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Comment by bilekas | Hacker News Reader

Andreas Kling is a great role model in the world of development I feel. The decision to step away from the Serenity OS makes a lot of sense. There are plenty of them, nice projects to do, but they'll never have an immediate impact if any at all. But the browser space, Ladybird is viable as a daily driver for people. I'm still today astounded the work that has been produced just on this.

> Somewhat ironically, it was not possible to log into Discord using Ladybird. It does a fair job of rendering pages, but speed and stability are still wanting.

Fascinating to see people expecting everything to work out of the box whilst being writter from scratch.

And as an avid rust appreciator, all the comments about "rewrite it in rust" as if that solves anything the OP spoke about is really frustrating.

Let the team cook, if you dont like the dish, help cook it. The project has been super interesting and honestly I feel we need more like this in the browser scope.

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I don't think casual observers understand how many new CSS features have been added to the web platform over the last few years.

468 new features have been added since 2018; 148 have been added in the past 18 months alone [1].

I applaud the effort but unless something fundamentally changes in their approach, I don't see how they can catch up.

Sure, you don't need every single spec, but even the core ones like Flexbox, Grid are large and complicated and are constantly being tweaked.

[1]: https://codepen.io/fimion/pen/WNmwJWJ

all of them were written in a way that mostly affect the api, not the underlying implementation models tho.

it's still 500 new things to test and actually implement. but not as bad as the original 1 to 2 change.

html5 was the forever missed opportunity to do things right. but keeping the browser-side effort low was always fought for on the w3 committe.

> Fascinating to see people expecting everything to work out of the box whilst being writter from scratch.

(Sarcastically saying something is interesting is something I find distasteful.)

Anyway the irony is that the project chose to use a discussion platform which uses lots of modern web cruft and would be a big challenge for a new browser, when they could have chosen a (maybe less capable) simpler platform like IRC or some simple web forum which would more likely have run on Ladybird.

They used to use IRC in the beginning.

Chosing Discord was a deliberate choice. I remember when Serenity was using IRC as the only communication channel and immediately after setting up a new Discord server the community gravitated towards it. Infact, the number of community members sky rocketed.

The fact is, Discord as a platform is more accessible compared to IRC.

> The fact is, Discord as a platform is more accessible compared to IRC.

Guess it depends on what you mean with "accessible". In terms of accessibility for impaired users, IRC is a open protocol vs a service that disallows 3rd party clients. I'm sure there exists better options for IRC than Discord, and at the very least, IRC allows you to access it however you want, be it visual, textual, voice control or whatever.

Besides, Discord being a US company, need to prevent users from Cuba, Iran, Syria (and NK) and is also banned in a bunch of countries like China, UAE and Egypt. So in that sense, Discord seems less accessible than IRC.

Only remaining part is that Discord has a somewhat easier "getting setup" UX than IRC for younger users, as it's more similar to the type of services they're probably already use.

Sounds like someone should work on Discord-ifying IRC to make it more palatable for the modern user.

That would be Matrix.

I wish rust people spent their time writing software instead of going around telling other people to do the job for them. They only manage to get others annoyed with this attitude.

Truer words have not been spoken.

> But the browser space, Ladybird is viable as a daily driver for people.

From the LWM article:

> Users will need GCC 13+ or Clang 17, and Qt6 development packages to play along at home. Ladybird compiles and runs on, for example, Fedora 40 without a problem, *but it is a long way from being suitable for regular use.*

Seems distributed binaries are missing, but that's easy to "fix"/"workaround". Is there something else that makes you say it is suitable as a daily driver while LWM author does not?

> Seems distributed binaries are missing,

Even with SerenityOS they long were of the mindset that binaries/ISO/etc. should not be produced and distributed by them apparently.

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