This post describes the Ladybird browser, based on the LibWeb and LibJS engines from SerenityOS.

I found that the SerenityOS project also has a web browser with a completely new set of engines. It looks reasonably capable too.

Both LibWeb and LibJS are novel engines. I have a personal history with the Qt and WebKit projects, so there’s some inspiration from them throughout, but all the code is new. Not to mention, hundreds of people have worked on the codebase since I started it, all adding their own personal influences, so it’s definitely its own thing.

Edit: Here’s a recent interview with the creator Andreas Kling talking to Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell about the browser https://www.igalia.com/chats/ladybird

Edit 2: Here’s their August 2023 update video of the browser https://youtu.be/OEsRW3UFjA0

Edit 3: Looks like the project was recently sponsored $100k USD from Shopify https://awesomekling.substack.com/p/welcoming-shopify-as-a-ladybird-sponsor

It’s quite impressive!

Note: I don’t know anything about the politics of the SerenityOS project or the people behind it.

  • SteveOPEnglish
    4•10 months ago

    I’ve never thought about it from this perspective. I wonder whose voices I’d find if I put on my tinfoil hat and do some digging on the impossible narrative.

    Here’s a thread on the orange site about the project from 5 months back with plenty of opinions™ on the matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35521704

    Edit: there are many threads https://hn.algolia.com/?q=ladybird

    also updated the OP with a link to the news that Shopify recently donated 100k to the project

    • @selfMAEnglish
      5•10 months ago

      There’s a vast difference between a page being degraded by all browsers in a consistent manner per W3C specs (especially the critical parts of a webpage such as JS execution or malformed HTML) vs the damn thing breaking in such a unique way that the web devs will never be able to fix the page for this new browser while getting it to work the same for others. Worst case would be security is compromised and that is a very long list of things to implement in both the HTTP layer and browser behavior before you even get started trying to render a page.

      it’s kinda amazing how fast the comments started getting fractally wrong as the orange site scrambled to justify why it’s too mediocre to do this work (clearly it’s the fault of the work)

      • SteveOPEnglish
        5•10 months ago

        I couldn’t read much further past that one, so much “but, actually” dick waving