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.
These types of projects are long term, but public perception matters. Making waves matters. The audacious possibility that it might just succeed matters.
You're missing a "new" or "another" in that sentence.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
I have ungoogled chromium installed alongside firefox for exactly this reason. A lot of mainstream sites clearly do not care about supporting other engines.
This appears to be the mindset, anyway.
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.