Welcome to Ladybird, a truly independent web browser
359 comments
·February 28, 2025goplayoutside
matsz
> Andreas Kling, the same person behind SerenityOS
Important context - Andreas isn't involved with SerenityOS much anymore. He decided to prioritize Ladybird, which is arguably the more important project here.
Also, he used to contribute to WebKit. Even ended up working at Apple for a period of time. Quite definitely the right person in the right place.
hnfong
More context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40560768
qingcharles
I can highly recommend Andreas' YouTube updates if you're remotely interested in browser dev. Really fun.
biohazard2
Yes, they were fascinating! I truly miss them.
thisislife2
Ladybird is lucky in that it has someone who knows how important marketing is, even for opensource projects. There are other opensource browser engine projects languishing because of lack of PR, patronage and / or volunteers. For e.g. NetSurf https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ - website is outdated because of lack of volunteers but the project has active development - https://source.netsurf-browser.org/netsurf.git/ (already has partial support for CSS3, and Flex layout). It can develop into a great alternative if it had some more volunteers. Servo (https://servo.org/) is another project but it has some decent PR because of its Rust codebase and the Rust PR team. There's the Goanna browser engine too ( http://www.palemoon.org/ ) but, like Mozilla Gecko, the project isn't truly modular to offer a stand-alone browser engine as Goanna also strives to be an XUL renderer.
pizlonator
I think that Ladybird's success has more to do with the fact that kling is one of the few people who knows how to write the whole browser than with marketing. But yeah, kling is also a great communicator.
LeFantome
SerenityOS was already quite successful before they started Ladybird. So successful that he was already making enough off sponsorship to do it full time. It was having the time to take on something as ambitious as a full web browser for SerenityOS that led to the project to begin with.
I agree that Ladybird is lucky to have a dev not only of his seniority but of his specific expertise. However, there is no denying that a huge reason for the success of his projects is non-technical and more about his ability to build community and engagement.
leidenfrost
Also, I really, REALLY wish the devs don't surrender to user's pressure for the plethora of features offered by the commercial products, done ASAP.
Please maintain the tinkering, passion and devs-first codebase it has now, and don't end up as a huge mess just because users want things like VDPAU asap.
I don't mind waiting a few more years. For the "just works" part of my life, I already have chromium+Firefox
your_challenger
Learning to market yourself and your projects is so important! I wish I had the skills.
culi
Thanks I forgot about NetSurf. After Microsoft abandoning Blink and Opera abandoning Presto to use Chromium, the internet needs these alternatives more than ether
Is Palemoon the most popular Goanna-based browser?
thisislife2
The data isn't available because PaleMoon doesn't collect any analytic or telemetry data. So they don't know how big their userbase is. (Recently though, I think they have started collecting some data on hardware because they wanted to revamp their code base. See this discussion - https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=30909 - I however don't know how extensive, or persistent, this data collection is / was).
fifticon
I will add to the hundreds of comments.. Whatever happened to the thin waist of the wasp, in interfaces.. So, we design a system, for showing and interacting with data over networks. When we start with this, the outset is defining say a character set of 12-20-26 alphabet letters. Already with that, you could exchange information; at least the greeks could. We also managed to design the gopher protocol, the early world wide web protocol, telnet, and (god forbid) X-Windows. Early www already had some complications: Support for images, and form controls. A lot of these things were possible to do, even on a commodore 64.
But still, take a look at the monstrosities we have built since, presumably to serve the same purpose.. It now takes an effort apparently bigger than that required to land a controlled drone on the moon, to deliver a working/full WEB BROWSER..? An application supposedly intended to allow you to browse pages of mixed text and images, require approximately --two-- (nah, one?) full virtual OS environments to function, a turing-complete sub-language, and is more complicated to build than the OS's that host it..
I often wonder if all that was really necessary. It looks to me like we have made the 'interface' the most complex part of it all, leading to almost everybody just piggy-backing on the chrome investment (or what one chooses to call it.. It is an MS-like market control mechanism is what it is).
whutsurnaym
It's one thing to make a rocket to take a human being to space.
It's another thing entirely to make a "rocket" that will take a human being to space, or to school, or to work, or to the mall, or to the bank, or to church on sundays. And also it functions as a TV, a telephone, a radio, an encyclopedia, a games console, or anything else one can imagine. And then you wrap that up in a user interface that my grandmother can use without a NASA astronaut's level of training (YMMV).
amelius
And it serves more cookies than my grandmother.
yencabulator
The "thin waist" is a reference to IP (as in TCP/IP), and it's literally the thing that enables those uses.
https://web.archive.org/web/20111108105207/https://www.iab.o...
DiggyJohnson
And also backwards compatible forever and platform agnostic
voshond
Because browsers don’t just browse these days, they do all the heavy lifting and not just for the nerds like us, but actually make it accessible to the normies. They do all the compliance work to all the standards too. There is no standards of sending something to space yet.
I do so much in my browser these days, things I had to have 15 applications for back in the ie days.
astrobe_
You still have 15 applications, it's just that now they appear as tabs in your browser - which is actually a virtual machine in disguise.
I see the news in the front page of HN: Edge, Firefox, Ladybird. The problems with privacy, funding, etc. will remain as long as one refuses to do an "AT&T" on the Web, that is delegate the non-essential browser functions (text, image display) to other applications (e.g. VLC for video, audio).
With a strong emphasis on banning remote code execution (JS), the father of all evils.
It may be convenient to call a coworker from Teams in your browser, but it is not a sane way to do it because we end up to where we are now: browser oligopoly. Convenience can be a trap; scammers and phishing use it all the time by including "direct" links. People are told again and again to know better and use their bookmarks instead.
Groxx
The kind of flexible dynamic delegation that'd need (outside extremely simplistic uses) really doesn't exist in any OS that I've seen. And it would have to be quite sophisticated, to resist abuses and ensure latency is as low as it needs to be. I'm not sure we'd be in any better place if that happened - browsers would be simpler, but OSes and those media players/plugin-able things would gain significantly more complexity to offset it.
If your goal is to get rid of all the fancy stuff, then yeah - gopher still exists, all UX can be thrown out the window, it all exists today. But I don't think that'll go anywhere, except in extreme niches.
tshaddox
> An application supposedly intended to allow you to browse pages of mixed text and images
This has not been the intended scope of the World Wide Web for well over 20 years, so this is not a reasonable supposition to make.
Of course, you are free to make claims about what the intent of the World Wide Web ought to be.
account42
Intended by whom? Google?
danjl
If you just want to display pages of mixed text and images, it would be much easier. However, browsers are closer operating systems, capable of supporting rich desktop apps, without the antiquated desktop APIs. Browsers have more sophisticated security than desktop systems, and provide direct access to hardware resources like cameras, microphones and GPUs. In fact, webGPU would probably be considered a much better interface for GPUs than the desktop APIs like DirectX, WebGL, though maybe Vulkan is just as good. Browsers are also forming the basis for WASM development, though there are other deployment platforms, browsers are the biggest.
katzenversteher
Well said, I feel the same. While I never used gopher I still remember e.g. the usenet vs. web forums. I mean being able to add images and stuff like that to discussions was helpful in many cases, I prefer the user experience of the usenet.
amelius
The web specifications should have been written in Haskell with a test suite. From there, it should be just a matter of optimization. Still a big task, but completely doable in a package by package basis.
gnabgib
Big discussion 8 months ago (1077 comments, 757 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40856791
1 year ago (625 points, 284 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39271449
2 years ago (1341 points, 473 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32809126
xiaoyu2006
I got to know this project through the one year old post. I was quite buggy and can’t even render github.com back then. The improvement is huge.
samiv
I applaud the effort but seriously though I just wonder...
For reference, Chromimum (and therefore Chrome) is a monster of a project and has at this point probably over 10 million lines of code and has taken +20 years to develop with thousands of developers involved.
I can only conclude that:
a) the modern WEB is so complicated that this is the minimum required level of complexity to run and render modern WEB safely
b) chromium is extravagantly over engineered and the actual amount of complexity and code needed to run and render modern WEB is actually much less
c) Ladybird is actually not targeting the same features but some "suitable" subset of features.
Or maybe the answer really is C thus making this a toy/hobby project?
One could of course then hope that the answer is b) but somehow I don't feel like it is.
igrunert
While the modern web is complicated, there's a few things working in Ladybird's favor.
Web Platform Tests (1) make it significantly easier to test your compliance with W3C standards. You don't have to reverse engineer what other engines are doing all the time.
The standards documents themselves have improved over time, and are relatively comprehensive at this point. Again, you don't have to reverse engineer what other engines are doing, the spec is relatively comprehensive.
Ladybird has chosen to not add a JIT compiler for JS and Wasm, reducing complexity on the JS engine. They're already reached (or exceeded) other JS engines on the ECMAScript Test Suite Test262 (2).
There's a big differential between the level of investment in Chromium and the other engines - in part because Chrome / Chromium are often doing R&D to build out new specifications, which is more work than implementing a completed specification. There's also a large amount of work that goes into security for all three major engines - which (for now) is less of a concern for Ladybird.
I'm confident that the Ladybird team will hit their goal of Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version on Linux and macOS. They'll cut a release with whatever they have at that point - it's already able to render a large swathe of the modern web, and continues to improve month-on-month.
(1) https://web-platform-tests.org/ (2) https://test262.fyi/
sho_hn
The Chromium codebase also implements requirements that you may not need to take on for just a web browser, e.g. all of the infrastructure to make it ChromeOS, including for example being a Wayland compositor and a lot of other stuff. The projects are somewhat apples to oranges.
swiftcoder
The answer is probably some combination of all 3. The modern web is indeed insanely complicated, Chromium is a massive enterprise project with all the resulting inefficiencies one would expect, and a competing web browser should likely aim to support the 90% use-case and ignore a large fraction of the total complexity in the process.
culi
A ton of that code is web APIs that, although standardized and accepted, are not really what most would consider critical to a browser. Stuff like Speech Synthesis API[0] or Device Motion[1] might be important to a PWA but are rarely relevant to the web in general
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SpeechSynth...
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/DeviceMotio...
jcelerier
Note that chrome's codebase loc count contains some huge third-party libraries such as ffmpeg - pretty sure a lot of it is unused.
cmrdporcupine
Chromium also includes things like a complete PDF renderer, etc.
I used to work a bit in that codebase, but I don't recall the core "blink" renderer portion being at all the largest part of the codebase.
gawa
Regarding A, I found this blogpost from 2020 interesting to get some sense of scale : https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....
As for C, the "suitable" subset really depends what we expect from a browser. In my experience, I was forced to use a Chrome based browser only for work, because mostly for google web apps (Google Cloud and Google Meet come to mind). For browsing the small web, I'm sure smaller browsers can work well. I tried some, but was usually put off because of the lack of adblockers, and I also quickly miss the element picker zapper feature of the ublock origin extension.
eikenberry
All of the above?
a) the modern WEB is stupidly complicated, it jumped the shark a while back b) enterprise development practices make this an almost certainty (though I haven't studied the code) c) it is targeting a subset, but this has 0 to do with it being a toy or not
account42
Why does C automatically make Ladybird a toy/hobby project? Don't you think there can be room for specialized sofware? Let your Netflixes and whatever run in separate Chromium containers (they already do on your TV anway) and make the web browser efficient for browsing the web and just that.
serviceberry
The practical trade-off is that it is very, very difficult to secure a modern browser. Major vendors employ large teams of full-time security engineers and still ship vulnerable code with regularity. Companies such as Brave don't, but they get the benefit of getting many of the Chromium security features for free. Ladybird won't.
The thing that works in your favor is that Ladybird is very niche at this point, so unless some well-resourced adversary hates you specifically, it's unlikely that you'd be targeted.
igrunert
Ladybird does have another slight advantage in that it only has an interpreter for JS and wasm, instead of maintaining multiple tiers of JIT compilation for both. That choice materially reduces the surface area for exploits.
stephen_g
Obviously there are many types of security vulnerabilities, but one thing that should start paying off for Ladybird eventually is the move to a memory and race safe language (Swift). Of course, that will be a gradual process (they haven't really started yet and they will be using the Swift C++ interop so there will be C++ parts of the browser for years to come).
They do also benefit from using off-the-shelf libraries like Skia, OpenSSL, image libraries etc. that the other browsers are using too. Previously they were rolling their own for everything but changed after the split from SerenityOS.
pjmlp
Will they, or it will be like Jank, just a kind of side endevour without commitment to actually make use of?
It isn't as if Swift developer experience is that great outside Apple's ecosystem.
While I would definitly use it when on Apple's ground, I feel less inclined to thouch it for anything related to cross platform GUIs.
askonomm
I don't think they'd use Swift for GUI building. Ladybird's GUI's are platform-dependent (Qt on Linux, AppKit on Mac, etc). From what I understand they want to use Swift as a replacement for C++.
I haven't done a lot of Swift, but I did play around with it recently, and it seems to work fine even outside of the Apple ecosystem. It has a LSP you can use so you don't need XCode, they even develop a first-class plugin for VSCode.
DavidPiper
> It isn't as if Swift developer experience is that great outside Apple's ecosystem.
I keep hearing this - and have for years - but is it actually still true? Sure, you're never going to get Cocoa on non-Apple platforms, but with first-party VS Code support and a lot of the surrounding tooling open-sourced, is it all still [~that much worse than XCode~] as bad as all that?
ykonstant
>It isn't as if Swift developer experience is that great outside Apple's ecosystem.
That is indeed a serious problem for aspiring contributors to the project.
account42
Yeah I fear their choice of Swift will stifle cross-platform contribution.
rixed
Major vendors also employ teams of engineers to steal your data, identify and locate you, so it cuts both ways, depending on your threat model.
mannyv
Well, it's hard to say because every browser engine is old. There are layers upon layers of code in every engine. And the old stuff wasn't really designed with security in mind.
PedroBatista
Just installed Waterfox a couple hours ago. ( https://www.waterfox.net/ ) I'm getting fed up with all the latest Mozilla bullshit to the point I'm ready to switch browsers.
Ladybird is starting to look good too, from an end user daily driver perspective, technically it has been impressive for a long time.
One other thing I'm really hopeful is to embed Ladybird engine in a "first class" way. Think of if as an Electron alternative but in a sane way.
depingus
Waterfox looks worth a try, but I opted for LibreWolf because it's verified on Flathub and Waterfox is not. It looks like the Flathub version of Waterfox was packaged the same BrowserWorks Ltd that makes Waterfox, but they didn't take the extra steps to get verified so we can't be sure. Hopefully they can remedy that. Browsers are too important to install from untrusted sources.
wongarsu
For what it's worth, it's the opposite situation on Windows: The Waterfox installer is signed (even with an Extended Validation certificate), the LibreWolf installer isn't.
Another thing that surprised me is that there is a Waterfox Android build in the Play Store. Reviews of that are however mixed.
gs17
Similar on macOS, the LibreWolf team (somewhat understandably) refuses to pay for Apple's developer account to notarize their builds, so every update I have to remove the quarantine extended attribute (Homebrew can do this as part of updating now) or the OS helpfully tells me my browser is damaged and needs to be deleted.
egberts1
Waterfox got bought by an advertisement company System1.
Not surprisen that Waterfox can be signed by Microsoft.
foxrider
Librewolf is available on Microsoft Store officially tho
MrLeap
> One other thing I'm really hopeful is to embed Ladybird engine in a "first class" way. Think of if as an Electron alternative but in a sane way.
I have the same hope. If it were performant enough I would find reasons to use it for gamedev, even with quirks.
niutech
Servo is already embeddable, you can use it in Tauri (https://servo.org/blog/2024/01/19/embedding-update/) or Qt (https://www.kdab.com/embedding-servo-in-qt/).
bix6
I’m very excited but how will this survive without some sort of monetization?
In the old thread I see the non-profit was seeded with $1M. That’s 5 good US developers for 1 year. What next?
MrLeap
Andreas Kling is pouring his attention into this. He's a grit elemental. I believe he will accomplish this no matter how many people tell him it's a doomed effort, impossible, whatever. What happens in the longer term depends on if enough people value what he and his team does.
Looking at what FF has recently decided about selling out its users, I think demand will catalyze.
bix6
I love that term “grit elemental”! Hopefully Chris will continue to support the project. Fun rabbit hole learning about all this.
ratg13
It says on the website they aim to always maintain 18 months of runway.. so basically scaling up and down as needed.
They get sponsors through enthusiasm, which is the way it should be for a project like this.
After reading their website, I know that I am going to request my company to donate, so there’s at least one more contribution.
BirAdam
Not just enthusiasm.
Companies like Shopify will invest because a healthy ecosystem is good for their bottom line in the long term. Monopolies are not good for them in the long term.
LAC-Tech
Why does it need to be accomplished without monetization?
I'd gladly pay for a good browser, that respects my privacy. Quite frankly we all need to start opening our pockets for this; the idea that big companies will benevolently supply stuff like this to us for free without trying to spy on us is naive.
iamsaitam
Perhaps, instead they can get 5 good developers from elsewhere for a decade /s
account42
Why the /s. The idea that you can only get qualified developers for silicon valley salaries is absurd. It's not like tech companies in europe generally pay that much and they do just fine.
pinoy420
[dead]
MontagFTB
This is the SerenityOS browser split off into its own project. I have respect for Andreas and hope this browser continues to mature.
andrewchilds
This is the first time I'm looking at SerenityOS and I really appreciate the Win98 vibe. Also this opening line from their FAQ:
Will SerenityOS support $THING?
Maybe. Maybe not. There is no plan.noisy_boy
Good - we already have an overload of scrum/agile driven planning sucking the life out of the joy of programming in our corporate lives.
Let him enjoy making a great browser.
notpushkin
I think the browser is a bit more organized (OP is referring to the OS), but I do hope they maintain the tinkering vibe, too.
_benj
This seems so much more relevant in light of the recent Firefox new terms and conditions. I think the writing was on the wall but I didn’t wanted to see it.
It might be time to explore librewolf or Vivaldi again
tech234a
Also related is Mozilla's apparent removal of their promise not to sell user data: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...
Additionally, it's worth noting the Vivaldi is Chromium-based
ericjmorey
[flagged]
MrLeap
Reading down discussion indicates they're "sharing anonymized data with partners" and that some jurisdictions think that's at odds with claiming you don't sell user data. I.. agree? Sounds like selling user data to me.
hiccuphippo
What can protect you from them changing their wording again?
egberts1
"seems".
Does it "seems" that we should see what you did there?
andrewchilds
I switched from Arc to Vivaldi and have been mostly happy with the it. Arc has a very polished UI, but has a number of annoying UX decisions. I've found I could customize Vivaldi to a point where it's basically Arc without the UX annoyances.
flawn
Is there a guide on that? Would love to check it out!
beretguy
LeoPanthera
Even if I agreed with the “block ads and then show our own” business model, which I don’t, I will never install a web browser, or any other application, that includes a cryptocurrency wallet.
Sadly, this also includes Signal at the moment, but I won’t be moved.
groundcontr01
I'm not baiting or anything, just purely curious --why not?
And what do you use as an alternative to Signal?
edoceo
And remember when KeyBase added that crypto crap? Downhill then dead.
somenameforme
Brave's optional stuff is opt in. If you don't like seeing the little icon for the Brave Wallet you can right click it to hide it.
WD-42
I'd amend this list to place anything that can run UBO (the real version, not kneecapped lite version that now runs on chrome) at the top. AFAIK that still only includes Firefox and derivatives.
yborg
Vivaldi is still supporting Manifest v2 for the moment but said they will drop support once Chromium upstream drops support.
Opera has has said they will continue to support them going forward.
j16sdiz
Does brave still do the purchase referral code swap thing?
soundnote
Purchase referral code swap thing? As far as I know, nothing like that has existed. There's a ton of FUD "reporting" about Brave out there intended to drive users away.
There was a function that'd suggest a campaign partner while typing things in the address bar (eg. "binan" for binance.com, it'd show an ad for binance as one of the dropdown suggestions). For one day, it had a bug that if you wrote a complete url (eg. binance.com) in it and that matched a campaign partner, it'd give the ad as a suggestion. The bug was fixed within one day of being reported and the whole ad suggestion thing turned off by default.
As far as I know, they've never done anything to referral codes within websites. The current browser does have a function where if you right-click a link, it gives you an option to copy a clean link by stripping tracking nonsense out of it. Eg. X links just become plain links to tweets and so on.
TylerE
Brave is, and always has been, super scummy.
ericjmorey
[flagged]
consumer451
This is an important detail. I must admit that I thought it was worse at first. I did get my pitchfork ready.
However, sync does include your bookmarks, your browsing history, and anything else?
Are you saying that these new ToS are just legal CYA for previously enabled features, and nothing else?
account42
If it was just about sync features then the terms would be scoped to those features.
akimbostrawman
There is giant legal difference between "seem" and "are". Unless specified assume the worst.
globular-toast
I just wish this was GPL (or any other copyleft licence). With everything that's happened over the past decade I would have thought it was obvious. If you contribute to permissively licenced software you are working for corporations for free. If you contribute to a copyleft project you are working for the community. I just don't want to see history repeat itself. If this ever gets good enough it will be eaten by big tech just like everything else. Copyleft is what we need. Stallman was right.
glitcher
Good timing with these other HN entries on the front page:
Mozilla deletes promise to never sell Firefox data
Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge
Looks like it will be an alternate browser kinda day in the top stories...
warkdarrior
It does not seem like Ladybird supports uBlock Origin, at least I cannot find any references. Does it?
BizarroLand
the browser is in pre-alpha, so it's not that it doesn't support it, it's that the groundwork hasn't been laid yet.
Give it time
PaulDavisThe1st
aka "no, it doesn't support it yet"
Ladybird is a BSD-2[0] project from Andreas Kling, the same person behind SerenityOS.
awesomekling does monthly progress recaps, January's[1] shows LB as the fourth most standards compliant browser, just behind Safari. For example, GMail, Google Calendar, and Figma all fully load now, though usability is not at 100% yet.
The updates also have video versions[2], which include demos of Ladybird's rendering.
Last year, Ladybird became an official non-profit[3] and received a $1mm donation from Chris Wanstrath (a Github founder). There's an optional Donorbox link in the upper-righthand corner of ladybird.org[4].
0. https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/master/LICE...
1. https://buttondown.com/ladybird/archive/this-month-in-ladybi...
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l8epGysffQ
3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40856791
4. https://ladybird.org/