- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- linux@programming.dev
Finally, another web engine is being developed to compete with Chromium and Firefox (Gecko), and they’re also working on a browser that will use it.
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I don’t know if it’s a good idea to build a new engine from scratch… Maybe it is but I don’t know, behind an engine you need to have support and development, so this thing needs to be improved and supported along the versions to be safe, so I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not 🙃
Servo hype
verso is the web browser, servo is the web engine
I feel like this is a dumb question but why do web engines need constant development? I thought we had an established standard for HTML. Once a web engine matches that standard isn’t that sufficient?
established standard for HTML
That is constantly changing.
Like CSS or JS, or other modern web technologies nowadays browsers are capable of.
There are features that constantly get added. It’s not only HTML (maybe the html part is stable, I don’t know), but there’s CSS and most importantly JavaScript.
Also, browsers don’t always follow the standard exactly. Some features get added that aren’t in the standard.
Some of the new features most people aren’t aware of us that I used recently :
- WebXR, make a Web page immersive and work in the browser of VR/AR headsets, e.g Meta Quest, Lynx XR1, Apple Vision Pro, etc
- WebBlueTooth, connect to a BT device, e.g a Lego controller in order to move actuator, data from sensors, etc
- WebUSB, connect a device and update its firmware, e.g SmartWatch, mechanical keyboard, etc
- GamePad API, use a gamepad or joystick to play from a browser window
- Realms in JavaScript for “better” sandboxing, it’s a relatively new feature of the language so the engine must be updated
So… sure none of that really helps to read a 2D Web page (like this one on Lemmy) but they pretty much all help to achieve better cross-platform support. By using the Web rather than native to connect to hardware then it is instantly delivered without having any OS specific driver to build and install. Practically speaking it does make the browser increasingly complex but IMHO it is worth it.
PS: I probably also used some modern CSS so there also the engine (which is ridiculously complex by the way) has to be updated too.
Web Bluetooth and web USB aren’t web standards and are Chromium specific
AFAICT that’s correct for WebBluetooth indeed, as it’s only implemented by Chromium (and thus all browsers relying on it) but for but for WebUSB https://wicg.github.io/webusb/ it’s still being discussed at the W3C level so even though not standards (which I don’t think W3C even produce, only API specifications, e.g HTML isn’t a standard whereas Bluetooth is) thus allowing others to possibly implement it.
To clarify Firefox is my main browser, but (sadly) for those very specific cases I’m relying on Chromium (WebXR on standalone XR devices, even now Wolvic switching to Chromium as a backend).
It’s an important point as by doing this Google is pushing for it’s own set of technologies and is pushing for it’s own engine which comes with a lot of business (namely ads) related “feature” e.g Manifest v3 that aren’t good for privacy.
That is also interesting to consider on “why” a browser keeps on evolving, i.e having the most “advanced” browsers does give an edge and pushes competition away.
From a security and privacy stand point webUSB and web Bluetooth seem very bad. We already see webRTC and webGL being abused.
HTML used to be a pretty set standard, maintained by the W3C. HTML5 was retired in 2018 (5.2 in 2021). Now it is a Living Standard that changes often and is maintained by a consortium of browser vendors.
It is also not the only technology being changed.
some reasons that I can think of:
- performance improvements (e.g. JIT)
- new standards (e.g. WASM)
- vulnerabities
- new features (e.g. web engines weren’t always sandboxed)
What’s the problem with the gecko engine?
What’s the problem with the blink engine?
Multiple implementations is good for everyone.
I feel like like inventing the wheel every five years is not the best use of talented people’s time.
People don’t need to build model trains either.
The project started as a hobby. People can do what they want with their free time.
Tell that to Microsoft. Lol.
Right now most browsers are based on an engine owned by Google with a small percentage based on Firefox, which has historically depended on Google for significant funding. Not a great situation.
For something as important to modern life, its beneficial to have more diversity, if only to add different security flaws to it then exist in Chrome and Firefox.
Repost but still cool
Also I am surprised at how many sponsors there are and how many industries are represented. The project isn’t that old
How is it progressing so fast compared to Servo? Isn’t Servo being developed for a longer time?
Tom Servo?
Servo was partially integrated into Firefox and discontinued
Servo is now an active project managed by the Linux Foundation.
Which means nothing honestly
I think Ladybird has way more promise
Basically everywhere I go on Lemmy you’re there spouting ignorant bullshit, garbage takes, rage-bait and misinformation. You’re inescapable. This is the perfect example. You know what you’re saying is wrong. You know you’re being dishonest. Do you wanna know how I know? Because I literally told you as much less than two weeks ago when you tried spreading the same lies. But you didn’t care back then and you still don’t care now. The only thing you seem to care about going by the other things I’ve seen you post is pushing your favorite projects, and you will use all of the arguments available to do so, including the ones that you just entirely made up. You think LadyBird is the better project and are trying to spread the belief that Servo is dead to make others buy into the LadyBird hype further. But, of course, Servo verifiably isn’t dead and in fact the Servo team writes up monthly blog posts detailing their progress, which show the project developing at a healthy pace. And to top it all off, when these facts are pointed out to you, your only comeback is “means nothing”. Clearly you’re not the kind of person to let facts tie you down.
Heh, I thought about blocking them like a thousand times, but they are sometimes sharing neutral or interesting information so I’m just trying to ignore this type of comments
Only reason I unblocked them was in case I needed to refute their claims anywhere. Suffice to say though, for anyone reading this, a good rule of thumb is if Possibly Linux says it, decent chance its untrue
Maybe I made to many assumptions. All I saw was on the about page they said they started under Mozilla and moved to the Linux foundation. Maybe I’m to quick to jump to conclusions but it doesn’t look like it has that much momentum. To be fair neither does Labybird. The big thing about Ladybird is that it is completely independent and already has a decent amount of funding. Maybe Servo is bigger than I realized. At the end of they day we need diversity.
I didn’t mean this as a personal attack. It seems like you have some previous knowedge of Servo which is completely fine. You are welcome to block me if you so wish. At the end of the day you don’t have to care about what I say. While I don’t suspect this will turn into harassment I will note that I will block you if you start trying to “chase” me across the fediverse. I have had issues in the past where someone starts going though and replying to every one of my comments everywhere.
Hot take: Since it’s a BSD licensed browser at some point in the future, there’s going to be a company that funds it brings it to mainstream with their flavor, and then will over throw chromium in time. Replace an ‘evil’ with another ‘evil’.
Luckily Gecko still exists. And who knows, maybe Servo will make it one day (but the odds are stacked against both them and Ladybird anyway).
I feel you… Fingers crossed dude. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride
Yeah not a good licence at all for an independent browser. Idk if Servo MPL is a good license either. Do you know of any web browser that is GPL?
Its better than a BSD style license which is what I was mainly critiquing
Definitely not what you want, but Gnome web (Epiphany) is GPLv3 according to flathub.
WebKit/Blink are mostly LGPL.
I like this project and just hope it was gplv3 or some similar copyleft license
Ladybird is licences under BSD-clause 2. Which allows privatization of the code.
IMO a web browser should be GPLv3, specially to not allow DRM bullshit in the browser.
AGPL, to prevent streaming (while not sharing the code).
Yeah AGPLv3 is the best if it’s going to be hosted as a service. Which a lot of web services do. Good point.
yeah agree
All hail the cuck license, ensuring we end up back at the same place every single time.
Good intentions and all that
Isn’t that the road to hell? Paved with good intentions
It’s nice and all but usage of Swift is kind of not great.
Why is Swift bad?
Also, I noticed the project has taken donations from mostly non-foss companies. Let’s hope they stand by their principles
Welp, I haven’t seen anyone learn Swift other than for Apple stuff these days. So I wonder how many can actually contribute to the code. It’s also made by Apple, so yeah. It would have been more performant and secure (both of which are pretty important in a browser) if it was written in a more low level language. For example Rust.
While Rust would probably have been a good choice for implementing a new browser, I don’t think Swift deserves the criticism it’s getting in this thread:
- Swift was created by the same person who created Rust, and has many of the same nice traits
- Swift is a modern language that is easy for plenty of developers to pick up; I’d place it in the same family as Rust and Kotlin
- Swift grants access to a large pool of native iOS/Mac developers
It’s also made by Apple, so yeah.
It’s also open-source? Like, Microsoft created C# and Typescript. Google created Go. Those get used without people bringing up their origins. Hell, Rust was created by a homophobe. What, do you think the license lets Apple close-source everyone’s code if they choose or something?
Sorry, I’m just really tired of these low-effort comments. The only thing that should matter is the language and if it hits the goals the project needs.
Sure. It is open source, but the development is done by Apple engineers. I also would like to state that Go has trackers in it. I also don’t really care what the creator of a language is. Homophobe, sexist, racist or other similar stuff, I couldn’t care less as long as the language is good.
You couldn’t care, as long as the language is good, but you care when it’s Apple?
You’re wrong btw. Sure, Apple engineers developed it originally. But it is now in the hands of the open source community, with over 1,000 contributors on github: https://github.com/swiftlang/swift
Edit: To be clear, unlike something like Chromium, Apple doesn’t even own the repositories anymore. It’s fully independent.
I said:
I couldn’t care less as long as the language is good.
Why wouldn’t I care if the language is bad in my opinion?
Okay, so what’s bad about Swift?
Rust was created by a homophobe
javascript, too
Sorry, I was thinking of Javascript. Rust was a different Mozilla employee.
May I recommend editing your comment?
Honestly, I really should have already, but spaced on it. Thank you for reminding me.
makes sense, though. javascript is a very bad language :shrug:
It is currently written in C++. They are looking to switch to Swift.
They looked into Rust but decided that GUI work was a pain and that they wanted something more object-oriented.
“More performant” citation needed. Very well written Rust might be extremely fast, yes, but Rust is also a hard language to get right. Swift is far from a slow language and I would not be surprised if the average rust programmer barely if at all manages to beat out the average swift programmer in terms of speed. As for the amount of programmers interested, hard to tell, but given the sheer amount of Swift devs I’d not be surprised if there were quite a few interested ones and I am unconvinced Rust programmers are statistically more likely to be interested in Browser development.
Benchmarks mean nothing. These aren’t the results of code written by an average programmer. Edit: and as a general note I would also like to point out the relative inconsistency of the results in terms of factor, only further reinforcing my point. I like Rust and all but we do need to admit it doesn’t magically solve all our problems.
Benchmarks mean nothing.
You’re free to suggest another method of comparing the two languages’ performance. This is the best we’re have, and Rust wins in every single benchmark shown there.
These aren’t the results of code written by an average programmer.
Citation needed.
I like Rust and all but we do need to admit it doesn’t magically solve all our problems.
I never said it did. I simply pointed out that it’s demonstrably faster than Swift.
lol
Shopify (i.e. Shittify) being their top donor already has me looking sideways at this project. They’ll invest in anything they think they can get an edge with and if something starts to happen they’ll fuck it up and wallstreet-ify it as fast as possible if they can.
Their guru founder Tobi made a huge NFT play that went absolutely nowhere while I still worked there. They spent a lot of time and money on it, right before they laid several thousand people off.
I agree that it’s not ideal, but hey, it’s open source, and the Louis Rossmann cult is the only other top-tier donor, so I’m sure they’ll be fine.
Do you have a source for that? I’m trying to look for donors but don’t really find anything.
Starts about midway down their page at ladybird.org
How could I have missed that, lol. Thanks.
Anyways, I don’t think it’s too weird. It might even be to simply have their name up there. We’ll have to see.
I read somewhere awhile back their platinum donors gave a certain tier (10k or 100k or whatever it was). To be clear I’m more than open to being surprised here, I want Ladybird to succeed. I just resent Shopify being involved in any way, I’m a little bit petty after slogging it out at that company awhile because I know what they’re all about.
Also I’m very much cautious about them on anything browsing related. Discovered (after others also) they let their search-pages-in-a-shop get indexed.
Meaning I could go to Caterpillar, search for “Wabtec is better” and then this search url (with 0 products) would turn up in Google searches and that URL persisted. Text and all.
Basically one could spray-paint and tag sites with this graffiti. Shop admins didn’t even have means to remove it.
Problem ignored and stayed this way for months.
While I agree shopify has a kind of “mierda touch”, I still see it as if it goes sideways with them someone will just fork the code.
True
Oh great. Now I’m losing hope in this project even more.
There’s a good chance it won’t ever really be usable if the lead developer was a crypto scammer. Those guys are just looking for a quick buck. Vaporware is really the way to do it in 2024.
You may have misunderstood. It was Shopify who did the big NFT play on their platform. I don’t know much about the Ladybird team, I’m not trying to throw shade on them.
Gotcha
I mean I hope Ladybird devs do a great build and go their own way without being corrupted by their donors and all that, don’t get me wrong. But whenever I see that dumb shopping bag logo I get the no feelings.
You can also read up on how the vast majority of Mozilla’s funding has been coming from Google for a very long time, and draw your own conclusions from that fact.
Shoulda built it in Julia.
There was a gpl licensed browser engine someone by hobby is writing from scratch. I think theese companies supporting ladybird just do so because of license that they can proprietarify(like chromium)
I agree. However, things are so bad in the browser market that even a proprietary browser could be good news if they don’t become a duopoly and actually compete.
There was a gpl licensed browser engine someone by hobby is writing from scratch. I think theese companies supporting ladybird just do so because of license that they can proprietarify(like chromium)
As someone insecure in their masculinity I don’t know if u would use ladybird. Now if it was MANbird I would.
MachoEagle
They should have called it ManDrill. Nothing more masculine than drilling a man.
Consider Edge you edgy man.
Sure, nothing is more masculine than having a preference for men.
Was this sarcasm? /genq
No /hj
Yes it was
i’d like to see a revival of webkit and an open source browser that uses it
WebKit isn’t dead and is being used by GNOME Web.
Doesn’t Safari still use WebKit?
it’s the only one i knew about before the other comment. with more browsers using it, we may not need to build another engine from scratch to broaden competition
I think this is the argument that the Ladybird people have made:
- Chrome is dependent on Google ( obviously )
- Edge is dependent on Google ( based on Chromium )
- Firefox is dependent on Google ( 80% of revenue )
- Safari is dependent on Google ( $4 billion from Google )
- most other browsers are dependent on Google ( use Chromium ) - Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, etc
Ladybird is intended to be a truly independent browser and especially independent of Google.
Safari isn’t dependent on Google. It was just a no-brainer for Apple to take a free 20 billion dollars from Google for setting the default search engine to something most users would want anyway.
We don’t have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment.
We would like to do Windows eventually, but it’s not a priority at the moment.
This is how you make “critical mass” adoption that much more difficult.
As much as I love Linux, if you are creating a program to be used by everyone and anyone, you achieve adoption inertia and public consciousness penetration by focusing on the largest platform first. And at 72% market share, that would be Windows.
I hope this initiative works. I really do. But intentionally ignoring three-quarters of the market is tantamount to breaking at least one leg before the starting gate even opens. This browser is likely to be relegated to being a highly niche and special-interest-only browser with minuscule adoption numbers, which means it will be virtually ignored by web developers and web policy makers.
Linux users tend to give much better bug reports than Windows users (if they do at all). That alone is probably a good enough reason to do Linux first. There are many more good reasons when the first goal is getting it functional and not getting as many users as possible (who will probably hate it if they’re not a technically skilled user because there will be bugs).
You’re making an assumption their first priority is the number of users. I would suspect that isn’t true, and they’re aware Windows has more users.
We would like to do Windows eventually, but it’s not a priority at the moment.
intentionally ignoring
I think you just read what you wanted to read don’t you think?
One salty downvote from @rekabis@lemmy.ca :P
Can’t win 'em all.
LadyBird is an unusable pre-alpha-quality web browser. The fact that they haven’t bothered porting to Windows yet is both thoroughly unsurprising and entirely meaningless. In its current state, it wouldn’t become popular either way. But I guess Linux users have this weird inferiority complex where everything must instantly be dropped to port to Windows even when it makes little sense to do so.
Ladybird was originally started as a browser for SerenityOS, a POSIX operating system. Well into the project, they decided to make it cross-platform but that still meant POSIX ( Linux and macOS ). As interest ( and sponsorships ) came in from outside SerenityOS, focus moved more and more to the browser and away from SerenityOS.
Just recently, Ladybird decided to split from SerenityOS, allow more outside code, and in fact has dropped SerenityOS as a supported OS.
The project is fairly pragmatic. I am sure they will add Windows support as the core browser engine matures.
All the code is hosted on GitHub. Clone it, build it, and join our Discord if you want to collaborate on it! We’re looking forward to seeing you there.
So much for freedom when everything is done thru proprietary services under US jurisdiction.
It’s interesting to see a new browser engine aside from Gecko and Chromium, especially with all the conundrum surrounding the Manifest v2 support.
I want manifest 3.2
