He knew what he was doing when he started the project, even if it was "just for fun". Linux started under similar circumstances.