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Comment by rjh29 | Hacker News Reader

> if writing a browser today is in fact easier than both writing AND maintaining a browser a decade back.

Probably not. Yeah we have web standards and some idea of how to architect it, but the total set of APIs and HTML/CSS features a browser supports is probably changing faster than the Ladybird team can actively implement it. The API surface is just impossibly large compared to 10 or 15 years ago. Look at all of these: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API

And that doesn't include the updates to Javascript, MathML, SVG, HTTP-based security features, encryption or media support.

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It's a lot of work but most of it is very doable for several reasons:

- standards are really detailed at this point and a large reason why the three remaining browser engines (chromium, safari, and firefox) largely do exactly the same things.

- There are a lot of open source components. It's not necessary to start from scratch on things like wasm and javascript interpreters for example. There are some nice low level graphics libraries out there as well. And of course things like Rust are now pretty mature and there's a lot of rust code out there that does stuff that a browser would need.

That being said, it's one hell of a hobby project to take on and I don't see much economical value in an independent implementation of something provided by free by three independent browsers already; two of which are open source.

Which begs the question: why?!? Is there qualitative argument here of doing the exact same thing but somehow better?

In the case of Ladybird they build everything from scratch (intentionally) so existing open source code cannot be used.

The main argument for doing it is because it is fun, just as with SerenityOS. Having alternative implementations is never a bad thing for web diversity though.

Of course, alternatives are almost never a bad thing, and devs should feel free to work on whatever floats their boat when they're volunteers, but developer resources are scarce, and there are other things in the FOSS realm that could use some attention where there really aren't great alternatives. But again, if these people prefer to work on this, that's OK. Just because the world could use a better X doesn't mean these devs have enough interest in X to be effective at building such a thing in a volunteer capacity: in my experience, having personal interest in a project makes you much more productive than working on something you really don't care about.

Not to mention the number of possible vulnerabilities that will be needed to be pentested and fixed.

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