Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project
awesomekling.github.io
awesomekling.github.io
The Ladybird browser came to life on July 4th
Coincidence or not, that's a great date.
I'm talking about easy stuff, too, like normal flow, margin, border, padding box alignment.
The existing official test suites are entirely manual.
Edit: What you're describing requires you to make the entire world first, then finally test something.
Here's an example: I want to test the white-space property. How do I test that? Oh also, font rasterizers are all different and standards don't dictate what happens after box layout. It's acceptable that glyphs render with different dimensions.
How do I test that? A casual HN reader isn't going to care. Someone actually writing this stuff, will.
Rather, those acid tests were tests that test the rendering engine (in multiple aspects at the same time), and are meant for the end users: to give them a nice visual representation of the browser's progress, or lack thereof, and to push browser developers to fix issues that cause visual glitches (with features drawing the test image selected to be nice for layout writers to have) and have them race each other to pass them...
What about W3C's web-platform-tests suite [1]?
[1]: https://github.com/web-platform-tests/wpt/tree/master/css
Do it again with different CSS settings.
edit: MacOS and Windows.
On FF for Android it hits 100% but the image is incorrect (there is red text in the top-left).
Same (FF 104.0.2 on Mac, with uBO).
The failing test is:
Test 64 failed: object.data isn't absoluteDisabling the LastPass add-on brought it to 100%. I'm guessing you also use LastPass?
Though I suppose rendering differences that affect z-order or visibility could be detected indirectly, by listening for pointer events on elements that are "supposed to be" visible/hidden.
This is with all extensions off using Firefox ESR
[0] https://www.ekioh.com/flow-browser/ [1] https://www.ekioh.com/devblog/acid/
Yes, I do disqualify it for that reason.
> 1708 Battle of Holowczyn: Swedish King Charles XII defeats superior Russian force in surprising vctory
That must have been it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tir_(month)#Observances:
“Independence Day (United States) - 14 or 15 Tir”
Not entirely!
I’m not American by the way.
Relatedly, I find that with regards to history, most people have quite a large recency bias. If I ask someone who the greatest actors of all time are, at least half will be within the last several years. Same with this question, the first non imperialist great power is likely some random Chinese or Mesopotamian or African kingdom.
Acid2 was specifically built to call IE out and to put browser builders on notice. It tests the most nuanced little quirks of some specific specs; and, because of some changes in the modern standard, doesn’t actually conform anymore.
Also, he actually did work on web browsers previously:
> Until that point, my career had been focused on web browsers (WebKit at Apple & Nokia).
So he knows exactly what he's doing.
Based on those two datapoints, I'd say he (and other contributors) have a good shot at it.
Yes, I am aware also that HN has blindspots, eg with Show HN Dropbox
> Coincidence or not, that's a great date.
Especially if considering that St. Ulrich is also the saint of the dying.
> No, we have a traditional AST interpreter that is being replaced by a bytecode VM. You can track the LibJS test262 score for both backends here. I’m not convinced that the complexity and security burdens of a JavaScript JIT are reasonable, and given recent developments like Microsoft Edge’s Super Duper Secure Mode, I’m interested in pushing for best-effort JIT-less performance while keeping the codebase simple.
Always excited to see new JS engines. I'd be curious to see where LibJS's performance / code simplicity / memory balance tends towards over time.
That being that everything in SerenityOS and its several related projects is made from scratch.
They are using Qt and C++. They have chosen where to draw a line, which is fine, and that line happens to be on the other side of "Javascript Engine".
Everything is from scratch on SerenityOS. Ladybird takes as much of that as it can but the is not afraid to use existing tech for the bits of Serenity that cannot currently be used on Linux ( the GUi framework and networking ).
Also, they are making a new programming language (Jakt) to replace a lot of the C++
Of course, every respectable software project sooner or later invents its own language!
As a larger point, it is important to have multiple web stacks so that no one player can dictate what the web should look like, or gate access through that stack. Having this new stack grow to the point where it is becoming a viable alternative is great to see.
That strikes me as a pretty naive view. If you y've got a webstack with >90% market share, you effectively have one webstack which dictates what the web should look like.
Because most devs will only test for it (best ROI) and most users will switch to it when their ability to use the web on other stacks starts degrading.
It took MS sleeping on it for several years and the entire web taking off like a rocket for that to happen. Not to mention “full web” mobile expectations.
It took cataclysmic disruptions in the space to even have a chance if breaking IE’s monopoly.
A website I use said I need to use their Chrome add-on to automate some info gathering stuff. But I use Firefox?
I'm not hopeful that it can ever be replicated. That said, I will always continue to use browsers other than Chrome, so at least selfishly I'm excited about projects like this!
Playing dirty [eg. purposely changing Youtube to not work with the standards adhered to to by FF], making promises that they never filled and lots of aggressive marketing is the only reason that they achieved dominance.
[1]: https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium/blo... That's the list of unique divisions that Chrome sends to, but don't forget that they send which page you went to, how long you stayed on the page, your passwords in plaintext, etc.
are you sure they do that? That's a big claim, and a huge security problem.
Went home, logged into the same website from my desktop. Chrome offered to log me in.
My unprofessional conclusion - Google could not have encrypted my password in a way that would have prevented them from logging in as me on another device.
As an aside, I was logged into GMail on the desktop, but I couldn't recall having logged into Chrome. If correct, than once you have logged into a Google property, all is fair game on any other sites you visit.
Google dictates it and I've ran into many many sites that doesn't function with firefox or anything other than chrome
For a while, Slack didn't support all features on Firefox despite the technology being there, I don't know if this is still the case.
That said, lately, that particular thing has been the only one that I need to use that outright doesn't work.
I think a number of Google technologies are slower in Firefox on purpose, but I just avoid them and keep telling competition authorities about their abuse of power.
Sooner or later they will get caught.
If you watch his first Ladybird video after the project announcement, it is just him saying that he has spent the day getting Reddit to look right. He records the hour or so that it takes him to make CSS font emblems render properly. It is a priority because they appear on Reddit.
The video that brought SerenityOS the most fame was probably him porting Diablo ( well, DevilutionX ) to his OS. When he encounters a missing function from his C Standard Library, he simply adds it.
He is very driven by practical usability.
He wants an OS written from scratch with a full suite of software that he can use as his daily driver. So, he needs a web browser. He needs one that properly renders the kinds of sites he visits. Simple.
Compare this to projects like ReactOS that resist even adding support for a working browser.
For context, SerenityOS was dreamed up during a stint at a state rehab facility. (This information is included in a link from TFA)
His operating system was deeply related to his obsessive mystical thoughts. The computer was an "oracle", a medium through which he communicated with the Divine. If he had received the mental healthcare he needed, I wonder if he would have continued with the project. In a way, that project was all he had, when he had lost everything.
When I see hype around a new browser engine from scratch I am immediately skeptical, unless those 'donations' turn into 'corporate sponsorships'.
All thanks to Google; 'funding' more than 85% of Mozilla, which not only having a direct competitor browser going against what Mozilla is standing for, they continue to fall behind features that Google pushes into the web standards committee at the W3C with Mozilla sitting there doing nothing, but going along with it, but late.
Mozilla failed because for 14+ years it was unable to make money for itself other than Google and could not move away from them when they ate their lunch and quickened their decline.
> I'll take 100 monthly donations over one corporate sponsor any day.
I didn't say 'one corporate sponsor', but let's go with the '100 monthly donations'.
How many of those developers are active and full time like awesomekling? Less than 5?
With a simple observation on their Patreon / GitHub sponsorship page, paying $4 a month average with 100 people is hardly enough to support a single developer, even with the $1K monthly going to only one developer for building a browser and especially with less than 5 active developers. Realistically, corporate sponsors would make this more sustainable.
It was an R&D project and, if you look at the bits that made their way in to Firefox, a fairly successful one. Stylo, WebRender, various parsers etc...
I'm not doubting you, I'm just curious what was written. I'd expect stuff like "Servo is an experimental browser engine," or, "We don't currently have plans to replace Gecko with Servo" (which was obviously true at all times in history), but I'd be surprised to see something like "Servo will never replace Gecko." But maybe I just didn't see that messaging - could be!
It's also worth mentioning that "replacing Gecko" may be the wrong way to look at it. More reasonable is for Gecko and Servo to eventually come into alignment - somehow. That's what happened in practice, in a way that has a lot more of Gecko than Servo, but in theory it could have happened the other way, with a lot more Servo. Even in that situation, I wouldn't say Servo "replaced" Gecko - it's more complicated than that.
For Mozilla, Servo was an experiment. Experiments can end up as full products, or parts of them, or not at all. I think it's clear one possible outcome of the experiment was a full browser (I was personally rooting for that all along). It didn't end up that way, but when people say a full browser was never the intention, I think that's not accurate history.
Not off hand (and Mozilla's official marketing rarely goes so low-level as to mention the browser engine itself by name), but (as someone who has been hanging out in Rust spaces since 2011) I recall the Servo devs always being very careful to disclaim any intentions to wholesale replace Gecko in Firefox (though I did always wonder if they were instructed to do so, as a way to keep Gecko contributors from rebelling).
Product success could happen through convergence with Gecko (as actually happened, but again, the convergence could have been tilted the other way), or through Servo powering something separate from Gecko (for an example of that, in later years Servo was meant to power Mixed Reality projects, which is a story in itself; but other ideas include Servo as an embedded engine, or powering distinct tabs in Firefox and other obvious ideas).
In some of those options Servo could have been a full browser engine or even a full browser. I think there was always a hope for that. I'm sad it didn't happen, but it's still a big success in several important ways. Anyhow, I just hope the history doesn't get rewritten as "the goal was always exactly what happened in the end."
Indeed, that's not my goal, I wish that Servo would have been developed even further and still hope that it might happen someday, somehow.
Servo had trouble getting 10k per year funding for just basic CI expenses.
An interesting alternative was embassies project[1], which got WebKit running on an understandable computing base. The current-day equivalent would be to get WebKit running on top of, say, WebAssembly and the Canvas API. That would be immense impactful, but isn't as sexy or cool as writing your own browser from scratch.
That being said, I applaud the Ladybird initiative. Scratching your own itch is the way to go when aiming for maximum enjoyment.
[1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi13/technical-sessions/...
Most complex languages get interpreted or compiled into a much simpler format, and the simpler format gets executed. This lets the execution environment be small and understandable, as you said.
Using HTML/CSS as primitives means the execution environment has to be complicated, because the execution environment itself needs to be aware of things like whether certain attributes get inherited and how they are inherited.
I have hope for WebAssembly + Canvas, because it's a simpler set of primitives. There's a clear boundary between the simple execution environment and the tools that translate complex instructions into simple instructions.
Do they? Maybe they don't? Maybe we're at a point where people can author html/css, and if there are syntax issues, they just 'break' until someone fixes it. 25 years ago, maybe we needed some laxness, and perhaps today, we don't?
If your browser handles all of the popular sites, people will use it. Nobody cares about whether Flash loads anymore, do they? Yet there's millions of Flash animations and games never ported to another platform
In the worst case, the browser would then have to download some additional code that contained all the support for invalid HTML/CSS code. In the best case, the 25 year old page would be served with a header containing a cryptographic proof that the site really had been around for 25 years, and it wasn't just some newly created attack site that was exploiting some weird behaviour in old renderers.
Gonna need vulkan, better tooling, and lots front-end brain rewiring. Might happen before the end of the decade
I think there could be middle-ground approaches, we just don't have them right now. E.g. React is basically entirely interpreted; we could create something like React that used a different set of primitives than the DOM. Browser extensions could act as middleware between React and those new primitives, as a plugin to the execution engine similar to how they currently work. Someone smarter than me probably has a better idea of how that would be implemented, but it seems possible.
A lot of webpages I see aren't even really documents anymore. They serve a very basic HTML page and use JS to flesh out the rest. It's not all that conceptually different from Qt to me, except that there's a standards-enforced way to serialize the objects out into text. We could create a middle-ground engine that used simple primitives and could be serialized out into a text format. Qt kind of does that QtCreator, from what I know. I believe it creates XML docs that specify the objects to create.
https://microsoftedge.github.io/edgevr/posts/Super-Duper-Sec...
The "super duper secure mode" is not at all about you accessing or modifying the JS code from a website you are visiting. What it is about is trying to protect against some piece of JS code bypassing the security of the browser sandbox and accessing stuff it shouldn't ever have access to.
:)
Edit: Also, in general, no, disabling JIT would not prevent any particular JS code or extension from running. At most, it might mean some code would run slower. But that's what they claim, that it isn't noticeable.
My question as a systems programming newbie:
Could a compiled binary of this project with HTML and CSS be used to create cross platform apps like Electron?
Have a look at Jakt, it looks a like a really cool language, that strike a balance between performance and simplicity. And it has proper sum-types!
Replace browsers -and- existing operating systems altogether.
——
As of now, in terms of end results for the user, what's missing from the Linux/Mac/Windows GUIs:
• Typing something (URL etc) and accessing the latest version of an app, with latest content, and knowing that everyone else in the world is getting the same thing.
• Linking to content within apps.
What's missing from browsers and the web: Too much to list, but mainly:
• Basic shit behaves differently on everywhere website.
• Too many artificial restrictions: Can't scroll freely, can't select freely, can't even freely zoom or save images on the most popular image-sharing websites, fuck you Instagram.
• I can't save my own data on my own machine, or easily move it between web-apps. Have to go through hoops to even access all your data that the website's company has access to, if ever.
• Inefficient usage of your hardware.
Variety is good. New browsers with new engines are good (though I think an announcement like this without any pre-built binaries for normies to download is a bit premature). I say this as a web developer who well remembers the IE6 struggles of yesteryear - but also fears the Chrome monoculture of tomorrow. UI differences between web pages are annoying, especially when they break things like scrolling and selecting, I agree, but the answer isn't to creatively flatten what the web can be, Big Brother-style.
As for Instagram, well, perhaps you should consider making a back-up of your own photos before you entrust them to a service owned by a company whose sole profit model is taking your content and putting ads next to it.
This is why I prefer managing the software I use myself. Upon first receiving a new version of a web app, I have never tried it or had a chance to review the changes to figure out how they affect my workflow. With software installed natively with my package manager, I have a chance to review everything and update only the software I want to update.
> • Linking to content within apps.
No, all major operating systems support scheme handlers.
No, you know that rarely works out in practice and is not what I meant.
Take this example: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=32814887&goto=threads%...
Or: https://old.reddit.com/r/Gloomhaven/top/?t=month
But can we do something like this? file://Users/Me/Pictures/?filter=cats&sort=new
Or this? pixelmator.app/lastdocument/thumbnail
Android actually allows registering HTTP(S) URLs with certain domains and wildcards (https://developer.android.com/training/app-links). Not a big fan of this "validate a token through Google to skip the app choice dialogue" approach but luckily Firefox always prompts before opening a registered app link anyway. iOS supports a similar feature. It's up to browsers on other platforms to implement their own support if this is something one would want to add to the browser.
No, as far as I know it works very well in practice and thus I don't know what you mean.
Take this example. Steam has registered as a handler for the steam scheme on my PC. Any other app can open e.g. steam://store/655480 to link to a game in Steam. It's up to the scheme handler how the URI works. Steam supports a bunch of different actions and forms of deep linking via the steam scheme.
Here's what Slack supports via its scheme handler, for example: https://api.slack.com/reference/deep-linking#client
It's exactly what you're asking for, so I have no idea what compelled you to immediately dismiss what I was saying.
Sounds like you want WebAssembly.
I guess SPAs and WASM kind of give you that within the security of the browser's sandbox.
It is true that the things that you list are the actual problems, and there are many others, too. The modern WWW is a too messy design, and additionally to that, web pages and web browsers are also badly designed.
I had partially written specification of "VM3", which hopefully will be an improvement for cross-platform application programs. There is no CSS, nor Unicode (well, technically you can include Unicode text fragments, but it is discouraged), and it is independent of protocols (so you can use with local files, DVD, HTTP(S), Gemini, etc, but none of these are required nor is it limited to any specific kind). All I/O must be done using extensions (identified by UUID), which require a specification; it also has a mechanism for polyfills which is (in my opinion) superior than that of WWW. Furthermore, is intended better for the end user controls/customizations. Also, some of the internal design decisions I have done differently due to things that I think are better than what are currently done (e.g. how linking works, and many features use a binary format, etc). Extension declarations can also be linked with each other, too (note that this is linking the interface, not the implementation; the implementation is deliberately not specified by VM3).
Some VM designs are good for interpreted, and some are good for JIT, but I think that to make implementations competitive, and improve efficiency, it may be better for the design to be good for both, so that is what I have tried to do. For example, there are restrictions on how branch addresses can be derived (e.g. one feature is that you cannot store branch addresses in general registers).
VM3 cannot "execute ANY content natively on any platform" (and nor can anything else), but my intention is to make something better than existing systems.
Things similar to TerseNet, and other possible different things people will want to make, some of them may be possible as specific subsets of VM3. An implementation of VM3 can then support specific subsets or can have full capabilities (preferably, configurable by end user).
LibJS itself was very interesting, but unfortunately it depends on a bunch of other Serenity libraries (AK, LibCore, etc.) which in turn heavily depend on POSIX.
I'm curious if that means they want to make LibWeb / LibJS actually portable C++ code and how they plan on achieving that (hopefully without introducing a POSIX compatibility layer on win32 like msys or whatever).
[1] https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...
It's akin to saying Microsoft Office runs on Linux; you just need to set up a VM running a Windows kernel first :)
I've just tried it, and it's early days- there are hundreds of thousands of edge cases to consider just to get it really "working" on linux, so it's no easy task. On the other hand , implementing a posix compatibility layer for Windows for just the things you need to support in the browser is relatively easy.
But it looks like whole WWW ecosystem resembles CVS -> Subversion situation and L.T. -like comments starts to look very sane...
> we do pass the classic Acid3 standards test, which covers a bunch of basic CSS layout features, and various DOM/HTML APIs. However, the test does not cover many of the features used on the web today (like CSS flexbox, CSS grid, etc.)
Ladybird implements its own HTML parser, CSS renderer, TLS layer, JavaScript engine, WASM VM, and even its own font rendering. As if building a browser from scratch was not hard enough, why not re-use some existing libraries as some comments here suggest.
Andreas had countered that he finds it slower and more difficult to work with a typical Open Source project that uses many libraries authored independently. In SerenityOS, if you want a feature or find a bug, you just make the change wherever required and check it into Git. This is true even if you make changes to multiple sub-systems at once. You have access to everything. In a more typical project, you may have to work around bugs in layers you do not control. You may be completely blocked by missing features. The standard argument is that you can just add it yourself but, as he points out, you may have to wait months for your changes to be incorporated and they could even be rejected. You can fork stuff but having to maintain a foreign code base written for different use cases using different philosophies is no fun. If you have to maintain it, why not write it the way you want.
Anyway, he argument is that for large, complex projects, it may actually be easier to write things from scratch than to try to cobble together a basket of independent dependencies.
There is something to be said for this perspective in my view. His progress with SerenityOS seems to support the argument.
At a rate, I am hopeful they can succeed and certainly wish them luck.
The worst part is the fucking patent lawyers: https://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/.piw?docid=09576068
Writing a browser was no walk in the park like 6 standards revs ago: I bet it’s a fucking nightmare now.
WHATWG doesn't improve on this either, in fact, they completely leave it out, whereas at least W3C's original work makes it clear that it's descriptive and you need to figure out an algorithm that makes it work.
Edit: The section describing the processing model for CSS is non-normative. The authors provide an example flow, but a normative algorithm doesn't exist for CSS.[1]
[1]: https://lmeyerov.github.io/projects/pbrowser/pubfiles/paper....
[2]: https://github.com/uwplse/cassius
(not counting the 1990s constraint CSS effort).
The first was merely part of a parallel compiler project and also covers table layout, whereas the second is a Racket (Scheme) program to formulate the HTML doc and CSS rules as a theory for submitting to z3 SMT to solve all kinds of decision problems (it can also produce a rendering).
Not sure that's very helpful; it would be cool if W3C can invest some time into better specs (not just prose).
[1] Also made a Mac OS launcher filesystem hook to auto apply the patch every time the browser updates.
[2] Yes, I packaged and published them too.
I wonder if that test suite could be run on LibWeb to give a good target for all those test-driven-development developers to target their efforts towards...?
As a side effect, multiple browser engines sharing test suites might help make the web more compatible...
This led me to think that I'm not sure inspiring of what, and so made me think of whether a sense of inspiration must always be to do something, or if is it sometimes just a feeling (like being sad, happy, angry).
Sorry for the somewhat off-topic thread.
[1] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/master/Meta/sere...
[2] https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/master/CONTRIBUT...
I wrote an extremely primitive layout engine a few days ago that I was intending to build a custom browser around but it's very challenging problem. I use the ORCSolver greedy algorithm for widths or heights. I plan to implement text support but that's hard problem really.
I used WxWidgets and wrote it in Python for simplicity and understandability.
I plan to implement branch and bound with intervals.
Also should be helpful that independent programs can be written which combine them and use them in their own ways, e.g. to change the connections between components, to deliberately exclude some features, and/or to add new protocols and URI schemes and file formats and JavaScript functions and HTML commands and CSS commands (I have idea how to do by "meta-CSS", which is a feature to be used purely by the end user (document authors cannot use it)) and character encodings and audio/video codecs and other features, and/or changing some features. (I would hope to be able to write such extensions/programs in C, instead of having to use JavaScript.)
I also would have designed that it avoids converting to/from Unicode if possible, preferring to work in the text encoding directly, and using fonts of those encodings directly, when possible, and using Unicode as a fallback when needed or if there aren't fonts, etc available for the specific encoding already used. (This is to work around many problematic features of Unicode.)
User options are also needed. For example, there should be an option to disable MIME sniffing if the user does not want it. (One way to support this and other options is to implement a "header overriding" menu that the end user can configure (both request headers and response headers); this can be used to implement many options that the end user can configure, including (but not necessarily limited to): DNT, language, cookies, HSTS, etc.) Also, a better implementation would not try to hide things from the user or believe they know better than what the user has specified.
I also think that some parts of the W3C specification aren't so good and need to work around that somehow, in some cases.
Nevertheless it seem a good idea that they can make a new one in order hopefully is better than the other one (which, in time, we may be able to see).
https://github.com/SerenityOS/ladybird/blob/master/CookieJar...
class Node {
Vector<Node*> m_children;
Node* m_next_sibling { nullptr };
Node* m_previous_sibling { nullptr };
}
m_children + m_parent are enough for tree representation.
I haven't looked at the code but that's my first impression given the nomenclature.
You may have children accounted as DL list and so each Node should have m_next / m_previous node references. + Parent node to have m_first_child reference (if list is circular). + m_parent (Node) reference.
So you need 4 pointers per each non-terminal node. Or 3 pointers for terminals.
Otherwise (vector of children):
You need only m_parent (Node) reference in terminals. And in container nodes additional vector<NodePtr> m_children; to store child references.
You want sibling nodes otherwise you will have to traverse back to the root node sometimes to find a sibling.
You do need parent, check this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Node/parent...
> You want sibling nodes otherwise you will have to traverse back to the root node sometimes to find a sibling.
The only need for this is in Node.nextSibling implementation: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Node/nextSi...
Where vector<>::find is pretty sufficient.
But in reality (at least in my Sciter) node stores its index in parent's m_children so it is O(1) operation.
and ~ combinator and :nth-child(n) selector for that matter too.
See: http://aosabook.org/en/posa/parsing-xml-at-the-speed-of-ligh...
Iteration on array is faster (cache locality) than DL list traversal. And there are issues when you traverse tree while changing it.
In any case I've found that storing child nodes as m_children collection is more convenient in many cases. At least in Sciter (https://sciter.com).
struct node {
weak_ref<element> m_parent;
uint m_node_index;
}
struct element : node {
vector<ref<node>> m_children; // strict ownership, sic!
} ladybird-git/src/ladybird/ConsoleGlobalObject.cpp:10:10: fatal error: LibWeb/Bindings/NodeWrapper.h: No such file or directory
10 | #include <LibWeb/Bindings/NodeWrapper.h>It would be great if they added a Github actions script to perform automated builds on each commit or PR merge.
Implementing a layout spec is exactly the kind of thing that is "easy for computers, hard for humans". ML is for things that are "hard for computers, easy for humans" (like, telling dogs apart from cats, or transcribing speech, etc).
I say so because (among other reasons) in general, current popular ML architectures (like transformers) count processing heirarchical data as one of their weaknesses. For example, there's a theoretical paper proving that self attention blocks (which are central to transformers) cannot solve arbitrarily nested negation(Ie, resolve not(not(not(true))) to true). Practically as well, we see most times that language models have trouble dealing with naturally occurring double negation in language, etc. But CSS/HTML is, I think, very heirarchical.
The standard Serenity install even comes with a basic filter list: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/blob/master/Base/home...
HTML/CSS/JS combo has been pretty much as is, only with some better tooling, for the past 25 years and we could use a fresh innovation.
It's usually a small team who initiates an innovation as big companies don't like niche ideas but when it if gets enough dedication to take enough traction, it can fly.
Yes, I think that's the point of the browser: to allow users of SerenityOS to browse the web.
> Q: Why bother? You can’t make a new browser engine without billions of dollars and hundreds of staff.
Sure you can. Don’t listen to armchair defeatists who never worked on a browser.
I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of the work spent on current webbrowsers is spent on maintaining compatiblity and edge cases.
Also, lightweight browsers have been a dying breed for a while, if ladybird ends up as a more modern alternative to surf and Dillo, I'm already satisfied.
[1] https://surf.suckless.org [2] http://www.netsurf-browser.org
So, the project does _not_ cover rendering web pages and tracking the HTML, CSS and JS standards. Those are separate projects.
What remains, then? I guess that would be the user interface and user experience.
> What remains, then? I guess that would be the user interface and user experience.
To be clear it uses a novel rendering engine (libweb) that the creators of LadyBird develop, it's just that that rendering engine has its own name and exists as a separate library.
This is not just another skin around webkit or chromium.
It's usually "ok" and I can deal with performance issues; but these little niggles just makes you want to not deal with it.
OTOH, if the page is black and not repainting, that might be a graphics issue (in Firefox or the GPU driver). Firefox uses the GPU more than Chrome for rendering and video decoding, which can be great for performance but unfortunately means users can be exposed to GPU driver bugs.
How can you possibly use any web browser without an ad blocker installed?
I don't really see anything wrong with a browser that doesn't fully support every website and every weird example of HTML and CSS that a developer decided to hack together. If a browser supports the standards well and does a pretty good job of rendering modern websites then I'd happily trade failing to render some ancient HTML for a web browser that was truly open and free and doesn't send swathes of data about me back to some corporation.
Web browsers are compatible with old HTML because we choose to make them that way. That is a choice. If the cost of having a free and open browser is a requirement to drop some backwards compatibility with old HTML then I think that's actually quite a simple choice. After all, if people want to view an old website then they can still use Chromium or something. It's not like people have to pick a single browser and stick with it.
Consider from the perspective of the user. They're using chrome and browsing the web - all their favorite sites work. They switch to a new browser and some of the sites stop working correctly. Is it the fault of the browser? or is it the fault of the site?
For most users, if site X works using browser A and breaks using browser B - then it is browser B that is at fault.
This is a lesson that Microsoft learned. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost... There's no refund involved, but switching back to the old browser is certainly possible.
> This is a system by us, for us, based on the things we like.
Nowadays it runs in almost every home at least in the developed world.
New browser is not inevitable, as the need for free-ish browser is already satisfied.
> They're written from the perspective of the developers
And I get it. A few years back I had an open-source project [1] get users and it was terrible. What had previously been a fun technical exercise became a pain in the ass that felt a lot like actual work. I was relieved when my hardware broke and I had an excuse to archive the project.
But that does create a huge gap that mostly gets filled by commercial interests.
There are a couple of implicit assumptions here that I think should be unpacked;
First, you're assuming that users have favorite websites, and that those sites wouldn't work. As I said in my post, so long as the browser worked with standards compliant modern websites I think that would be fine ... and that would cover 99.9% of user's favorite websites. People don't carry on using old, unmaintained (or even maintained) sites for a particularly long time. I don't believe people return to old websites that haven't been maintained very much. I don't think many users would even notice if their browser stopped supporting things that browser developers consider edge cases that eat up dev time.
Secondly, you're assuming that users who choose a browser like Ladybird wouldn't understand the choice they're making. Of course they would. They could still make that choice though. The idea of trading out-of-standards compatibility for increased privacy is actually really appealing to a lot of people. Hell, a lot of people see out-of-standards compatibility as a bug rather than a feature.
I wonder then why developers test on multiple browsers... Is it because website developers code not to standards per se, but rather how their top two browsers behave?
That being said, I think this is a cool project and since the goal is personal satisfaction and usability, there isn't the pull to satisfy hundreds of thousands of users.
Do they still? I find myself using only Firefox and I haven't had a Chrome-related bug for a loooong time. I do however avoid using latest features and wait until the support is good enough.
I agree with GP, seeing a new hobbyist browser enter the arena is awesome, I need to check it out. I for one don't care if some pages don't display, I can still open them in FF. I just hope that corporation doesn't "happen to it" too soon...
Define which subset of standards would qualify for "standards compliant". Don't forget that quite a few of standards (for example, HN's darlings like bluetooth) are barely drafts.
Both are true almost in my case. Browsers based on older Firefox versions such as Palemoon and Seamonkey don't work with GitLab and Github - which are not my "favorite" websites but rather, are hard to avoid.
> I don't think many users would even notice if their browser stopped supporting things that browser developers consider edge cases that eat up dev time
That's not the issue. The issue is that some websites use the shiny new features - probably through some new shiny framework - that older browsers don't support.
And this is a loser's game for browsers done from scratch, because by the time they implement one missing features, two others have been standardized. That will probably kill Firefox too.
There are also the "Mom's cooking blog" that is running an ancient copy of Wordpress and mom still doesn't understand that <b><i>This is important</b></i> is not formatted correctly. Some browsers are able to handle this, but if you browse it with a "this browser only follows standard compliant html" you may get the entire page in italics or bold.
The article even acknowledges this - https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...
> Fidelity of modern websites in Ladybird is steadily improving, but you’ll often see lots of layout and compatibility issues. For example, here’s Reddit right now:
> (mangled layout)
We could put Reddit in that list of favorite sites that need to work. And so, is it the fault of reddit or the browser that the page isn't rendering right? As reddit works on other browsers, surely its the browser's fault and not something janky that reddit is doing that the other browsers happen to work with.
And thus my post - if a page works correctly in a different browser but incorrectly on Ladybird, to a user it is always the browser's fault.
If the average user wants to lean to a corporation and use its product because on the reliability it offers then that's fine. While the privacy concerns are there, I don't think it's wrong for a consumer to reach to a company to fulfill their needs.
Product mentality can be a problem on FOSS software. People forget that all of this started as a project made by volunteers because it was fun to them.
Google Chrome is a product. But a new browser doesn't have to be a product. And doesn't have to compete with Chrome.
Linux as a project wasn't created to compete with other Unixes. And it wasn't deemed a failure when it lacked features compared to them 20 years ago
more than that, i don't think this framing does you any good with the segment this browser is targeting, as developers still want others to recognize their (good) work. but that's fine, as there's plenty of time to develop the brand (and yes, brand also exists outside of being a formal product).
There are still loads of cross compatibility issues and performance differences based on certain features of course! But I would say the set of "sites that require weirdness" is going down, not up, every day
Something that will work reliably on every site and support the gazillions of APIs that Chrome provides? Hell no. Even Microsoft threw in the towel on that. Mozilla barely manages it.
You can make a browser that people can use if they really really want to make a point of using your browser. You can't make one that the average person would choose.
What we do need is to make one that you may choose if you want to be able to fully control the system (with fine customization, and interaction with other programs including native codes in C), and is designed for advanced users who have read all of the documents, rather than trying to hide things from the user or believe they know better than what the end user specified, and also it must be one that avoids all of the bad stuff that Google put in.
If the goal is to have something that's usable in limited cases for a self-selected set technically competent enthusiasts, then this is well within reason and not without value.
What I find particularly interesting is that there's an intent to support WebAssembly. That may turn out to be overly ambitious, but if they succeed there's a lot of potential upside to having another WebAssembly engine that's independent from the major browsers.
I don't even have it installed and yet I'm typing this into a website.
This is all true.
On the other hand, operating systems are huge, complicated beasts, hardware compatibility is a constant moving target, and manufacturers won’t uphold compatibility guarantees.
I think that's the irony here, the standards are pretty much set in stone and just incrementally grow. Some old cruft is beyond obsolete though. On the other hand nobody uses most of the bleeding edge APIs. But JS (and the part that is actually in use) is indeed growing at a solid pace.
And the elephant in the room, regardless of adoption it will never be on iphone.
I suggest reading https://justforfunnoreally.dev/ .
They are doing it though; it's "real." Perhaps you are setting goals for them that they are not themselves setting?
> can't compete
You actually can read about their goals on the linked page, though. They are not attempting to "compete" with Chromium.
> iphone
So don't use iPhone, and use a phone that allows you to use the browser engine you want to!
It's obviously the grandparent meant it as not a toy implementation. As in, non computer literate people can use it without complaining about broken sites.
The first 80% will take 10% of time. Now last 20% will take 90% of the time.
There are lots of tiny quasi browsers lying around.
- a developer who uses firefox 99% of the time
There is no winning going down this road for Mozilla other than maybe going the firefox phone route, and we all saw how that went.
I'm afraid there is no route for sustainability for Mozilla at this point.
Apparently they can't but they still do. Typing this from a mozilla browser.
> realistic
Having looked at the project and followed a few serenityos updates videos and if there is one word I would do to describe Andreas Kling and his contributors is that they are realistic about what they do and do not.
Same, but I doubt I'll continue to do so in far future, unless something major changes. Mozilla seems to be inching closer and closer to just another Chromium.
Like Google being forced to remove Chrome integration.
Google has been caught sabotaging browser based on user agent.
In addition to its strong marketing machine.
Not sure I understand this. I mean Chrome drives the feature set and performance, but it's not like Mozilla's switching to Blink/v8 AFAIK. Competition is good. Even the proliferation of WebKit/Blink browsers is fine to me.
I run into the occasional site that does the block-by-user agent of ye olde IE days and an odd niche commercial product used by my company that only works in Chrome or Safari. And honestly, I hit more of the latter that only work in IE and I have to RDP to an old windows server host to use them.
I like the Firefox UI better, and it doesn't get as sluggish as fill-in-your-chrome on my Mac. Now, that's "feel" and not measurable. Safari's a lot snappier, but too sparse for me. To me, browsers and OSes are like shoes. Pick what's comfortable to you. There's not a "right" answer.
Addressing the thread more than you: This project never states it's trying to slay the giant. The whole argument is weird. I'll play with it once I can without compiling (I'm lazier than I used to be). It'll be fun. Probably not a daily driver, but interesting.
And who knows? KHTML was a broken (and oft neglected) toy and now dominates with world via Blink/WebKit. We may all bemoan Ladybird in 20 years.
For now. If they are willing to fire their Servo team, MDN on a whim. Why not fire your engine team and outsource it to Chromium/Blink?
> Pick what's comfortable to you.
That's the issue. I like Firefox, but I have doubts that they'll soon replace their shoes with a model that is two sizes smaller for me.
> And who knows? KHTML was a broken (and oft neglected) toy and now dominates with world via Blink/WebKit. We may all bemoan Ladybird in 20 years.
Only after two big corps (Apple and Google) injected huge amount of cash and developer man hours on it.
you are lost.
maybe if mozilla tried to compete, instead of all the irellevant activities they waste their energy on
If we start slowly, focus not on delivering a working product ASAP but a nice codebase that's accessible for other developers to read, carefully split modules so each part of the browser is a mini project by itself, with clearly defined business logic, outward connections (GUI, APIs, Drivers, etc), it can be done.
Yes, it will be a lot of work. But with a tidy codebase and a welcoming community (at least for a programmer) that "a lot of work" will instead become a playground to hack whatever component they desire.
The problem is that people don't want another Linux-like hobby project, they want another Firefox
The enduser couldn't care less what if-else nightmare logic you ran in your "application engine" in order to reach the current framebuffer, they care only about the framebuffer. Following this logic, that tidy codebase should perhaps be also tiny: in the extreme case, just thinking on a whim right now, it should be comprised of only one "module": a stable diffusion-like algorithm which ingests the HTML/CSS/JS specification documents and the requested website response and "simply" outputs the adequate framebuffer, with which the enduser interacts accordingly. This kind of approach probably reduces the cost from billions to only a few millions for the GPUs training time. Sort of a "generative browser", a "genser", if you will.
I don't want to build another Chromium. I want to build a web browser. I don't think every browser is required to be like or support as many websites as Chromium does. Note that competing with the popular browsers of today has never been stated as one of Ladybird's goals.
Mild nitpick but "web browser" and "rendering engine" and "JavaScript" are different.
Anybody can take WebKit and do some cool stuff on top in the UI and call it a "web browser".
At the end of the day, without patching to the HTML/CSS rendering engine, it's going to perform like every other WebKit based browser, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_browser_engines
I know Chromium uses Blink and not WebKit now.
Looks like Ladybird is based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SerenityOS "LibWeb"
That's all just rendering. You need to hook a JavaScript engine up to the rendering engine as well (with glue to the DOM from what I know?)
Chromium is Blink + V8, right?
Does Ladybird SerenityOS Libweb also do JavaScript?
> Browser with JavaScript, WebAssembly, and more (check the spec compliance for JS, CSS, and WASM)
It does. https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Userland/...
Not even Google started from scratch. They started from WebKit and used their billions to overhaul, maintain and change everything from the engine to the renderer.
> But maybe you don't even need to build another Chromium.
That's what Servo said years ago. I don't see the progress or hype around that anymore.
Maybe Ladybird is different, but overall I'm very skeptical; but an alternative browser that is not Firefox, Chrome or Safari needs a high multi-person and project contribution for it to work.
And WebKit didn’t start from scratch either, it started from khtml.
A few years ago there used to be 4 active browser lineages, now there are just 2.
The Mozilla team didn’t intend Servo to be a fully functional new browser. The project was amazing as a Rust-only implementation of the basics of a browser. But ultimately, the utility of Servo was that it served as a place to rewrite modules into Rust for use in Firefox.
Incidentally, there were some good talks by the Firefox team about how they chose to select which modules to rewrite in Rust (since a complete rewrite with feature parity is prohibitively expensive).
This is not accurate. Some parts of Mozilla thought that way, other parts didn't. And thoughts changed over time. For years Servo was officially an experiment, with many possible futures.
Had it succeeded in rendering the modern Web well enough, I think it could have become a fully functional new browser. Sadly, that didn't happen.
(source: I was at Mozilla at the time, and adjacent to the Servo people, who I talked to a lot)
The if-else nightmare logic it's exactly what drives developers away and a surefire way to kill a project before it's even born.
Since the success of Ubuntu as a distro, people started to think of the FOSS ecosystem as a competitor to commercial software but gratis. And IMHO that's a wrong approach to Open Source.
We should go back to the roots, forget about competing, focus on what's the best not for the end users but on what's fun for the FOSS developers, and bring back the hobby on open source projects. Maybe someday, this project will become huge. Maybe not. Dunno.
I am all for going back at the roots, but at the root of all the roots is the enduser: the machine must do something useful, otherwise it's a niche postmodernist art contraption (not that there's anything wrong with that).
I don't entirely agree with the end user being the root of all, at least in FOSS. While they shouldn't be alienated, the focus should be on having a good approach to the project, one that is friendly with the idea of having to code after a full time job, like most open source developers do.
Keep in mind that this isn't a job, nobody will fire you and most complains by end users can be ignored with no consequences. If the project is not fun and engaging, then what's the incentive to keep going?
I prefer Blender's approach of heavily prioritizing users over developers [0]. It's been a huge success.
haa, that's a fun idea! setting aside efficiency, though, neural networks aren't usually Turing-complete, so arbitrary JS isn't going to work. but, I could imagine building a very strict, minimalist browser engine (think XHTML and Scheme rather than HTML and JS), and learning a transformation between the two.
and for perf to be attainable, rather than an NN you could learn a bunch of syntax transformation rules between the two.
I wouldn't worry about performance: Nvidia breaks world records with H100 [2], Intel is going for 6 GHz processors [3], for performance you just have to be patient.
[1] 2019, Jorge Pérez et. al, On the Turing Completeness of Modern Neural Network Architectures, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.03429.pdf
[2] https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2022/09/08/hopper-mlperf-infer...
[3] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-teases-8-ghz-raptor-...
It would be interesting to see if a search engine's worth of raw data, and enough training on Chrome's output, could build a JS interpreter. I'm skeptical but don't see why not in principle.
Reminds me of: "According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. But the bee doesn't know that, so it flies anyway."
I guess Kling & co. didn't get the memo :)
Chromium isn't successful because of the billions thrown at it. It's successful because it was significantly better than anything else during its rise:
It was significantly faster than IE and FF. Much better memory management and crash handling via separate processes. Strict adherence to web standards. Seamless auto-updates that required no user intervention - ever. No admin privileges needed for updates. Clean UI that stays out of your way. Top-tier developer tools built-in. Very secure. Has there ever been a widespread instance where users were infected with malware from a Chrome exploit? I haven't heard of one yet.
Any competitor to Chromium needs to be significantly better than it for genuine reasons. Unfortunately, "not Google" and "privacy" aren't going to cut it for most average users to switch over. Unlike Meta, Google's reputation isn't in the trash so people still trust them.
I think you're dramatically underestimating the importance that advertising and bundling had in the rise of Chrome. Every non-techie I've talked to about this basically uses Chrome because Google told them it was the best, and Google is the first internet page they go to whenever they go to the internet.
We've seen Microsoft throw money and bundling with IE and Edge, and it still hasn't done much. Even with being able to bundle Edge as the OS default - the biggest advantage anyone could ask for.
IIRC some Firefox devs also accused them of tweaking sites like Youtube in particular ways that only affected competing browsers and made performance worse comparatively.
Then Microsoft bundled IE4, and killed Netscape (it took a while, but the unstoppable momentum was built with bundling/embedding).
Chrome is “bundled” with Google. Every Google search recommends it, and everyone uses Google. Same for YouTube which to this day works better and faster on Chrome. Android (80% user base at the time it happened) also pushed Chrome.
Chrome wouldn’t have become popular if it wasn’t good. But the market dominance did not come from being good - it was just a necessary condition for market dominance in a market already dominated by incumbents.
Maybe not widespread attacks, but the Chrome team regularly see 0days being actively exploited in the wild, I imagine as rare and isolated incidents instead of mass pwning billions of users. For some exploits to work you have to visit a carefully crafted page that has the payload in it. And that's not easy to do at scale. You'd have to cajole millions (billions?) of people into navigating to a specific URL. Also I imagine you don't hear about these exploits because the actors would have good op-sec and keep all their data gathering secret.
This is akin to saying that if you want visit the US from Europe you must built a wooden tall ship, secure a crew of sailors, pack several barrels of limes, and spend weeks sailing across the ocean.
That's how they got there the first time but the choices they made then were determined more by the information they had at the time (or lack thereof) and the technology they had (or lack thereof).
Re-implementing a browser, starting today, is a fundamentally different process from building one starting over a decade ago while the web was constantly evolving.
Of course, the n-th time is cheaper, easier, faster, case in point: I implemented 'deon', a notation format for structured data [1], using your amazing "Crafting Interpreters" for which I paid nothing since I was reading the web version as you were writing. Never had the chance to say thank you, somewhere in my drafts there is an email of appreciation: reading your book and applying it chapter by chapter, crafting a final, useful artifact, has been a beautiful experience, thank you very much, for all your writing, since I am a longtime reader of your technical and otherwise texts.
Sorry, yes. I didn't intent to disagree with your entire comment, but just remark on the first sentence of it.
I'm glad you enjoyed the book! :D
My understanding is that this is exactly the opposite of how Linux was started. It started off as a barely working product on 386 only and went from there.
It was a barely working product, but it was accessible enough to other developers to develop on it and extend it.
The comparison doesn't make sense.
Linux was not released in 2022, competing against 2022's Windows, it was released in 1991, competing with the technology at the time, and has since evolved and grew progressively, as the competition evolved and grew.
Releasing a new browser in 2022, competing against 2022's Chrome and Firefox, is a way bigger task (not that it's their goal).
The competition at the time was also cutting edge at the time, the result of billions of dollars of investment over decades, and Linux was nothing. There's no reason that your argument couldn't have been made in 1991. Why, specifically, would it have been a bad argument in 1991, since we now know it would have been?
I don't deny that, but just the feature gap was a lot less compared to what it is now.
We're talking about a time where video games were made by teams of 5 people, not 500.
If the cutting edge technology is using a rock on a stick and you're using a rock, it's easier to catch up than if you're using a rock and they already have tree cutters working on nuclear energy.
Related: are you trying to make an argument that a small team or a single person shouldn't try to write a video game in 2022?
I don't want that at all. Firefox lost their spine long ago, and at this point they aren't a Chrome clone, but its pretty close.
The web was a bit simpler back then, but still...
https://awards.acm.org/software-system/award-winners
For example, Richard Stallman (GNU) and Chris Lattner (LLVM) have both won the software system award, but it seems unlikely for them to be considered for a Turing award.
I know it isn't a pretty thing to hear, but someone in this comment section has to say it.
Then let's not - death to irregular HTML and let the era of lean browsers begin !
Yes, I know, Martian Headsets (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2008/03/17/martian-headsets/) - but considering how much of a contemporary web browser is about supporting irregular markup and other grandfathered hacks, deliberately scoping them out is an exciting approach to a possible non-RFC793 compliant future. Won't fly with mass market, but worth exploring by people who don't care about the mass market - and the marketing will come later, once someone with no money and a device to ship figures out how fast such browser can be with ridiculously low resources !
If rendering is usable but not pixel-perfect, then maybe that's fine. Especially when what's being rendered is in categories like "visual fluff" and "needed for advertising".
Who's going to support a browser compatible with stuff from 2011? There are companies like Ekioh that make niche solutions for embedded stuff, but there's nothing open source.
So what? Interested people can have multiple browsers installed.
Not even Firefox is supported by all sites, in which case I dust off Chromium I keep installed for just such situations.
You cannot make a useable, modern engine without such huge investments.
But it’s a cool hobby project.
I am still sad that xhtml-basic failed, as it was an attempt to create a legacy free spec that might be feasible on embedded devices and phones. It got some adoption and then the iPhone ran full safari and that was the end of that.
I tried to phrase these questions without snark, but your comment genuinely surprised and confused me. Maybe I'm misunderstanding. I do see how OP's comment is a bit nonsensical in light of the author's Swedish origins, but I don't think this justifies your invocation of a term with such negative connotations.
You’re injecting dismissiveness, again a word with very negative connotation, at a simple mistake.
I would be more inclined to take your point if it wasn’t a cheerful, good-natured attempt at humor - nothing more.
Get a good UX guy to gain an edge over the current offerings.
And yes, talking to Wayland directly is extremely cumbersome and unnecessary complex. That's why nobody uses it.
To the point that it's banned at my job because we're too small to have lawyers on retainer to protect us if we use the LGPL version and do too few GUI jobs to justify the licensing model for the commercial version...
While its fine to create new languages and platforms, attention should be paid to the costs this will have on the developers that have to now support the new stuff as well as the old. One example I bring up is Gradle. The jump from Ant to Maven was huge. Maven was so much better than Ant that Ant basically disappeared from my purview. But when Gradle came out it was not so much better than Maven that is caused a sea-change in the Java community. Now I see a split. Some projects use Maven, some use Gradle. And some projects post their instructions in both. I have to become an expert in both. And I don't see this changing any time soon. So now the Java community has to pay this tax going forward. Its no one's fault. The intentions were good by the folks who created Gradle or who adopted it in their project. And projects do need competitors to keep them motivated. I offer no solutions here, only gripes.
The problem is testing M browsers against N web sites - M*N complexity with M tests being done by each website. It should be M browsers tested against a single conformance test, and some means of testing N websites against a conformance test. The web browsers compatibility should not be your problem. Once people start accommodating non-conformists there is NO incentive for them to conform.
To bring something really interesting: plain and simple C (not like the linux kernel gcc C dialect) with, if required, some assembly which do not abuse its macro preprocessor.
not good omens.
hopefully, jakt is written in plain and simple C...
The first words which come to my mind is "convoluted and expensive SDK".
That said, I have not checked on rust syntax lately to see if it became insane like c++. Last time I had a look, it was not, but it was a long time ago.
LibWeb very much exists, and is not a fork of anything. It lives in the SerenityOS project and is written entirely green field C++.
I think I got the picture now. Thx.