Announcing the Ladybird Browser Initiative

Comments

• laxe@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I want to follow updates from this project. They have a Twitter account but not Mastodon sigh

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  • infeeeee@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Image

    RSS is not even enabled on the Newz page on the website.

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    • Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I share the disappointment.

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    • mynamesnotrick@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Im glad to see this. Discord is a nightmare. It’s the same as a Facebook only group to me.

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• 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.

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  • weststadtgesicht@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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”

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  • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Scrollone@feddit.it ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Let’s not forget that Mozilla (the company) is largely mismanaged, so that doesn’t help.

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    • 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.

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  • 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.

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    • 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).

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    • 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.

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  • 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.

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    • NaoPb@eviltoast.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Lol, mentioning Twinings tea together with Reddit and Twitter sounds so random

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  • 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…

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    • 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.

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  • 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?

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  • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Wait, 1138? If there are any Star Wars fans in there, there won’t be more.

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• vantablack@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  you shouldn’t use this browser the devs are transphobic sexist chuds

  cyberpunk.lol/@vantablack/112717420300967771

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  • interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    All this because they won’t change a “he” into “they” ? Who gives a fuck about such rampant whiteknightism ? Why does a browser even need to know your gender ? In what context even is there a pronoun in the user interface ?

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    • Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You could find out the context by reading the title of the thread, but then you’d have less to bitch about, so I can understand why you chose ignorance.

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  • blind3rdeye@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Hmm. I just read the github thread that this is about. The devs made a mistake on this; but it seems to me that there is a bit of an over-reaction here. The people in the thread seem to be discussing it calmly and politely; and the issue (i.e. use of pronouns in the build instructions) ends up being resolved. By contrast, the reaction outside of the actual thread… is extreme.

    Like I said, this seems like an overreaction to someone making a mistake of ignorance & indifference. It wasn’t an act of malice.

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  • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Why don’t ya’ll contribute some meaningful code instead of finding ways to deny those who do

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    • wholookshere@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Please describe to me how someone who offered up changes to change “he” to “they” for them, and then the contributor getting pissy about “politics” is denying work.

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  • babeuh@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Appears to be fixed now: github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/24648

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  • cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    they must be trying to go after the brave marketshare

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  • Woht24@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    … What

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  • Moneo@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    That website is completely unreadable what the fuck.

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• Logh@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Love the idea! Shopify as the highest tier sponsor? Not so much.

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  • Spedwell@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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)?

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    • themurphy@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      My best guess would be that Shopify either care about the open Web or had some disagreements with Google.

      I can’t find anything shady on them, but maybe I’m looking the wrong places.

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  • Prandom_returns@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Why? Shopify has been sponsoring stuff like community gaming events for a few years now.

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• asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Glad to hear that!

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  • maxinstuff@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Must be planning on actually shipping something

    /s

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    • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Ship what, segfaults / invalid memory access? Lol

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  • HKayn@dormi.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This you?

    forum.qt.io/topic/142885/rewriting-qt-in-rust

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  • Fitik@fedia.io ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    @asdfasdfasdf There's Servo ( @servo ), it's a browser engine written in rust

    @Diabolo96

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    • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Yes, that’s what I’m referring to. They could build on that, or they could write something their own in Rust. But I’d think building on Servo would be fantastic.

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    • Diabolo96@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I know about servo. It was pretty much a dead project until they joined the Linux fondation last year and started getting some sponsorship. Since then, they being doing pretty good on there own with personal donations rising by around 20% each month.

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• jojo@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Wasn’t this the transphobic one?

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  • vantablack@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    yuppppsies github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/8046#issuecom…

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    • Facebones@reddthat.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Shoutout to the user pointing out that forcing “he” is just as, if not more, political ❤️

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    • cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      i like how they’re like this isnt the place for personal politics while ignoring the fact that gendered readme files are patently stupid in the first place.

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    • DAMunzy@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Changing to gender neutral seems like a no brainer to me but how is this transphobia?

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• avidamoeba@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • accideath@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • rottingleaf@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      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.

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    • ikidd@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Mozilla doesn’t seem to have a working strategy

      Guess they couldn’t replicate the “own everything that people use to get stuff on the internet and make secret breaking changes to constantly mess up other browsers” strategy.

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    • Mubelotix@jlai.lu ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Webkit and blink have the same base

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    • el_abuelo@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Could they not add HEVC support? Or is there some technical limitation that meant starting from zero was a good idea?

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    • pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      webkit and blink are based of KHTML

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    • fine_sandy_bottom@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      WDYM “independent” ?

      Isn’t mozilla / gecko more or less independent?

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    • thedeadwalking4242@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      No webkit browser on Android either. If there was gnome web for Android id switch in a heartbeat

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  • vanderbilt@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • avidamoeba@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Why are open source software monocultures bad? The vast majority of non-Windows OSes are Linux based. Teams who don’t like certain decisions of the mainline Linux team maintain their forks with the needed 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.

      And we could get a functional one today by forking Chromium and never accepting a single upstream patch thereafter. I find it really hard to believe that starting a browser engine from scratch would require less labor. This is why I’m looking for an alternative motive. Someone mentioned licensing.

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    • el_abuelo@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I agree mostly, but forks don’t need to keep the upstream. They can go their own way.

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  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • glukoza@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      i’d argue its better for software to max foss license like AGPL, not bsd that can be taken out by companies

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    • avidamoeba@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I guess Chromium isn’t fully BSD. This could be the reason. Although I’d think reimplementing the non-BSD bits in Chromium would be less work than reimplementing all the bits, including the BSD ones.

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    • michaelmrose@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Why is that a gap worth filling? There is no benefit to users as long as its free of a EULA they don’t have to care either way. For those wanting to produce open source software based on same they already have all the rights they could need. The only party clamoring for permissively licensed software are companies intending to close off the source and sell other people’s work.

      I understand why they would want to do that I don’t understand why anyone would feel the need to work for free for something someone else closes off.

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  • rdri@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I can’t understand how people can continue relying on chrome and derivatives like electron, CEF etc. and not see it as a problem.

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    • el_abuelo@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s easy to understand when you think most comments are similar to yours and don’t provide any insight as to why this might be a problem.

      Maybe you could update your post and share your knowledge and experience with others, so that there are less people in the world who don’t see the problem.

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  • merthyr1831@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Ladybird was born from SerenityOS, which is a hobbyist unix-like (or POSIX compliant?) OS that simply aimed to do things “from the ground up”. It just happened that they needed to make a browser, and the response was to make one from scratch.

    From there it seemed to have brought a lot of attention organically to the point where it can stand on its own, but originally it was never intended to be a “third browser engine” from its inception.

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• venoft@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Funny how in the video the guy say that all other browsers are based on Google’s code. But Firefox is also independent right?

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  • infeeeee@lemm.ee ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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  • viking@infosec.pub ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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  • shortwavesurfer@monero.town ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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• linearchaos@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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  • brbposting@sh.itjust.works ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Only 114 million words of spec!

    Image

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• hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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.

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• cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  “Ladybird uses a brand new engine based on web standards, without borrowing any code from other browsers.” has the same energy as

  Image

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• unlawfulbooger@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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?

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• miridius@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  builds a new browser from scratch without borrowing existing code

  still chooses to do it in C++

  Epic fail

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• mynamesnotrick@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Laaaaaaaaa^dybird.^

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• merthyr1831@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It would be nice if people read the post and the project before randomly making assumptions such as implying the project started from scratch yesterday or its run by some amateurs, this is a 4 year old project! It’s founded by a former KHTML/Webkit developer for Apple!

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• Toes@ani.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  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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• nixcamic@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Servo already exists and is independent and written in a modern language and way ahead of this.

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• vsis@feddit.cl ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  The project management may have some obvious problems (jOin dIsc0Rd sErVEr; w0rD “thEy” t0o p0liTicAl). But we really need an alternative to browsers funded by Google (Chrome and Firefox).

  So I’ll do my best to actually build from sources and see what can I help with. Attacking the author is helping nobody.

  And for the folks who are saying “wHy n0t rUst”, you can always show me the code.

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• Scotty_Trees@lemmy.world [bot] ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Remind me in 2 years when this project becomes discontinued…

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• bobc7@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  is it open source?

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• robocall@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I use Firefox.

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• Xeroxchasechase@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Good luck!

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• solrize@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s hard to understand the purpose of this. The difficulty of the project (i.e. complexity of the web) is the real problem that needs solving. We don’t need another fork of the browser-verse. We need a fork of the web itself.

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• Caligvla@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  I hope this pans out, because I’ve long ago lost hope on Firefox being a worthy alternative to Chromium.

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• ComplexLotus@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  As Firefox will introduce Manifest V3 which will make ad-blockers unusable, I hope they will not implement that as well … But I forsee this will not have any add-ons at all

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• 96VXb9ktTjFnRi@feddit.nl ⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Is it true that there is no truly independent web browser or are there others?

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