Technology

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

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"

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.

You are assuming that they only started now from point 0. They have probably been working on it for a bit before announcing everything.

I mean if they're gonna give money without demanding anything I'm sure no complaints from the devs.

Shopify or an exec there might find some value in avoiding Google owning the web, could maybe bring goodwill for the company, or they could just be looking for a write off.

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)?

I think it's less that it's "impossible" but rather that it's expensive.

Honestly we've in general shoved too much shit into the browser that's not strictly related to just browsing web sites.

And you "have to" support all the layers and layers and layers of added stuff, or you can't "compete".

But, at the same time, the goals of making a good-enough browser that mostly works and isn't completely enshittified and captured by corpo big tech interests is a very worthy project and 100% support what they're doing.

Only 114 million words of spec!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

1. (BSD vs GPL) Andreas stated on twitter that he wanted to give devs total freedom to use his work because when he worked at Apple he felt frustrated he couldn't incorporate some code/software into his work because of GPL.
2. (Why?) The aim is not to create a chrome competitor, but to make a good enough, truly free browser that isn't either chrome or funded by chrome. A browser made for and by its user's.
3. (Discord) Because of gen-z.

Contributing directly to Firefox and reducing the dependence on Google should be three best bet

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.