Ladybird web browser funded by GitHub co-founder, promises 'no code' from rivals | Hacker News Reader

Ladybird web browser funded by GitHub co-founder, promises 'no code' from rivals

devclass.com

22 pointslaktak20 comments

Related Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder (995 points, 1 day ago, 705 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40856791

I'm not invested, but slightly bullish on Ladybird here. I'm a FireFox user of the last five years, but I'm all ears for a non-chromium competitor.

I'm glad that it seems they're building a truly independent engine (which I assume is both rendering and JS). It's been a minute since we've had something _actually_ new in the browser space, and I'm excited.

"promises ‘no code’ from rivals"

The article is quite good, but the headline seems clickbait and wrong.

I do not recall Kling making such statements, rather:

"we implement web standards ourselves,” ruling out adopting a third-party engine in its entirety."

So not just using webkit, yes. But copying code how to handle a CSS case, or a wasm implementation, is not ruled out as far as I know.

From ladybird.org:

> What does "No code from other browsers" really mean?

> The focus of the Ladybird project is to build a new browser engine from the ground up. We don't use code from Blink, WebKit, Gecko, or any other browser engine.

Ok then, my bad, I have not checked the website, but I think that quote should belong in the article as well.

(And I also would disagree to that absolute choice of using no other browser code at all)

"We implement web standards ourselves" would seem to be entirely at odds with your last sentence.

Meanwhile, if you go searching for ladybird on Mastodon you will find that there’s quite a bit of ill will that started from a rather innocent PR to make some documentation use gender neutral pronouns.

Why are you trying to bring drama in here? Please delete this.

Seems like the project quickly shut the annoying troublemakers down. The few people on Mastodon that are upset about this don't matter and they'll quickly move on to being upset about some other trivial matter.

Their opinions on this subject may not matter (to most), but I think it’s problematic to say people don’t matter.

Since it was brought up, can you, or someone else summarize what happened?

I am not looking for drama on Mastodon (it seems I need an account to search?), or drama here. Just some facts to judge whether this is a red flag of some kind, worth investigating more.

There was a PR to change references of he to they, or similar thinking the writing was by a non-native English speaker. The PR was aimed at inclusivity. The response was that politics are not welcome there.

A legit seeming concern is that anything can be political in the eyes of the lead dev. Is support for screen readers part of a political agenda?

In an effort to avoid drama, drama was invited. This doesn’t seem likely to be a welcoming place for some that would otherwise contribute.

Except screen reader support is an actual usability concern.

I found the PR:

> To prevent this, remove `anon` from the `wheel` group and they will no longer be able to run `/bin/su`.

That's a terrible change, since "they" is plural and seems to refer to the group. It's a low quality PR.

> The response was that politics are not welcome there.

This is the ultimate response. Huge respect to the lead dev.

And this is very political. "They" is plural, it's usage in singular form is fringe, only very recent and originates from within political activism. For the majority of English speakers this is incorrect, and will remain incorrect as the belief system associated with it's usage is fundementally wrong and incompatible with their world view.

This is false, singular they existed since the 14th century, says right on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

they is inclusive and can refer to a singular unknown binary gender or to someone who is nonbinary. language is fluid... it changes.

The dev responds:

“I have absolutely nothing against gender neutral language. I am however against outsiders doing drive-by PRs with ideological motivations. If a regular contributor hade made these edits, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it. Could I have communicated this better in 2021? You bet.”

— <https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1808294414101467564>

Here’s one I found: <https://lunduke.locals.com/post/5823666/ladybird-web-browser...>

I'm sure the Mastodon complainers will build a much better browser!

> if you go searching for ladybird on Mastodon you will find that there’s quite a bit of ill will

I followed your suggestion and took a look at this.

Let's call the situation what it is: Someone with a few followers on Mastodon saw a reason to harass an individual, with the reason itself being secondary in nature. What happened there is called brigading, which is rightfully a bannable offense in many moderated online communities, even those many would (rightfully) consider very toxic in nature.

Pretending that this 3 year old pull request with a one (!) word change was actually of deep interest to the people involved seems pretty dishonest.

The fact that this absolutely trivial PR is enough to gain so much traction in certain circles that they gather to sling hurtful tirades at someone and call them names in order to hurt them....why would anyone want such a community interacting with a project?

Why would anyone want such a toxic crowd near a project?

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