Exiting news for the lady bird browser. https://ladybird.org/
Neat. But it’s kind of concerning to see yet another OSS project hitch it’s community resourcing to Discord.
Yeah, it’s a bit at odds with their “free from corporate influence” angle. Absolutely no reason to not use Matrix.
How does the make it non free from corporate influence. The hate boner towards discord is getting ridiculous sometimes. Yeah it sucks to use a repo thats not googleable and not open source bur discord is an objectively better user experience than matrix
We see these things differently. I would argue that Matrix clients are better organized than Discord. That said, not only is Discord a privacy nightmare, but ilthe interface is only pseudo-organized at best.
How does the make it non free from corporate influence.
Do they require Discord and depend on it? Yes.
Is Discord corporate? Yes.
Are they then still free from corporate influence? Nope.
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Simply put, if Discord suddenly implemented weird rules the Ladybird devs would have to comply with, they’d simply have to follow suit or break their main communication channel.
How does the make it non free from corporate influence.
Do they require Discord and depend on it? Yes.
Is Discord corporate? Yes.
Are they then still free from corporate influence? Nope.
Simply put, if Discord suddenly implemented weird rules the Ladybird devs would have to comply with, they’d simply have to follow suit or break their main communication channel.
TL;DR: The Ladybird browser, which was written from scratch and aims to be an alternative to corporate-backed browser, now has a non-profit organisation behind it. Also, it got additional funding of 1 million dollars. The end.
Ah, now I can be excited for them and move on with my day. I get that video presentations can be great for feature releases that need visual aids, but I don’t want to sit through a video for details that can be summed up in two sentences.
Then don’t watch it. I have spent more time now reading this complaint on Lemmy than I have watching videos that were not worth my time.
The guy that made this video had a few minutes to make a high-engagement video I guess and no time to write a low-engagement press release. That was his choice.
Your choice is to watch it or not. He does not your views. Videos do better regardless of your opinion.
I actually agree with you but I am just sick of reading this comment on every video posted. Use tech to transcribe it yourself or just don’t watch. Stop making me read this complaint. Unlike video, I have to waste time reading before I realize what you are saying.
It’s great to build a completely open browser from scratch and I want to follow updates from the project. They have a Twitter account but not Mastodon sigh
The other day I was reading some GitHub issues involving an issue I was also having and the maintainer of the project was directing people to their discord server to talk about and hopefully resolve the issue. On top of that, they came back to the GitHub issue and just posted that after some discussion (on Discord) the issue had been resolved. Totally useless to me and anybody else who might be searching for that thing.
I was wondering why it was written in C++, but the FAQ already beat me to it.
Why build a new browser in C++ when safer and more modern languages are available?
Ladybird started as a component of the SerenityOS hobby project, which only allows C++. The choice of language was not so much a technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain.
However, now that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect. We are actively evaluating a number of alternatives and will be adding a mature successor language to the project in the near future. This process is already quite far along, and prototypes exist in multiple languages.
Glad to see they are open to using safer languages. C/C++ was great for its time, but we really need to move on from them.
As someone who has done no programming since taking C++ in high school more than 20 years ago, what do you mean by safer language?
C and C++ require more manual management of memory, and their compilers are unable to let you know about a lot of cases where you’re managing memory improperly. This often causes bugs, memory leaks, and security issues.
Safer languages manage the memory for you, or at least are able to track memory usage to ensure you don’t run into problems. Rust is the poster boy for this lately; if you’re writing code that has potential issues with memory management, the compiler will consider that an error unless you specifically mark that section of code as unsafe.
I’m not sure why people keep pushing that myth on C++. It’s been a decade we have smart pointers. There’s no memory management to be done ever.
Using the old ‘new’ is like typing ‘unsafe’ in rust. Even arrays/vectors have safe accessor.
Am I missing something?
I wish it was not C++ but their implementation is quite interesting. Not only is it modern but they wrote their own standard library including error handling right down to the main function. It is quite nice for C++.
All that came from SerenityOS. I hope they do not lose too much of it with the split. I mean, the Ladybird Project Leader authored most of it ( their C++ framework ) so it will probably stick. Harder to do when you start using other libraries though.
Hard disagree. Safe C++ code can be written quite easily these days. And better tools are coming out all the time.
Yes, but there’s a difference between “you can write safe code” and “the compiler will come for your family the next time you make a mistake”
rust isn’t a magic bullet either, it still doesn’t protect against a whole host of problems, like stack overflows, out of memory/bitflips, logic errors, memory leaks, unrecoverable errors/panics etc., and many projects are full of unsafe context rust code anyways.
We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.
I will watch this from afar with great interest.
