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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Clearly I have no idea what Ladybird browser is. Why should I be impressed? I would expect every browser to be capable of this.

EDIT: Lots of great answers. Thanks everyone. Glad this inspired such lively discussion.

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It's a NEW browser in every sense of the word - a new rendering and JS engine, not built on top of Chromium's (or Firefox's) backends. It's impressive because most people have a few preconceived notions: a) It is impossible to build a NEW browser given the complexity and huge history, b) browsers need to rely on JIT and other tricks. This browser is new hobby project, from scratch, breaks away from the preconceived notions of what a browser should be, and gives a glimpse of a future where another open-source project has some influence in web standards instead of the monolith companies that we have now (this is a pipe-dream of course, but we're in a better position now than we were a year ago).

Edit: And I would say to others, please don't downvote a question because I think it was genuine and not meant with malice - and provides a good learning opportunity for EVERYONE

The work is impressive, but I think you're putting up some straw men (or inaccuracies):

> It is impossible to build a NEW browser given the complexity and huge history

Building some browser is certainly possible. What's difficult/impossible is to build a browser from scratch which runs 99% of existing websites correctly.

> browsers need to rely on JIT and other tricks

... to be fast in today's JS-rich websites. I believe that as well.

Great quick overview of some of these challenges and thank you for taking my question at face value, it was asked honestly. Pretty cool what the dev is doing.

The “from-scratch” part is key. (The “can display Google Docs” part is also, well, correct in a strictly technical sense, see linked screenshot. It is still a significant achievement—even GNOME Web / Epiphany, based on WebKitGTK, has some problems running Google Docs.) The browser is based on a new engine that started development in 2019. It was originally written for a hobby OS with its own toolkit and only ported to run on top of Qt as well some months ago[1]. The original author of said OS used to be employed working on WebKit, as far as I understand.

[1] See previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32809126

Nobody is trying to impress you. There have been no new browser engines for years, with the idea that its impossible to develop one anymore being a meme people would espouse regularly.

This is impressive as a group of random interested people have made significant progress to making a functional web browser off the back of passion, not billions of dollars. Andreas has be an incredible force for showing what bringing people together through passion and openness can do.

I think you may have misinterpreted my comment. I just wanted to know why this was news.

Ah, I'm sorry I misread the tone. I'm quite a big fan of the project and didn't reply in the most sane way possible. Sorry about that :)

No worries, I can see how it sounded. The project sounds pretty cool. I really dig the 90's UI of SerenityOS. Do you think the OS can be more than a novelty? I read that it doesn't support 3rd party software. Maybe I don't fully understand what that means, but wouldn't it mean anything that doesn't ship with the OS likely wont work? That I couldn't make my own package that could be installed via the package manager? Seems like that kind of OS just couldn't satisfy people's computing needs.

Not sure what your source for ”doesn’t support 3rd party software” is, so it’s unclear what that actually means, but there are numerous examples on Andreas’ YouTube channel about porting software to Serenity, e.g. Diablo [1].

Maybe the text you read refers to the OS itself and all first party software being written without external dependencies?

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOzZ8R4gphE

I wonder how much of mainstream browser code consists of layers of legacy over legacy over legacy which complicates it much more than needed.

Ladybird is the browser being developed for SerenityOS, the "love letter to '90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core"[0]

[0] - https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity

Because it's actually a new browser, not just a wrapper/reskin around webkit, gecko or blink.

Ladybird is a from-scratch browser on a from-scratch OS.

Well it is now, but is also more. Originally Ladybird was the cross platform port of the from-scratch browser on a from-scratch OS. If I recall correctly, the browser on Serenity was just called 'Browser', and then Ladybird was created to wrap the LibWeb / LibJS engine from that in a Qt interface that could run on Linux and Mac, and then the Browser program in Serenity was also renamed to Ladybird.

You should be impressed. A browser engine from scratch displaying a mammoth like google products.

~~I think its a browser writing by one person.~~

Edit: the point is that its an independent browser, not that its built by just one person

It isn’t. The SerenityOS project (of which this is an offshoot) was started by one person a few years ago, but it’s had a lot of contributors since then. https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/graphs/contributors

I don't think this is true? If nothing else, github[0] lists 30 contributors.

[0] https://github.com/SerenityOS/ladybird

Ladybird is a NEW browser. If you don't want to see NEW things, why are you on hacker NEWs?

Why are you supposing that I knew Ladybird was new, even after I said "Clearly I have no idea what Ladybird browser is" ?

right, because you expect every browser to just use webkit/chromium

great username

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