Understanding Complexity Like an Engineer – The Case of the Ladybird Browser
t-shaped.nl
t-shaped.nl
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36620450
However I don't understand why many people are longing for Ladybird as another free browser. There are already some and Firefox is losing marketshare every day. So please do use it.
Ok, I guess Mozilla Foundation's running the Firefox project is not to everyones liking, so that would be a valid reason. But not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Firefox is a great browser and the only reason I sometimes use Chrome is that more and more sites require Chrome (e.g. Teams).
https://mybrowseraddon.com/custom-useragent-string.html
For these urls
https://teams.microsoft.com/ https://statics.teams.cdn.office.net/
To Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/85.0.4183.102 Safari/537.36 Edg/85.0.564.51
The various Chrome-clones are doing interesting things like adding toggleable vertical tabs built in (Vivaldi, Edge) or even vertical-only (Arc) and Arc is playing with using native OS widgets for UI across platforms for example.
There’s also functionality advantages. All the chrome-clones have better out of the box profile support, as does Safari as of the last major release or so. Safari also IMO has a better stock tab groups implementation than any of the other major browsers.
Firefox can be fixed up to support these things, but you’ll need multiple extensions and if you want to make it all look good (e.g. hiding the ugly sidebar header, extending sidebar into toolbar area, configuring Sidebery/TST/etc), a substantial amount of tinkering is needed. More of this should be rolled into the base browser and “just work”.
The Mozilla Foundation is a separate advocacy and campaigning non-profit (which is also why donating to the foundation means your money goes towards advocacy and campaigns, not Firefox)
The history behind why there are two different entities is fascinating, but also doesn't change the fact that they are two completely different companies with completely different org charts and completely different focuses, united under the Mozilla manifesto.
(And even in the tech crowd, far too many people have no idea that there are two different things called Mozilla, and that their donations to the Foundation go to "the things the Foundation does", not Firefox)
My apologies, and thanks for the information.
The foundation or the corporation?
I would really love to see a mass resignation of Firefox engineers, who then set up a new nonprofit + ff fork, and I could just switch my attention and my donations over there.
It sucks that you can't donate to Firefox directly, but calling what the foundation does "irrelevant" feels like you're not looking at the very real big picture of everyone wanting to lock down the web, all the time, everywhere.
I realize that there's some creative bookkeeping and bureaucratic barriers set up so that the only entity that can meaningfully support Firefox financially is Google in the end, but I hate the fact.
I'll probably donate to Andreas instead.
And no one at the foundation has any say over what happens to Firefox (certainly not during my tenure) which was the original point: the comment said "I guess Mozilla Foundation's running the Firefox project is not to everyones liking", which perpetuates the mistaken belief that the foundation manages Firefox.
(My agenda is mostly to get folks to understand that the foundation has nothing to do with Firefox, something that isn't particularly well-communicated to this day)
I am very much team Firefox and think it is important to protect and promote it as much as possible. But I don't think the attention that people are giving to Ladybird would otherwise be dedicated to Firefox. Maybe when Ladybird gets more functional and stable they might become competitors but not right now.
IMO it is exactly because building a fully featured browser from scratch is considered basically impossible today, that we so desperately need Firefox to succeed.
Depends on your definition of “a web browser”.
It’s not possible to clone Firefox or Chrome without huge huge resources and time and effort.
It is probably possible to make something like a web browser from 20 years ago.
Browsers have never had a sustainable revenue model. If we're at a point where building one is so complex that it requires a massive resource investment we're setup to eventually be left with only one or two highly centralized and controlled browsers. That defeats the whole purpose of the web.
A more likely successful path is to standardize markdown links, and just let browsers start showing markdown natively. Throw in a simple optional style sheet for good measure.
Still a long ways to go to be a Chrome/Firefox for sure but that it's already beyond what you suppose might be possible is just the point of why it's its own kind of excitement.
Having more options in the FOSS world is always a good thing. Firefox unfortunately lost market share because the Mozilla Foundation does absolutely nothing to promote it, and that's not going to change until they find a better source of revenue than Google.
Mozilla has betrayed FOSS for Google monies, at last the chickens come home...
I'm longing for a free web browser *engine*.
Neither Firefox nor Chrome like being used as a component of something else. Chrome is used by Qt, but only by force through a pile of hacks.
I'm really hoping a new project drops that nonsense and just allows rendering HTML to a texture without needing a big corporation to maintain a patch set to make it actually possible.
This is fine.
Seriously though, that's insane.
No doubt it’s possible to build a simple web browser that gets some 50% of the job done and could serviceabley display some websites.
However there would a very very long tail of detail and nuance and edge cases that would be very very hard to catch up.
This is why you should use Firefox and we should never lose Firefox.
If you don’t follow it closely, the pace of new feature development in web browsers is stunning. There is a huge amount of new stuff going in constantly.
I’m not knocking this project….. developers can build whatever they like. I’m just observing that the web browser is already the Pyramids of Giza or some other such gigantic human endeavor.
It can do 99.99% of what you use the web for with less resource usage. you can implement your own gemini client in 100 lines of code.
For the remainder 0.01% of stuff, use a dedicated application. Dont trust it? Use it with docker or similar.
As far as Im concerned all the browser bloat is worse than useless. Much of it is just to spy on you. Im sure these dedicated spying apps, you call web browsers, are deliberately full of security holes so they can upload your data to their servers
The more you understand about the modern web browser and how stunningly powerful it is, the more you should be amazed.
And far from bloated, the modern web browser is trim and fast given the unbelievable feature range.
And if you don't trust something you're free not to use it.
When I see Chrome or Firefox and I deeply gladdened.
Go back 25 years and any time you wanted to do something at the user interface in any context it was hard and glitchy and maybe couldn't be done at all. Want to do something in a user interface today? Chances are the browser can do it.
Truly breathtakingly beautiful and powerful software and I love it.
I'm glad they didn't listen to all the people repeating the conventional wisdom that writing a modern web engine from scratch is impossible. Success is the best proof.
What are the chances that a group of people come together to build another 20 million line browser? I'm with you in thinking not great. I'm also with you in supporting Firefox. That shouldn't be surprising as I'm one of the guys that started Firefox back in 2002 at Netscape when I was a member of staff@mozilla.org
More likely would have been that it was non-compliant but chrome renders it anyway.
And from there starts the work of figuring out how exactly to make it bug-compliant with Chrome.