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Comment by blowski | Hacker News Reader

I hear so much about Ladybird on HN, that I’m equally excited and cynical.

What is the value proposition? Is it to be another general purpose browser, so there’s more competition with Chrome / WebKit? Or to be a niche browser, that could be an alternative to Electron?

How close is it to achieving that?

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The question for a value proposition seems to be out of place to me.

It's not a business. Some people develop a browser for their own joy and now they decided to target Linux and use 3rd party libraries.

So the main value is to the people who get pleasure from working on it? I don’t mean it in a pejorative way, I love the idea.

I've heard innumerable times that it's infeasible to write a modern web browser from scratch without a trillion dollars of funding or something absurd like that. So it's exciting to see a small guy / group take a serious swing at it.

As I see it, Ladybird's value is showing that its still possible to write a modern browser engine without the resources of a major tech company like Apple or Google.

In the future it might be a real competitor to Chrome & Safari, but we're several years from that happening, if at all.

Having looked at the source code… it’s not close. Not even 1/20 of the way there IMO.

But it might not need to be. It’s nice just having a second system. I don’t know to what extent Ladybird can replace Chrome, but the issues that come with a monoculture are known. There’s probably at least some hope that Ladybird could take off once it reaches a critical mass.

To play devils advocate, Firefox breaks the monoculture, and arguably (Mobile) Safari too. If neither of these is big enough, will Ladybird be? I can’t imagine it getting bigger than them.

> Firefox breaks the monoculture

Not really as long as it is funded by Google.

But it’s a completely separate codebase right, and that’s the monoculture we’re aiming to prevent here.

If it’s not about tech but rather about funding, then should we be concerned of the monoculture of American browser vendors, or English speaking browser vendors? I don’t think we need to be, but I also think the tech side is the important place to prevent a monoculture for the open development of web technologies.

> But it’s a completely separate codebase right

Not entirely separate anymore as both make use of shared external libraries.

I might argue that being funded by Google gives Firefox stability, and allows it to deliver to a broad audience. If it were funded exclusively by, say, HN readers then it would probably end up being used exclusively by HN users.

Have you looked at Firefox's market share lately?

So it’s a fun project where people are learning a lot by working on it as a hobby project. But I shouldn’t expect it to threaten Firefox, let alone Chrome, any time soon, although that’s the dream. Is that a fair summary?

It will never reach critical mass.

You don't know that. After all, Chrome comes from Webkit, which comes from Khtml, which comes from a huuuge one-person rewrite of basically a whole browser engine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML#Re-write_and_improvement)

It might not, but so what? Don't we deserve options?

Ladybird is an experimental engineering project; consider it "basic engineering" (a la basic research). Thinking in terms of "value proposition" is very limiting. Its goal is to develop an independent web stack (not a "hobby project" at all); its intent, one of several really, is to peek into and implement the internals of the modern web stack.

By doing so openly and incrementally without attachments to deadlines or an employer with specific priorities, the dev can take the time to identify inefficiencies, pain points, subtleties across the stack etc. which are then recorded in the development of the browser.

Thus, the project is not aimed to "achieve" something at some point in time; its "value proposition", if you must use this annoying term, is the development process itself.

It's a fun project, but there's no practical value proposition besides showing that it can be done.

People are cheering on it because they love the author and want a new web browser written from scratch, but practically speaking it is a web browser that is 1) written in a memory unsafe language, 2) doesn't really have any sandboxing, and 3) is highly incomplete.

I think I just read in another comment that it uses per tab process isolation. Unless that's not what you mean by sandboxing?

By sandboxing I mean running various subcomponents of the web browser each in their own process, maximally reducing their priviledges and attack surface (through things like seccomp, user namespaces, strict resource limits, clearing and disabling capabilities, minimizing what code is loaded, making the address space immutable, etc.) and maybe even virtualizing some parts (e.g. Firefox started running some components in a WebAssembly sandbox).

There is this document here:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/d...

so there are some plans for sandboxing so that's good, but if I'm reading the code correctly (please correct me if I'm wrong) then no actual sandboxing is yet implemented on non-SerenityOS systems (e.g. there are some "pledge" calls that I can find, but it looks like it'll only work on SerenityOS?), and, if I'm being honest, this is nowhere near aggressive enough for a web browser, especially one written from scratch. If the goal was "produce the most secure web browser in the world" there's much more you could do with its architecture that even likes of Chrome won't (because of legacy considerations, and because they care a lot about how fast it runs).

But, of course, practically speaking as long as it has no market share (so no one will realistically target it) then even minimal sandboxing should be fine, and as long as the project itself doesn't pretend that it's something it is not then all is good.

I feel the same way. Excited to see another attempt. But it's a c++ engine so not something I would want to expose to the internet really.

Probably there's very little point to this other than learning how to build a browser right now.

I don't see this catching up any time soon to a point where you could use this and not deal with a very broken browsing experience. So this will likely stay a bit of a niche thing for quite some time. But I'm happy for people to prove me wrong.

Easy to forget that Webkit started out as a fork of Khtml when Apple embraced it for Safari. Later Google forked it off as Chrome. So, it has been done before. But it's a lot of work.

It sets my expectations. Sometimes you hear a lot about a project because it's a vaporware scam, and I'm reassured that's not happening here. I should expect to see lots of excited people posting about it because they enjoy working on it, and it's delivering on that value even without much production usage.

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