alt Hacker NewsI have recently started to wonder whether we can really create a browser that can dethrone Google.
Ladybird tries that, but Ladybird has made several really questionable decisions and has various strange policies. Now I am biased here since I was banned for "trolling" (I dispute that claim completely), but the issues go deeper.
Take the following:
https://github.com/ladybirdbrowser/ladybird
Or rather:
https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/master/CONT...
"We reserve the right to reject issues and other interactions that appear to be motivated by bad faith.
Additionally, anyone found participating in social media brigading of Ladybird will be permanently banned from the project."
Why does the Ladybird team engage in pro-actively banning people they disagree with? Does this not defeat the purpose of an open web if Ladybird goes about censoring people?
And that's not the only issue here. A while ago they removed the ability, more or less, by people to report issues (or rather, contribute to the project) when they are outsiders. Or the "swift is great, we use it", then suddenly "Rust is great, we use it". A lot of this awkwardness has to do with Kling; I think it would be better if a browser would act in an agnostic manner rather than as a "brigading leads to perma-bans". That's a very user-hostile policy. Is it no longer possible to build a browser? You can't go about "we will dethrone chrome" while you pursue "brigaders will be perma-banned".
Replies
Why are you posting this here? This thread is not about you?
I mean, HN tells me it's trivial to one-shot any software of any complexity with AI, so I guess. And if it's open source, of course it was possible to fork it before AI came along. I never understood why HN took it as axiomatic that it was impossible to build a browser without millions of dollars of funding and an entire corporate staff, particularly when the entire core is OSS. People here are weirdly fatalistic about it.
It's obviously possible to build a browser, as it's possible to build any kind of software. We're here in a thread about a browser that someone other than Google built. Competing against Google has nothing to do with the viability of building a product to compete against Google.
> You can't go about "we will dethrone chrome" while you pursue "brigaders will be perma-banned".
The two things seem entirely unrelated