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Comment by ironmagma | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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?

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?

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