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with mandatory male pronouns for users in the documentation.
(and no politics allowed!)
note
this issue was resolved eventually by another dev; afaik the lead dev stopped commenting on it after closing a PR and saying people who wanted to remove the docs’ implied assumption of users’ maleness were “being political”.
That’s not controlled by Google…
It is also important to note that the license is still foss and GPL compatible. In the future they could made it GPL.
Not only C++ but also Swift, which just feels strange
Why build a new browser in C++ when safer and more modern languages are available?
Ladybird started as a component of the SerenityOS hobby project, which only allows C++. The choice of language was not so much a technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain.
However, now that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect.
We have evaluated a number of alternatives, and will begin incremental adoption of Swift as a successor language, once Swift version 6 is released.
Swift is a pretty fully fledged systems language at this point … however, it’s far from tried and tested for use cases like this and cross platform support is still garbage, so still a pretty questionable choice.
that is actually really goofy, didn’t know about that
Everyone knows links2 is the best browser.
#links2gang
Is it that difficult to implement a CopyLeft licence ? Well we do have Servo (A modular browser engine) in development & SeaMonkey is a thing too (Which is an entire internet-application suite)
Let’s see how ladybird writes docs in the future. Will they assume the user is a man and shut down any corrections for being political?
Removed by mod
Can you elaborate ?
Is he the one constantly spewing hateful shit in the Issues on GitHub whenever people ask him to not use only “he” and “him” in the docs?
Yeah that was the thing that alerted me.
Dammit, again? What did this developer do…
I’ve only tangentially picked up things about this but this is an example for it
(For some context, if you didn’t already know this, Ladybird originated from a SerenityOS component and the first reply is from the lead dev)
Oh… That’s… Disappointing. Firefox it is, then, for now.
It’s weird… It makes “business” sense, too. If you want people to use your stuff and you can choose to appeal to more people, why wouldn’t you? I think we’ve reached the stage of normalcy now where using “they” and “them” are not in itself something that would necessarily scare away right-wing users (given you want to keep appealing to that attractive market, too.)
Well, in that case, I hope it gets forked into a super gay version in the future lol
At least there’s other projects too…
This is the way 🌈
_They_dybird
mastoqueerz
Wow 😳
was that nukeop? that Guy is a known asshole. He was also quoted Saying licenses don’t matter and threw a huge fucking hissy fit when someone forked his project and gave it a copyleft license because of making such a stupid statement. Unfortunately the website archiving the drama is down, and I could only find an archive if the first iteration of it (it had at least 2 more paragraphs after this) https://archive.is/UT9Xe
I’m OOTL. Are these actual issues people have with the project?
C++ might not be as memory-safe as Rust, but let’s not pretend a Rust code base wouldn’t be riddled with raw pointers.
BSD tells me the team probably wants Ladybird to become not just a standalone browser but also a new competing base for others to build a browser on top of – a Chromium competitor. Even though BSD wouldn’t force downstream projects to contribute back upstream, they probably would, since that’s far less resource-intensive than maintaining a fork. (Source: me, who works on proprietary software, can’t use GPL stuff, but contributes back to my open-source dependencies.)
well, its possible to check if a rust equivalent would be riddled with raw pointers: just check the Servo code base.
personally I think its a good thing to have another browser implementation, regardless of specific choices they make about language or license
If you cant tell from just looking at the relative successes of BSD and linux that copyleft licenses are better than I dont know how to convince you of anything
By that logic proprietary licenses are best for desktop OSs because Windows has the biggest market share?
Windows has lost more market share in the last 20 years than any other operating system
It’s the only operating system with that much market share to lose.
To… MacOS. Yet another proprietary closed source license
Actually macos was based off of BSD, but there were no basically contributions back to the community, so its whithered away. meanwhile linux is running in every sattelite and scientific insrument, it runs every router and nearly every server that are the internet. Microsoft google and apple all begrudginly make linux better while they make the operating systems they sell worse
Actually to linux, but hey nice try
C++ might not be as memory-safe as Rust, but let’s not pretend a Rust code base wouldn’t be riddled with raw pointers.
I’m curious. Why do you believe the last statement to be true?
I don’t like that “C++ isn’t memory safe”. It is. Users of that language are usually just not experienced or educated enough and therefore more mistakes happen.
I agree though, that other languages like Rust or Java can make it easier to prevent such mistakes.
In my experience, using smart pointers alone already solves 90% of memory issues I have to deal with. C++ improved a lot in that regard over the decades.
I’m very experienced with C++and I still feel like I’m juggling chainsaws every time I use it. And I’ve personally run into into things like use after free errors while working in Chromium. It’s a massive codebase full of multithreading, callbacks, and nonlocal effects. Managing memory may be easy in a simple codebase but it’s a nightmare in Chromium. Tools like AddressSanitizer are a routine part of Chrome development for exactly that reason. And people who think memory management is easy in C++ are precisely the people I expect to introduce a lot of bugs.
The good news is that the browser comes from Serenity OS which means it probably is lightweight and well written.
I agree that experienced users can write code that leaks less than in C, leaving aside the bottomless pit of despair that is undefined behaviour. But the the language isn’t memory safe, it doesn’t even prevent you from returning a reference to a local or helpnwitg iterator invalidation. you don’t have to jump through any hoops to enable making that mistake.
If a language prevents you from doing stuff like that, this always comes at a cost, since it has to do the work for you, almost always. This is additional overhead you can get rid of in C++ and therefore gain a lot of performance. But that again comes with more responsibility on the developer’s side and you might need to implement appropriate checks yourself where needed.
Rust prevents the things mentioned above in the compiler; there is no runtime cost for most of Rust’s safety measures. There is definitely a build time cost though.
You can unsafe your way around anything, but that’s on the dev.
I’m not just talking about performance costs. For example, compared to C++, Rust comes with reduced flexibility and increased complexity in certain cases.
The borrow checker, for example, imposes strict ownership and lifetime rules, which can be difficult to work with, especially in complex data structures or when interfacing with existing systems. Sometimes, you have to significantly refactor your code just to satisfy these constraints, even when you know the code would be safe in practice. This can slow down development, require more boilerplate, and make certain patterns harder to express.
C++ gives developers more freedom but expects them to take responsibility. That tradeoff isn’t just about raw performance; it’s also about how much control and convenience the developer has.
Every source I’ve seen has shown rust and c++ to be very similar in terms of performance.
It’s not just about runtime performance, but also about coding flexibility, and for example also reduction of boilerplate.
As long as we’re filling out our fantasy browser brackets, I’m hoping that the Servo engine and browser/s can become viable. Servo was started at Mozilla as a web rendering engine only, before they laid off the whole team and the Linux Foundation took over the project. Basically revived from the dead in 2023, the current project is working on an engine and a demonstration browser that uses it. It’s years away from being a usable replacement for current browsers and the engine is certainly the main project. A separate browser which employs Servo as its engine is a more likely future than an actual Servo browser.
Still, you can download a demo build of the official browser from the web site. Currently, it’s only usable for very simple web sites. Even Lemmy/Mbin display is a little broken, and I think of those as fairly basic. YouTube is out of the question. One of the sites that’s been used to demonstrate its capability to render web pages is the web site for Space Jam (1996) if that gives you any idea of its current state.
Honest question, since I have no clue about web/browser engines other than being able to maybe name 4-5 of them (Ladybird, Servo, Webkit, Gecko, … shit, what was Chromium’s called again?):
What makes browsers/browser engines so difficult that they need millions upon millions of LOC?
Naively thinking, it’s “just” XML + CSS + JS, right? (Edit: and then the networking stack/hyperlinks)
So what am I missing? (Since I’m obviously either forgetting something and/or underestimating how difficult engines for the aforementioned three are to build…)
JavaScript alone is not a simple beast. It needs to be optimized to deal with modern JavaScript web apps so it needs JIT, it also needs sandboxing, and all of the standard web APIs it has to implement. All of this also needs to be robust. Browsers ingest the majority of what people see on the Internet and they have to handle every single edge case gracefully. Robust software is actually incredibly difficult and good error handling often adds a lot more code complexity. Security in a browser is also not easy, you’re parsing a bunch of different untrusted HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You’re also executing untrusted code.
Then there is the monster that is CSS and layout. I can’t imagine being the people that have to write code dealing with that it’d drive me crazy.
Then there are all of the image formats, HTML5 canvases, videos, PDFs, etc. These all have to be parsed safely and displayed correctly as well.
There is also the entire HTTP spec that I didn’t even think to bring up. Yikes is that a monster too, you have to support all versions. Then there is all of that networking state and TLS + PKI.
There is likely so much that I’m still leaving out, like how all of this will also be cross platform and sometimes even cross architecture.
Adding on to this, while this article is fast approaching 20 years old, it gets into the quagmire that is web standards and how ~10 (now ~30) years of untrained amateurs (and/or professionals) doing their own interpretations of what the web standards mean–plus another decade or so before that in which there were no standards–has led to a situation of browsers needing to gracefully handle millions of contradictory instructions coming from different authors’ web sites.
Here’s a bonus: the W3C standards page. Try scrolling down it.
Well… according to ladybird, at this point they are more conformant than servo in web standards…
Servo is still making quick progress though.
does the ability to view websites other than Space Jam '96 really improve your life?
I will give you that
What is the problem with a BSD-license? I’m not familiar with the different open source licensing models and their problems.
It’s not really an issue for the end user. But it’s basically made for companies to take advantage of free hobbyist developers without needing to give anything back in return.
So if you’re the kind of person who runs to foss software to get away from corporate tech bull, having a license that benefits companies more than users just kinda feels scummy.
Remember the Minix operating system that runs on your processors ? It’s a proprietary spyware now because of BSD licencing
Basically, it allows you to steal all the code and use it in your closed-source programs, giving a green light for corporations to use open-source code without giving anything back.
GPL doesn’t allow that, forcing you to open-source anything that was produced using other GPL-licensed code. That’s, for example, why so much of Linux software is open-source - it commonly relies on various dependencies that are GPL-licensed, so there is no other legal option other than sharing the code as well.
It’s not “stealing”. It’s explicitly allowed. Using IP according to its licence is the opposite of stealing.
Ok, then call it “plagiarising”.
That is definitionally not plagiarising. It follows IP law, which is the opposite of plagiarism.
There’s more than a legal definition of plagiarism.
Plagiarism is when you sell the work of others as your own without attribution. There are bucketloads of examples of legal plagiarism.
I’m pretty sure that everything H. Bomberguy discussed in his plagiarism video was legal, for example.
No, actually, plagiarism is a legalistic term. If IP law did not exist, neither would plagiarism.
And if you give someone permission to use your IP, and they go ahead and use that permission, it is not plagiarism neither legally nor by any colloquial understanding of the term. That is what happens when someone uses BSD or MIT code in their proprietary software. It is explicitly allowed, by design, by intention.
without attribution
BSD/MIT also don’t allow you to not attribute the author of the BSD/MIT code, so that doesn’t even make sense. You are perhaps thinking of code released public domain, in which case, again, the author specifically chose that over BSD/MIT, and the main practical difference is not needing to give attribution, so that must be what the original author wanted.
I think your legalistic view of the world is quite limiting.
It’s not illegal to rephrase what someone wrote in a book and pass it off as your own work. You can’t “wown” a cultural analysis. It’s still plagiarism.
Apple, Sony, N*****do, Netflix all use BSD but they don’t contribute any code to the BSD project itself, because of the BSD allow other people/company to close source their code when using with BSD
Sony actually does contribute. https://christitus.com/sony-playstation-and-freebsd/
TBH, considering those corporations, most of that would be DRM stuff, and they can’t let that leak in any format. Others are drivers.
It’s not a viral copyleft license, so you’re free to use the source code without giving anything back.
This has pros and cons over something like GPL, but people like to circlejerk GPL and pretend it’s always the best option 100% of the time.
For situations where you have to sign an NDA and are unable to release source code (eg; console game dev), MIT and BSD licensed projects are a godsend.MIT/BSD also makes the most sense for small/minimal projects where GPL is likely overkill. A 100 line script does not need to be GPL’ed. A small static website does not need to be GPL’ed.
I’m never going to be one to dog on something before I try it. If it’s good and can offer the same or better experience as Firefox then sign me up. The biggest sticking point for me, though, is potentially losing Firefox’s massive add-in library. I really like my uBlock Origin and Restore YouTube Dislike and my VPN extension and Metamask and all the other crap I’ve got there.
you can try it now if you want and it does work surprisingly well, but their timeline is still “alpha in 2026”
Yes. Good filters and privacy/security are an absolutely vital requirement today. Unbreaking things and adding features via extensions or something are also good.
it is also written from the ground up wich means it also has its own engine
explaining the difference between a Toyota and a Honda
God forbid someone on the internet has less niche knowledge about browser engines than you.
I’m downloading this and contributing to prove the haters wrong. Y’all are gonna regret not being able to say “I toad a so” like me.
i’m sure they will appreciate your BSD 2 Clause contributions at Microsoft HQ
BSD license is the only thing that annoys me. Chrome not by google.
…I have no idea what this is referencing. Duckduckgo?
Its a new Browser build from the ground up. I think its called ladybird.
Good interview with the Dev for anyone who is interested in more of the details from this thread, like why Swift? What’s so hard about browsers? Etc. https://youtu.be/z1Eq0xlVs3g
It’s a monumental effort really, building a browser engine from scratch and taking it to daily driver usable is probably among the most difficult programming challenges. It’s way easier to build a new Linux kernel from scratch than a browser engine lmao
Even Microshit tried and gave up because it was so hard
Even Microshit tried and gave up because it was so hard
They also failed at building operative systems, so not sure they are the best example.
Even Microshit tried and gave up because it was so hard
Not exactly. Yes a browser engine is one of the most, if not the most, complex pieces of software.
But if it was almost impossible to create a web engine then this, or KDE’s KHTML, or Servo, or NetSurf, or Kraken, or you-name-it wouldn’t exist.
Then how come (one of) the most powerful tech company in the world couldn’t make it, you ask? They already had a “functional” web engine. But what they had from the beginning was absolute shit that did not respect any web standard. And oh boy we people who fought against that shit trying to support it do know. Its baggage was immensely huge and shitty that after a while and the speed Chrome was taking over they found it was easier to yeet it altogether, and I do hope that piece of shit is burning in hell because it made our lifes so miserable.
Note that Opera did the same thing with their web engine - they gave up with it mostly because they found easier to jump in the Blink bandwagon, without realizing they were making Opera just another Chromium skin without much value, contrary to what Presto was.
Kinda what could happen if one day Microsoft decided to try make Windows to be as functional, fast and permissive as Linux.
Can someone eli5 why that is?
The W3C (The body that dictates web standards) specification, that describes what browser engines should handle, like CSS features, HTML5 etc and how is equivalent to thousands of pages long and there are huge standards to implement.
HTML5 is a big thing to implement, so is CSS and the JavaScript engine and probably even more technologies I’m forgetting
And that’s just implementation, it takes even more work to get them running well enough for the average end-user
Ladybird has been working on their from scratch engine for ~5 years iirc and they’re not planning to even have the first alpha out until next year lol
Because if a website doesn’t work in your browser, but it works in everyone else’s, no one will say “oh that website’s badly written”, instead they say “what a shitty browser”.
So you have a huge web standard you have to respect, and then all the websites with non standard code you have to make work anyway.
What happened to the logo. I swear like 2 years ago it was a picture of an actual ladybird
Accelerated Firefox timeline.
That used to have a picture of an actual Phoenix and then a red panda before it got streamlined.
If ladybird keep going at this rate, everyone will be trying to cancel them by the middle of next week
How hard is it to do some web searches first before you announce a new name for your project?
