Welcome to Ladybird, a truly independent web browser

> Well this project is now more important than ever since Firefox basically sold its soul [1].

I'm still not convinced that Firefox is The Actual Devil for potentially appearing to perform .000001% of the bad behavior that is fully-baked into popular Chromium browsers.

But for the sake of argument, lets say that .0000001% > 99.99999%. What is the browser I can install+configure right now, that will perform what Firefox does every day. For ex:

    natively support containers, 
    provide fully uncrippled element control, 
    provide reader mode when *I* want it, 
    locally save and sync windows,
    provide granular redirection control,
    and the other functions that are mostly unique to Firefox ecosystem

?

Getting to know about this through here, and tbh I believe the writing has been on the wall for Mozilla for quite a while. This honestly does not surprise me as much as I thought it would.

That being said, I am sad to see this fear of mine come true. Mozilla products were rock solid, and available on virtually every platform imaginable. I do not want to live in a Chromium and WebKit only world.

I don't have any special insight on these events but I've seen that commit linked a lot.

From a pure optics point of view, it looks extremely bad but reading some of the comments, it sounds like that repo is basically a mirror of some upstream project where terms and conditions/faqs etc are stored as pseudo-structured data and that they're migrating parts of that repo to some other project?

I feel like a lot of context is missing publicly but if I squint, that seems to be what this comment is trying to express: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...

Don't get me wrong, I love bagging on Mozilla as much as the next person but as extremely bad as it looks, I'm not convinced that it's literally what it looks like?

What's crazy is that Firefox on Debian has been nagging me for weeks that I won't be able to use it after March 14th?

I have never seen those nag screens in Firefox, near the bookmarks toolbar. I think that is working around Debian's policies, IIUC. I have never had software on Debian nag me to update

It seems like this is under the guise of some DRM updates, and the like.

So I'm supposed to update, and then they apply a new Terms and Conditions that I didn't agree to?

And sell my personal data, I guess because there's a big market in AI now.

Also Firefox seems increasingly buggy -- I have had to switch to Chromium for 2 particular sites, so I guess I need to find a new browser ...

---

This reminds me of the Twitter thing where they asked for your phone number for security purposes, and then used it for advertising.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/25/twitter-u...

I think Firefox is forcing updates ostensibly for one reason, but the real reason is because they found a market for data, and want to apply a new T&C

You know what the really sad part about this is? If we switch to an alternative browser, fingerprinting makes us even more easily tracked. It's lose-lose nowadays. We need political changes to make selling off our private data no longer profitable.

For those of us that missed the memo — what is happening with Firefox at a macro level, aside from that commit message you linked?

I honestly think that Wikipedia should buy Mozilla to fund Firefox

Wow what the fuck Mozilla. I’ve been complaining about the phoning home on startup and shut down for a long time but this is just disgusting.

> 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.

I can highly recommend Andreas' YouTube updates if you're remotely interested in browser dev. Really fun.

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

Learning to market yourself and your projects is so important! I wish I had the skills.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[dead]

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.