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.
Comment on Announcing the Ladybird Browser Initiative
unconfirmedsourcesDOTgov@lemmy.sdf.org 4 months ago
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.
fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
Scrollone@feddit.it 4 months ago
Let’s not forget that Mozilla (the company) is largely mismanaged, so that doesn’t help.
fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
It might seem that way but it’s a fairly arrogant assertion. They’re a sophisticated organisation with a lot of well experienced people guiding them. As an outsider it’s easy to criticise their seemingly endless series of bad decisions, but I’m still confident that internally all of these decisions seemed like a good idea at the time.
Besides which, this would be a good reason to fork their codebase rather than starting from scratch.
merthyr1831@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Mozilla has loads of projects, not just the browser. I doubt more than a 30 work exclusively on the engine nowadays.
fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
Even if that were true, and it seems unlikely, that’s still an order of magnitude more than the ladybug devs.
Tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
You are assuming that they only started now from point 0. They have probably been working on it for a bit before announcing everything.
Matriks404@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Exactly. They have been working on Ladybird Browser for few years already, before it was announced as standalone product (It was a part of SerenityOS).
Blackmist@feddit.uk 4 months ago
And it passes the Acid3 test, which is more than Firefiox does.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 4 months ago
They say they already use it to manage GitHub issues so it’s definitely more than “point 0” right now.
merthyr1831@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Sure, but an individual website may use only a few of those standards. Ladybird devs will pick a website they like to use - Reddit, Twitter, Twinings tea, etc. and improve adherence to X or Y standards to make that one website look better. In turn, thousands of websites suddenly work perfectly, and many others work better than before.
Ladybird is largely conformant to the majority of HTML standards now. It’s about the edge cases (and where standards aren’t followed by websites) and performance. This isn’t a new project.
NaoPb@eviltoast.org 4 months ago
Lol, mentioning Twinings tea together with Reddit and Twitter sounds so random
merthyr1831@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Andreas Kling, the founder and lead dev, has a massive love for Twinings tea and spent a few Dev logs working on improving their website with the end goal being ordering his tea from them :)
NaoPb@eviltoast.org 4 months ago
That is a nice little tidbit of information :)
0x0@programming.dev 4 months ago
Let’s not do zomething because it’s hard pretty much sums up every new generation.
Imagine if they said that when they had to program everything in assembly…
Holzkohlen@feddit.de 4 months ago
Software nowadays is a lot more complex. You’d get nowhere using assembly. Are you also gonna call me lazy if I say making a smartphone from scratch is complicated? “But the Nokia 1234 only had 4kb of memory” Is what you will probably say.
0x0@programming.dev 4 months ago
You’d get nowhere using assembly because people wanted to keep improving technology.
The Nokia was actually build and freakin’ rock solid. Then came smartphones because people wanted to improve. It sure wasn’t easy and they didn’t go Geez, a phone from scratch? Why bother?
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 4 months ago
They’ve been at it for four years and they plan to have an alpha by 2026. Maybe wait how it actually turns out?
rottingleaf@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
Wait, 1138? If there are any Star Wars fans in there, there won’t be more.
weststadtgesicht@discuss.tchncs.de 4 months ago
Yes, that is exactly the plan: “We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version”