This Month in Ladybird: July 2024 | Hacker News Reader

This Month in Ladybird: July 2024

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42 pointsrichardboegli14 comments

- Louis Rossmann people gave another $200k

- hw acceleration is working in Vulkan and Metal

- Ladybird supports Web Assembly through the LibWasm library, which is separate from the JavaScript implementation in LibJS. ... As of this month, LibWasm has hit a 100% pass rate on the Wasm spec test suite!

- - Contributors Diego Frias and Ali Mohammad Pur have put in excellent work fixing bugs and implementing missing SIMD features in LibWasm to push us from approximately 60% back at the beginning of June to 100% of tests passing late this month.

I'm astonished. These people have a legitimate shot of breaking up Google's web oligopoly. In my opinion, Ladybird is currently the most important thing happening in the software ecosystem. Yes, I mean it.

They have no chance of breaking up Google’s web oligopoly. You could have your own browser and supports everything Chrome does and it still wouldn’t matter. What matters is getting people to use your browser, which is (so far) done in only one of two ways: control an existing platform so you can be the default (iOS, macOS, Windows’s, Android, etc) or spend a ridiculous amount of money on advertising (ex: Chrome on Windows). The implementation of the browser is irrelevant.

Not true. Firefox rose out of the ashes of Netscape pretty much by word of mouth and nerds installing it on other people's PCs.

Another world is possible.

That worked because IE was a pile of burning trash.

Chrome & co are not.

It’s a different world.

Chrome and Firefox are privacy nightmares and everyone knows it.

That has zero to do with how well they "just work" for the average user, which wasn't the case with IE6/7 back in the day.

Lots of stuff "back in the day" simply required IE and you just had to have it. And for people who needed stuff to "just work", IE generally did because it was the most popular browser in the world. I don't recall Firefox or Netscape ever being the majority browser.

In the interview with Tweakers (linked in the submission, see screenshots near the bottom), they wrote (presumably translated from English, but the original text isn't published afaik):

> Zo is de browserengine grotendeels in de relatief onveilige programmeertaal C++ geschreven. [...] Het team achter Ladybird is nog bezig met het zoeken naar een geschikte programmeertaal en wil dan in eerste instantie stapsgewijs de kwetsbare onderdelen van de engine vertalen die bijvoorbeeld in aanraking komen met untrusted netwerken.

Weird that they publish about tons of new features and improvements, when they also claim to be looking for a suitable programming language to use to translate the engine into. Won't this just make it a bigger and bigger hurdle to port the relevant parts to a different language?

If there's no default search deal, will there be a option to pick which search engine you use? Or will it just default to something like using https://search.marginalia.nu/ out of the box?

Relevant tweet from Andreas Kling (maintainer) https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1808927568176746525

Thank you!

To save others a click:

> Hey, that might just work!

Want to enlighten us on what that means?

It is a reply to this tweet:

> Could show the “Select your search engine for autocomplete or press enter” in the dropdown initially!

I've tried bribing Andreas with heaps of dude trust-me:s to no avail.

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