Ladybird faces an uphill website compatibility battle thanks to Chrome dominance. I wish them all the best.
They are writing the browser from the ground up following web specifications, specifications Google themselves often write and maintain. So it should just work once it’s done, great talk by the lead Dev that goes into a lot more detail on that and just the project in general. https://youtu.be/9YM7pDMLvr4
As far as I understand most websites load so far (slowly) and will be aout 90% correct, but with visual issues
I’m of the opinion that Google produces the specifications in bad faith, choosing features and constructions that are costly to implement to prevent others from entering the market. For example, see WebUSB. It’s a completely unnecessary standard at the very least and waste developer time. Other browsers have not bothered to implement it, generally calling it out for being a dumb specification.
With that said yes there are standards, but primarily pushed and controlled by one company that is not interested in others writing web browsers. Hopefully they’re forced to divest themselves from Chrome.
You seem to know more about it than I do, and I generally agree with your assessment. Either way ladybird has a talented team of paid engineers and tons of community contributors, so I’m choosing to believe in them even if Google is doing their best to stop them!
Both WebUSB and WebSerial can be pretty useful. Some online IDEs use WebSerial, meshtastic web flasher uses it too, GrapheneOS web flasher utilizes WebUSB.
Yeah I already can’t rely on just Firefox and keep chrome around as a last resort backup. I’ll be trying Ladybird out for sure though always good to help test new browser options
Unlike other browsers, Ladybird is not based on Chromium or Gecko or Blink but on the new independent SerenityOS LibWeb engine with a Qt GUI.
noice
Finally a QT browser because the stupid Firefox (and forks) always have disappearing GTK buttons randomly.
Hope they can adapt that GUI to libadwaita also.
Why though? Qt is much easier for cross platform and cross DE development.
libadwaita might be a good sideproject, but I don’t see much upside. And I even use Gnome.
Libadwaita just looks native on Gnome. I’m not saying its a necessity, but it would make the design feel more integrated on the system. I also run Gnome.
I’m waiting patiently for this.
That’s an awesome project.
Question, though, from scanning the repo: why not rust? ~65% of the codebase is C++; strikes me that this’d be a FANTASTIC opportunity to show how incredibly efficient, effective, and safe rust can be for a wide-scale, consumer-oriented application.
I think there was an interview where that question was asked and after various languages being evaluated it came down to being the language everyone working on it was most familiar with.
I’m looking forward to using it in the future.
Well yeah, but be that as it may, greenfields are an opportunity for the contributors to dive headfirst into using a new language, and bring their expertise from other languages into that new one. Idk, that’s just how I look at it, given that this project doesn’t really have the feel of something that’s under serious time pressure.
Edit: not to mention, I would be a little surprised if a lot of the js couldn’t be also replaced with rust compiled to WASM
I see your point and do agree greenfield projects can be great for learning new languages but only if the project is simple enough. Browsers are huge and complex, language choice is very important as well as who will be working on it.
I think one of the arguments as well was that building the DOM in rust would have extra challenges as it’s fundamentally very object oriented so having a language suited to OOP would make it easier.
I really hope something amazing comes out of this. Expectations are building up across many communities and I hope they can deliver.
Still not sure how they will sustain themselves though. The donation model is obviously very ethical, but I doubt its sustainability in the long run.
I can’t find the original thread now but there was some drama surrounding the author of this project and his views on gender language.
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814
This was also his project at the time. Shame I can’t find the Lemmy post.
Finally some good news in this space!
Shame they didn’t join effort on servo. AFAIK there is nothing wrong with it except for the fact they are not familiar with rust.
