alt Hacker NewsI just don't get the point of ladybird. They have full time engineers and are soliciting donations, so it's clearly more than a hobby project. Maybe my assumptions are off, but I just can't imagine they could ever become competitive in terms of features, security and performance with the big engines. Blink is setting the pace, Webkit is barely able to keep up and Gecko is slowly falling behind. All of these teams are orders of magnitudes larger than the Ladybird team. If you think that Blinks dominance is a thread to the web it's not enough to have an alternative engine you need enough adoption of that engine so web devs make sure their site is compatible with that engine. Most of this also applies to Servo, but at least their technical project goals (embeddable, modular, parallel, memory safe) sound at least moderately compelling. Maybe Ladybird has similar goals, but at least their website doesn't really state any technical goals.
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Not being funded by Google money is a pretty big deal. Some of the developers are former webkit devs so they have a good foundation to start from. It remains to be seen if they can pull it off.
Orion adding Windows support (getting WebKit running on Windows again) would be pretty good too.
Ladybird has better results in web rendering tests than Servo, and slowly is gaining on Firefox.
They are already quite competitive.
Larger teams do not necessarily mean you get stuff faster. If anything after some point, a large team can be hard to get things moving and have tons of issues with communication.
Well Andreas Kling has worked on Safari and WebKit and (obviously) has talked to a lot of browser people. He knows what he is doing, and he frequently says that no one that has actually worked on a browser thinks it's impossible to create a new one, even with a small team (...of highly motivated and skilled people).
I think there are two things to keep in mind.
1) Apple and Firefox have enough resources to implement the most recent web standards. When you see a feature which goes un-implemented for too long, it’s almost surely because nobody was even working on it because of internal resourcing fights.
2) Devs aren’t created equal. It’s possible for a team of 8 people to be 10x more productive than another team of 8.
What's wrong with Webkit? It's super fast. I tested Orion browser recently.
I think the browser attempts are all wrong trying to "cover all edge cases" they should focus on being able to transform any and all dark patterns down into something simpler.
Hell starting out as extracting text, pictures, video for all nightmare sites. Then slowly add whatever features dont actually lead to dark patterns
If anything, Ladybird is an independent implementation of the web standards, and the devs have identified and helped solving quite a few bugs and and ambiguities in the standards, which benefits everyone, from browser devs including the big guns to web developpers and users.
It was the similar sentiment with 0xide.
It is donation funded with no reliance on outside parties. They don't have to inject ads into pages like brave did or sell out to Google compromising their independence on web standards.
They're ahead of Servo already anyway, and better funded.