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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

Fantastic! Well deserved!

It's the exactly right type of project. High profile and high impact. The status quo of the software industry needs to be shaken up, and this has the potential to be exact right sort of rude awakening.

The fact that solo devs or small teams on a shoestring budget are time and time again shown to be surprisingly competitive with billion dollar companies retaining supposedly the best and brightest in the world is undeniably egg on their face.

It raises concerning questions about the entire industry, how we do things when we build software, where money is flowing.

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Ladybird is currently far from competetive. Andreas himself told that his loose goal for Ladybird is to be able to render YouTube page correctly and play video with sound - 5 years from now.

I'm looking mostly at what it could be. Ladybird has every potential of becoming the Linux of web browsers. And it took Linux what, over a decade to mostly displace the competition in the server space.

These types of projects are long term, but public perception matters. Making waves matters. The audacious possibility that it might just succeed matters.

Isn't Firefox already the Linux of web browsers?

As a multi-decade long Firefox user, I am going to say no.

Firefox is produced by a single company and its users are completely beholden to the choices that the company makes.

In some ways, Chromium is closer to being the Linux of browsers. There are multiple “distributions” or instances of the technology ( Chrome, Edge, Brave, and others ). There is at least some collaboration on the core.

Chromium is not developed nearly as collaboratively as Linux though and certainly it is dominated by Google.

What we need is something like Ladybird which is community driven prior to corporate involvement and that is led by that community and not by a company.

Not that we have not lost this opportunity before. KHTML was community driven before Apple co-opted it for WebKit which Google later forked to Blink.

Ladybird is perhaps already in a better spot being cross-platform vs only the browser in SerenityOS. It is also a “complete” project with JavaScript and multimedia already built in. Let’s work to keep the project together as a browser and not chase bits of it getting ripped off and taken elsewhere.

Agreed. There are far more differences/changes between Chromium-based browsers than Firefox ones (which just remove Mozilla telemetry or provide a way to use old-style extensions). It really was a huge shame that they chose to base Edge on Chromium instead and I feel it points to clear issues in Firefox that prevent it from being the Linux of browsers.

I do wonder what's so wrong with FF that nobody wants to base their fork on it.

> I do wonder what's so wrong with FF that nobody wants to base their fork on it.

It's compatibility. I use Firefox now it less exclusively, and sometimes I'll need to go on some "normie" website to book a flight or something and the Continue button will be broken or some shit. Seems like lots of web devs will just make the sure works in Chrome and call it a day.

> sometimes I'll need to go on some "normie" website to book a flight or something

I have ungoogled chromium installed alongside firefox for exactly this reason. A lot of mainstream sites clearly do not care about supporting other engines.

I find that faking a Chrome User-Agent works in half of those cases, YMMV.

If you're going to start less secure than state of the art, why not fork state of the art, or start your own?

This appears to be the mindset, anyway.

Nobody cares there's only one implementation that's really used widely for Java. I don't see why I should care what VM is used for the web. Chromium can be that and you can build whatever tooling on top to interact with that VM

I think this argument would have credibility if it wasn't for the fact that Google is ostensibly waging a war against the ability to extend the browser in any way that harms their ads business (with Manifest v3).

Google has a massive conflict of interest with the free and independent web in a way that Oracle does not have with the ability to build and run arbitrary Java applications.

Same could be said about Oracle a decade or two ago honestly

Given Firefox is primarily funded by Google handouts ostensibly as token competition to keep antitrust suits off their ass, I wouldn't say so.

I'd say to keep antitrust suits off their ass is even too strong a formulation ;) considering US antitrust is what has led the acquisition of DoubleClick and YouTube by Google happen (and that of WhatsApp by Facebook). Time to hold those responsible for this ... responsible.

Keep in mind Microsoft was a legal technicality away from being broken up. Lessons were learned from that.

It's the SunOS of webbrowsers. Chrome is technically opensource too.

Linux is Linux thanks to large involvement of big tech. It remains to be seen if any Big Tech companies would be interested in seriously supporting development of an open source browser.

Big tech used Linux to wage a proxy war against Microsoft from a safe distance without needing to actually commit to anything.

Linus Torvalds had nothing to his name when he started working on Linux. He was just some kid from Finland, but the audacity the project gave it attention and visibility, and visibility came with funding.

I think in general a hint of audacity along with being able to demonstrate capabilities to follow through is a great recipe for having people throw money at you, and the more money you have to work with, the more options you have to keep demonstrating what you can do.

A lot of people have a vested interest in shaking up the tech world. It's just a matter of finding the right fuses to light.

> A lot of people have a vested interest in shaking up the tech world.

I'd imagine you're one of us, considering you went full-time on your search engine :)

We had Andreas demo his OS / browser [0] at Handmade Cities [1]. These conferences are what I run full-time independently. I'm excited to see a flourishing of audacity, so to speak!

[0] https://vimeo.com/641406697

[1] https://handmadecities.com

Yeah. Andreas is an inspiration and a trailblazer, and although we're on slightly different journeys, we have similar ambitions I think :D

It's weird, it's become this truth in software development that one should lower their ambitions, try to do something small and not overextend. Don't try to reinvent the wheel, stay in your lane.

Which I guess is sage advice for a beginner, but I think it sort of stuck with the developer hive mind and as a result, what you get is these small low-impact projects instead of this kind of a moonshot.

While I don't think just anyone could make a browser or a search engine, I also don't think most who could would ever think to try because of these self-imposed limitations.

> It remains to be seen if any Big Tech companies would be interested in seriously supporting development of an open source browser.

You're missing a "new" or "another" in that sentence.

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