Finally, another web engine is being developed to compete with Chromium and Firefox (Gecko), and they’re also working on a browser that will use it.
Hot take: Since it’s a BSD licensed browser at some point in the future, there’s going to be a company that funds it brings it to mainstream with their flavor, and then will over throw chromium in time. Replace an ‘evil’ with another ‘evil’.
All hail the cuck license, ensuring we end up back at the same place every single time.
Good intentions and all that
I like this project and just hope it was gplv3 or some similar copyleft license
Ladybird is licences under BSD-clause 2. Which allows privatization of the code.
IMO a web browser should be GPLv3, specially to not allow DRM bullshit in the browser.
Yeah not a good licence at all for an independent browser. Idk if Servo MPL is a good license either. Do you know of any web browser that is GPL?
Luckily Gecko still exists. And who knows, maybe Servo will make it one day (but the odds are stacked against both them and Ladybird anyway).
Servo hype
It’s nice and all but usage of Swift is kind of not great.
Why is Swift bad?
Also, I noticed the project has taken donations from mostly non-foss companies. Let’s hope they stand by their principles
Shopify (i.e. Shittify) being their top donor already has me looking sideways at this project. They’ll invest in anything they think they can get an edge with and if something starts to happen they’ll fuck it up and wallstreet-ify it as fast as possible if they can.
Their (Shopify’s) guru founder Tobi made a huge NFT play that went absolutely nowhere while I still worked there. They spent a lot of time and money on it, right before they laid several thousand people off.
While I agree shopify has a kind of “mierda touch”, I still see it as if it goes sideways with them someone will just fork the code.
Also I’m very much cautious about them on anything browsing related. Discovered (after others also) they let their search-pages-in-a-shop get indexed.
Meaning I could go to Caterpillar, search for “Wabtec is better” and then this search url (with 0 products) would turn up in Google searches and that URL persisted. Text and all.
Basically one could spray-paint and tag sites with this graffiti. Shop admins didn’t even have means to remove it.
Problem ignored and stayed this way for months.
Do you have a source for that? I’m trying to look for donors but don’t really find anything.
Welp, I haven’t seen anyone learn Swift other than for Apple stuff these days. So I wonder how many can actually contribute to the code. It’s also made by Apple, so yeah. It would have been more performant and secure (both of which are pretty important in a browser) if it was written in a more low level language. For example Rust.
It’s also made by Apple, so yeah.
It’s also open-source? Like, Microsoft created C# and Typescript. Google created Go. Those get used without people bringing up their origins. Hell, Rust Javascript* was created by a homophobe. What, do you think the license lets Apple close-source everyone’s code if they choose or something?
Sorry, I’m just really tired of these low-effort comments. The only thing that should matter is the language and if it hits the goals the project needs.
While Rust would probably have been a good choice for implementing a new browser, I don’t think Swift deserves the criticism it’s getting in this thread:
- Swift was created by the same person who created Rust, and has many of the same nice traits
- Swift is a modern language that is easy for plenty of developers to pick up; I’d place it in the same family as Rust and Kotlin
- Swift grants access to a large pool of native iOS/Mac developers
“More performant” citation needed. Very well written Rust might be extremely fast, yes, but Rust is also a hard language to get right. Swift is far from a slow language and I would not be surprised if the average rust programmer barely if at all manages to beat out the average swift programmer in terms of speed. As for the amount of programmers interested, hard to tell, but given the sheer amount of Swift devs I’d not be surprised if there were quite a few interested ones and I am unconvinced Rust programmers are statistically more likely to be interested in Browser development.
Sounds fun, but I wish there were more people who’d invest in making Firefox’s Gecko more easy to use (stretch goal: revive Proton, which is Electron but Firefox) instead of pushing a ton of effort into inventing a new thing.
That said, this is coming from SerenityOS (specifically, the founder and basically the entire community concentrating on building its browser instead of hacking the OS, resulting in a split), so I understand that it might be a lot harder to port large codebases to a new OS instead of than starting a new one.
Edit: It’s Positron, not Proton
Well we wouldn’t want Proton, it would be 2000x less lightweight than electron! /s
It seems to me that Tauri is maybe a better direction to invest resources in than a direct electron-but-Firefox. Its lighter weight and better sandboxed, and can presumably be configured to run with a Gecko engine instead of a chromium-based webview. I have no idea its status, but geckoview does seem to exist.
Proton and photon is just the Firefox browser’s GUI style. Proton is the previous one, photon is the current one where everything is bigger and curly.
Sounds like fun, but I wish we had a real multiplatform GUI framework that does not look like ass and does not perform like ass, so we can put the whole shameful electron era behind us.
That’s never going to happen, and the reasons are twofold:
Brands want to push their own style on people, to make themselves recognizable, and to push their ideas about UX to their users (because they obviously know better than the OS/DE/compositor/whatever people).
It’s easier and cheaper to build a web app, because there are so many web developers. It also usually allows you to give an “app” to people who want that, while giving a (perhaps somewhat limited) browser version to everyone else, reaching the maximum amount of users while maintaining only a single codebase and keeping everything more or less cohesive and looking the same.
Brands want to push their own style on people, to make themselves recognizable, and to push their ideas about UX to their users
That’s not a universal behavior though. There’s so many utilities and simpler apps made by indie developers or smaller companies that don’t care about this.
It just makes too much sense… The only way to get past electron is a better electron. Or just fix electron
We’ve been going after this concept for decades now. That’s what java swing was supposed to be, what python gtlk was supposed to be, and I’m sure there were others before that and there’s been a hell of a lot since then
It’s all trade-offs between flexibility, ease of use, and performance. Also between maintenance cost, portability, and existing library support
Electron is a good compromise. The execution could be better, but it’s come a long way. There is no one size fits all solution, but there are some decent options that handle that compromise differently
These people started it and are doing it for fun.
Fixing few decades of technical debt is not fun and a big question would be if their code would even be considered for existing engines.
It us so much fin it already has over 1000 contributors. It got us 1k more people that understand browsers deeply. I think that’s a huge win whatever happens with browser itself
As someone insecure in their masculinity I don’t know if u would use ladybird. Now if it was MANbird I would.
