I thinkk it's about time Ladybird got some official prebuilt binaries - I'd love to try it, but I'm not going to install its whole dev environment and build it from source.
The hardest part for browser development has always been "artificial" web compatibility, as you know a lot of websites are forcefully blocking specific browser from loading, only allow Chromium to load their websites, that is the reality check for Ladybird, and seriously what stopping new web browsers from being able to compete, same with DRM Widevine, it's REALLY hard to acquire (unobtainiumware) for new browser, even big browser like Zen Browser with 10M users failed to acquire it
Hmm, I haven’t used a single website in a long time that forces a Chromium-based browser to operate. The only exception I know of is DocuSign requiring a Chrome extension. And, of course, plenty of websites are laggy on Safari.
Unfortunately a whole new generation failed to learn the IE lesson, and are the first to complain when others don't follow the Chrome OS Platform wishes.
How common is this that they would even care about it anyways? I've run Firefox exclusively for the last 2 decades and have never once run into a site that told me I needed to switch to Chromium for compatibility.
In the past Vivaldi used their own user agent string and they ran into a bunch of issues. And they are a chrome derivative! They had to default to the chrome user agent. Here are the examples they cite in their announcement of the decision:
"On Google.com if you present a Vivaldi user agent and arrive via a redirect, the search text box will be misaligned
On Google Docs if you present a Vivaldi user agent you will receive a warning
On Facebook’s WhatsApp web interface if you present a Vivaldi user agent, you cannot enter the site and are advised to switch to one of our competitors
On Microsoft Teams (chat and collaboration website), presenting a Vivaldi user agent will stop you from being able to use the website
On Netflix, presenting a Vivaldi user agent results in a suggestion to install Silverlight to play videos… yes… really… Silverlight!"
When these mega-companies block new competitors it really ought to be seen as collusion. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft certainly have the resources to test and approve the occasional new browser.
Common enough that Mozilla has full-time engineers working on triaging compatibility issues, so they can either be fixed in Firefox or reported to webmasters. Here are the reports they get: https://webcompat.com/issues
I've never had one tell me; they just don't work, or they get stuck in a loop until they consume all my RAM and the gecko engine crashes. That is, assuming they even show me the page, instead of telling me to go away because they they think I'm a bot.
A few years ago I was maintaining the website for a major brand whose products you probably use. To my horror the website did not support Firefox. I gave them a very minimal estimate on what it would cost to support Firefox along with the estimated percentage of Firefox users in their target market. They were not interested.
Your experience may be different, but every time I hit the Cloudflare "checking if your connection is secure" turnstyle, it goes into an infinite loop on Firefox. It's the only reason I still have Chrome on any personal device. It may be tracker and privacy settings rather than just Firefox on its own, but I'm not going to run combinatorial experiments to figure out exactly what Cloudflare is looking for, especially since it's probably a moving target.
And honestly, I've only ever once encountered a website that required Widevine. And that site was a media site. So if you don't watch DRMed movies in your browser then you don't need Widevine in my experience.
I've found widewine a blessing because news sites that autoplay trash seem to be the only group that uses it (other than paid media platforms like Netflix and Spotify).
The blessing is I can just reject it and it blocks all their videos from playing/downloading.
I actually ran into such issues, in particular with commercial websits. Some browsers I use do not work for my online transactions for instance - annoyingly the local bank I use for logging into my account as well. It is basically the bank hijacking my money and forcing me into using a specific browser (or, at the least, very few; they improved compatibility a bit in the last years, but there were more issues in the past here). It is just a reality of the situation that some websites don't work well on certain browsers.
I switched bank in 2021 and it was hard. No bank advertises "we do compliant chip tan" and no bank advertises "we do not buy an app framework that scans for customs roms".
Switching banks is hard, because all of them suck, are underdocumented and a moving target.
To get to the point where these artificial gates substantially matter for interop, you've already cleared 99% of the hurdles, and you can get away with just spoofing the User Agent string most of the time.
Widevine is legitimately a “gate”, but realistically it only stops 4K playback on Netflix, Disney and a few other streaming sites. And it's not super relevant considering that Zen has gathered 10M users without it.
They can mock the User Agent for the purposes of compatibility testing. When you control the browser itself, nothing's impossible. (aside from DRM specific issues)
easy choice. also, thats just BS, remember how SOMEHOW the same was said for playback of music on computers, yet somehow a certain now-dead CEO was able to say "fuck you" and it happened anyway?
This post reminded me of gaming emulator updates that I also love to read. "Fixed X bug to make Y behave correctly, which means game Z works now." (One of the things they fixed was CSS Doom, so I guess there is some legitimate overlap to gaming at any rate.)
Good call! I’ve heard Andreas say multiple times building a browser is like building an emulator. Each website uses different features in different ways, and he likens websites to roms.
If you want to use no-Javascript browser as well, this browser prototype [0] is getting pretty good too. It's developed by Dioxus, a GUI framework in Rust, as part of its native renderer which seeks to create their own alternative to Skia, similar to Flutter, but it'll work on the web as well with HTML and CSS standards unlike Flutter web which is just a canvas.
It's also a from scratch implementation, sort of, using existing Rust crates like stylo (which servo also uses) and taffy, but it doesn't rely on any code from existing browsers such as Chromium, Gecko or WebKit.
Ladybird is coming along so well. I am a long-term Firefox user and I'll definitely be an early adopter of Ladybird when it enters very early alpha and precompiled builds start being released.
BTW if you want to kick the tires at the current stage, building it locally is easy, just a couple of commands to install dependencies and run the build script:
Maybe it uses some that battery API as a heuristic for a lower-power version of the site? Or maybe they have a web-only version in developing markets? Low battery means it should query for your location less often to save battery?
Totally spitballing here. Strava being a website that requests battery does not seem wildly outlandish to me, albeit it is a bit suspicious in general.
> it uses some that battery API as a heuristic for a lower-power version of the site?
As a naive user I would expect websites to not be able to receive information about my battery state. With that information they can track my mobile phone usage pattern, and with some cross-referencing gain even more specific private information.
Strava's a route tracker. Assuming you can use it through the website, it probably controls how often it polls location, trading off accuracy for power consumption.
To whoever had the evangelion r/unixporn as a way to test out ladybird reddit. I respect you so much as I really liked reading about evangelion (I haven't watched it as much BUT I have watched countless documentaries explaining it and had evangelion as my wallpaper for sometime)
Now coming to the point, the fact that reddit is working in ladybird sounds crazy good, I am not sure if youtube is working or not but I hope that youtube works too and Ladybird sounds to really work.
Also, thanks to https://jakubsteplow.ski/ for donating the money to ladybird. I mean I would like to actively promote people who donate to open source projects as a better way than what google ads or others too and jakub I wish you nothing but the best and I hope other people donate to projects like ladybird too (Independent donors/donations), also thanks to human rights foundation https://hrf.org/program/ai-for-individual-rights/
It's amazing how browsers had an almost mono/(duo or trio?)-poly yet it took a single guy to do all of this. Its really inspiring.
I love EVA, but I’ll cautiously recommend it. I feel like there are two sides to it: the mecha/alien/monster sci-fi side which has an amazing aesthetic, and the personal drama focusing on self loathing and loneliness. I think the first side is the most attractive to most people, but what really sticks with me to this day is the latter.
If you do end up watching I have to warn about the watch order. There are two timelines, the original TV series plus the movie “End of Evangelion”, and then the “Rebuild of Eva” movie series which started as a complete reboot but somehow ended as the ultimate Reboot/Remake/Sequel to the original stuff.
Both are great shows made by GAINAX, but I highly watching suggest their prototypes as well: Gunbuster and Diebuster. All four are great Mecha shows made by the same studio and it's fun spotting the similarities across all of them.
What I consider to be a spiritual successor to these GAINAX mecha shows was the most recent Gundam series "Gquuuuuux" which shared many staff members from them and has plenty of homages that were fun to spot! Also had the same mechanical designer as the Evangelions so I got a kick out of that.
I understand, I had started watching these evangelion summaries thinking oh cool robots but then, I have been aware of the loneliness and other things within the series which were thought-provoking but also not really at the same time. I
I don't watch much anime (shocking within my generation which seems to be anime-driven?) but ironically I have also watched berserk's golden age arc also because of an edit that I had watched before all the horrificness is revealed but that's the reason why I haven't really read more about berserk other than the golden age.
Yu-Yu-Hakusho, death note, AOT and bersek/(evangelion? Only watched documentaries explaining it) are the only series that I have watched/listened about a lot in this sense I suppose.
With berserk and evangelion, perhaps there is something about the style of both of these, both lure you in with a particular sense of art but both have some aspects of darkness hidden beneath the pages.
There is something about first discovering it even knowing through comments that things would turn south but I still decided to watch berserk because it so captured my attention. I wished for it to be a bland piece where things turn happy ever happily but I think that berserk's decision to not do is somewhat fascinating too. maybe the lure to watch these increases knowing the fact that these aren't just single dimensional things but rather multi dimensional with deeper topics.
Evangelion with concepts like loneliness and I would associate berserk with pain and hope (hope to still fight even after so much pain)
Edit: should probably mention Its late night and I should probably sleep and I didn't really intend to send this message, I sometimes write somethings and don't send them (but save them for myself to read in documents)* because I find that I think deeper about something during this and I accidentally pressed enter, thanks for reading this but I am sure that I might not be able to give my viewpoint away but I am grateful that you read till the end. Looks like the world wanted me to send the message so I did :-D
Too bad LadyBird is being translated to LLM generated Rust.
It's nice that Rust is so beginner friendly but it would be nicer to have a pure C++ browser for the more experienced developers, to use as a basis for their projects like Chromium is used.
I’d rather have a good browser which took its time to get things right than a speed run one.
Too much software is written like that, and the result is that most things are shit. What are we in such a hurry for? To get more time to work more? Fucking chill. Do things slowly and right.
As a side thought, speed running seems like the wrong analogy for software. Speed runners in games are people who spend a ton of time doing the exact same steps over and over to find tiny optimisations and develop muscle memory to do something repeatable. They take the time to do it well. Being a good speed runner means embracing slow progress. It’s the antithesis of software, where rushing to get it out also means you barely look at it. You do it fast but seldom right.
> Human Rights Foundation ... “AI for Individual Rights” program
That sounds quite dodgy. Ladybird doesn't have AI, why would such a program support its development?
But even before that: "Human Rights Foundation" sounds like "The Human League" which George makes up in Seinfeld as a fake charity. And promoting AI as a "human right" is quite suspicious. If I had to, I might be that this is something backed by one of the corporations burning through Billions of dollars and Gigawatt-hours on LLMs.
Looking at their annual report summaries and their huge staff, my guess slants a bit towards either bodies like the CIA or some ideologically-motivated billionaires (e.g. talk about the "dictator Maduro", focus on Iran etc.)
No evidence for that. What Kling did say was white developers were being discriminated in the bay area. Small debate and links at the last ladybird post:
Interesting, I've checked the LinkedIn link of Jakub Stęplowski, a software developer proudly presenting himself as "from Poland" - 10 years of working outside of Poland in Italy and Switzerland. Yep, that checks out. I was wondering where he could have gotten $1,000 to generously burn on this project as a sponsor, with Polish salaries.
Nothing bad about it, of course. It's just it's long time overdue to move to Switzerland as well, I see.
There was a developer who I worked with at a mortgage company who had moved to the UK from Czech Republic. He would sit at his desk playing games on his phone all day and had outsourced his entire job to his friend back home for 25% of his UK salary.
So basically, it will be useless. How many use epiphany please? That thing has been so extremely ineffective. It's like 1999 (not that everything was bad in 1999).
> follows GNOME’s design guidelines: no menubar, a hamburger menu
Oh. my. god.
So Ladybird worships uselessness now. Also, GTK progressively gets worse and with GTK5 they will (try to) kill of xorg-server too. Some people disagree with that - https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver and https://git.devuan.org/Daemonratte/gtk2-ng; I get it that there are not that many folks using that, but the point is that the GNOME corporate mindset has a tiny bit of competition. Perhaps that seed of competition grows over time until the corporate gnomeys have to change course (won't happen, as they are paid to abolish what is "old", but more competition is good, if only to try to "reason" with mr. ebassi and other hardcore gnomeys; sadly KDE also goes that way with wayland-only, thanks to anti Robin Hood Nate and his donation-pester daemon. Oldschool KDE devs didn't waylay people for money, now it is "pay or get nagged", thanks to Natey Nate).
We kind of need competition in the browser landscape, so in some ways having Ladybird is good. I don't really have much hope that ladybird will be able to challenge the evil Google empire though. But perhaps more people realise that Google controlling so much of the www-ecosystem (again, just look at how they nerfed google search in the last years) is a huge problem.
I like the approach of ladybird to provides as many native chrome as possible it gives peoples choice and let the browser feel native in whatever DE they choose to use :)
