Welcome to Ladybird, a truly independent web browser | Hacker News Reader

Welcome to Ladybird, a truly independent web browser

github.com

994 pointsgoplayoutside331 comments

Ladybird is a BSD-2[0] project from Andreas Kling, the same person behind SerenityOS.

awesomekling does monthly progress recaps, January's[1] shows LB as the fourth most standards compliant browser, just behind Safari. For example, GMail, Google Calendar, and Figma all fully load now, though usability is not at 100% yet.

The updates also have video versions[2], which include demos of Ladybird's rendering.

Last year, Ladybird became an official non-profit[3] and received a $1mm donation from Chris Wanstrath (a Github founder). There's an optional Donorbox link in the upper-righthand corner of ladybird.org[4].

0. https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/blob/master/LICE...

1. https://buttondown.com/ladybird/archive/this-month-in-ladybi...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-l8epGysffQ

3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40856791

4. https://ladybird.org/

> Andreas Kling, the same person behind SerenityOS

Important context - Andreas isn't involved with SerenityOS much anymore. He decided to prioritize Ladybird, which is arguably the more important project here.

Also, he used to contribute to WebKit. Even ended up working at Apple for a period of time. Quite definitely the right person in the right place.

More context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40560768

I can highly recommend Andreas' YouTube updates if you're remotely interested in browser dev. Really fun.

Yes, they were fascinating! I truly miss them.

Ladybird is lucky in that it has someone who knows how important marketing is, even for opensource projects. There are other opensource browser engine projects languishing because of lack of PR, patronage and / or volunteers. For e.g. NetSurf https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ - website is outdated because of lack of volunteers but the project has active development - https://source.netsurf-browser.org/netsurf.git/ (already has partial support for CSS3, and Flex layout). It can develop into a great alternative if it had some more volunteers. Servo (https://servo.org/) is another project but it has some decent PR because of its Rust codebase and the Rust PR team. There's the Goanna browser engine too ( http://www.palemoon.org/ ) but, like Mozilla Gecko, the project isn't truly modular to offer a stand-alone browser engine as Goanna also strives to be an XUL renderer.

Learning to market yourself and your projects is so important! I wish I had the skills.

Also, I really, REALLY wish the devs don't surrender to user's pressure for the plethora of features offered by the commercial products, done ASAP.

Please maintain the tinkering, passion and devs-first codebase it has now, and don't end up as a huge mess just because users want things like VDPAU asap.

I don't mind waiting a few more years. For the "just works" part of my life, I already have chromium+Firefox

I think that Ladybird's success has more to do with the fact that kling is one of the few people who knows how to write the whole browser than with marketing. But yeah, kling is also a great communicator.

SerenityOS was already quite successful before they started Ladybird. So successful that he was already making enough off sponsorship to do it full time. It was having the time to take on something as ambitious as a full web browser for SerenityOS that led to the project to begin with.

I agree that Ladybird is lucky to have a dev not only of his seniority but of his specific expertise. However, there is no denying that a huge reason for the success of his projects is non-technical and more about his ability to build community and engagement.

Thanks I forgot about NetSurf. After Microsoft abandoning Blink and Opera abandoning Presto to use Chromium, the internet needs these alternatives more than ether

Is Palemoon the most popular Goanna-based browser?

Quick clarification: Microsoft abandoned Trident for Blink/Chromium.

Microsoft abandoned Spartan (the original MS Edge rewrite) for Blink, Trident was just phased out and left to die.

Oh wow, I actually completely blacked out that they attempted their own first. Those were interesting times to be a web developer.

The data isn't available because PaleMoon doesn't collect any analytic or telemetry data. So they don't know how big their userbase is. (Recently though, I think they have started collecting some data on hardware because they wanted to revamp their code base. See this discussion - https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=30909 - I however don't know how extensive, or persistent, this data collection is / was).

I will add to the hundreds of comments.. Whatever happened to the thin waist of the wasp, in interfaces.. So, we design a system, for showing and interacting with data over networks. When we start with this, the outset is defining say a character set of 12-20-26 alphabet letters. Already with that, you could exchange information; at least the greeks could. We also managed to design the gopher protocol, the early world wide web protocol, telnet, and (god forbid) X-Windows. Early www already had some complications: Support for images, and form controls. A lot of these things were possible to do, even on a commodore 64.

But still, take a look at the monstrosities we have built since, presumably to serve the same purpose.. It now takes an effort apparently bigger than that required to land a controlled drone on the moon, to deliver a working/full WEB BROWSER..? An application supposedly intended to allow you to browse pages of mixed text and images, require approximately --two-- (nah, one?) full virtual OS environments to function, a turing-complete sub-language, and is more complicated to build than the OS's that host it..

I often wonder if all that was really necessary. It looks to me like we have made the 'interface' the most complex part of it all, leading to almost everybody just piggy-backing on the chrome investment (or what one chooses to call it.. It is an MS-like market control mechanism is what it is).

Because browsers don’t just browse these days, they do all the heavy lifting and not just for the nerds like us, but actually make it accessible to the normies. They do all the compliance work to all the standards too. There is no standards of sending something to space yet.

I do so much in my browser these days, things I had to have 15 applications for back in the ie days.

You still have 15 applications, it's just that now they appear as tabs in your browser - which is actually a virtual machine in disguise.

I see the news in the front page of HN: Edge, Firefox, Ladybird. The problems with privacy, funding, etc. will remain as long as one refuses to do an "AT&T" on the Web, that is delegate the non-essential browser functions (text, image display) to other applications (e.g. VLC for video, audio).

With a strong emphasis on banning remote code execution (JS), the father of all evils.

It may be convenient to call a coworker from Teams in your browser, but it is not a sane way to do it because we end up to where we are now: browser oligopoly. Convenience can be a trap; scammers and phishing use it all the time by including "direct" links. People are told again and again to know better and use their bookmarks instead.

The kind of flexible dynamic delegation that'd need (outside extremely simplistic uses) really doesn't exist in any OS that I've seen. And it would have to be quite sophisticated, to resist abuses and ensure latency is as low as it needs to be. I'm not sure we'd be in any better place if that happened - browsers would be simpler, but OSes and those media players/plugin-able things would gain significantly more complexity to offset it.

If your goal is to get rid of all the fancy stuff, then yeah - gopher still exists, all UX can be thrown out the window, it all exists today. But I don't think that'll go anywhere, except in extreme niches.

Well said, I feel the same. While I never used gopher I still remember e.g. the usenet vs. web forums. I mean being able to add images and stuff like that to discussions was helpful in many cases, I prefer the user experience of the usenet.

It's one thing to make a rocket to take a human being to space.

It's another thing entirely to make a "rocket" that will take a human being to space, or to school, or to work, or to the mall, or to the bank, or to church on sundays. And also it functions as a TV, a telephone, a radio, an encyclopedia, a games console, or anything else one can imagine. And then you wrap that up in a user interface that my grandmother can use without a NASA astronaut's level of training (YMMV).

And also backwards compatible forever and platform agnostic

And it serves more cookies than my grandmother.

The "thin waist" is a reference to IP (as in TCP/IP), and it's literally the thing that enables those uses.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111108105207/https://www.iab.o...

The web specifications should have been written in Haskell with a test suite. From there, it should be just a matter of optimization. Still a big task, but completely doable in a package by package basis.

If you just want to display pages of mixed text and images, it would be much easier. However, browsers are closer operating systems, capable of supporting rich desktop apps, without the antiquated desktop APIs. Browsers have more sophisticated security than desktop systems, and provide direct access to hardware resources like cameras, microphones and GPUs. In fact, webGPU would probably be considered a much better interface for GPUs than the desktop APIs like DirectX, WebGL, though maybe Vulkan is just as good. Browsers are also forming the basis for WASM development, though there are other deployment platforms, browsers are the biggest.

> An application supposedly intended to allow you to browse pages of mixed text and images

This has not been the intended scope of the World Wide Web for well over 20 years, so this is not a reasonable supposition to make.

Of course, you are free to make claims about what the intent of the World Wide Web ought to be.

Intended by whom? Google?

Big discussion 8 months ago (1077 comments, 757 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40856791

1 year ago (625 points, 284 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39271449

2 years ago (1341 points, 473 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32809126

I got to know this project through the one year old post. I was quite buggy and can’t even render github.com back then. The improvement is huge.

I applaud the effort but seriously though I just wonder...

For reference, Chromimum (and therefore Chrome) is a monster of a project and has at this point probably over 10 million lines of code and has taken +20 years to develop with thousands of developers involved.

I can only conclude that:

   a) the modern WEB is so complicated that this is the minimum  required level of complexity to run and render modern WEB safely

   b) chromium is extravagantly over engineered and the actual amount of complexity and code needed to run and render modern WEB is actually much less

   c) Ladybird is actually not targeting the same features but some "suitable" subset of features.

If the answer is A) how does the small team working on Ladybird think they can actually pull this off? Are they all 10000x developers?

Or maybe the answer really is C thus making this a toy/hobby project?

One could of course then hope that the answer is b) but somehow I don't feel like it is.

The answer is probably some combination of all 3. The modern web is indeed insanely complicated, Chromium is a massive enterprise project with all the resulting inefficiencies one would expect, and a competing web browser should likely aim to support the 90% use-case and ignore a large fraction of the total complexity in the process.

Note that chrome's codebase loc count contains some huge third-party libraries such as ffmpeg - pretty sure a lot of it is unused.

Chromium also includes things like a complete PDF renderer, etc.

I used to work a bit in that codebase, but I don't recall the core "blink" renderer portion being at all the largest part of the codebase.

Regarding A, I found this blogpost from 2020 interesting to get some sense of scale : https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....

As for C, the "suitable" subset really depends what we expect from a browser. In my experience, I was forced to use a Chrome based browser only for work, because mostly for google web apps (Google Cloud and Google Meet come to mind). For browsing the small web, I'm sure smaller browsers can work well. I tried some, but was usually put off because of the lack of adblockers, and I also quickly miss the element picker zapper feature of the ublock origin extension.

A ton of that code is web APIs that, although standardized and accepted, are not really what most would consider critical to a browser. Stuff like Speech Synthesis API[0] or Device Motion[1] might be important to a PWA but are rarely relevant to the web in general

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/SpeechSynth...

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/DeviceMotio...

While the modern web is complicated, there's a few things working in Ladybird's favor.

Web Platform Tests (1) make it significantly easier to test your compliance with W3C standards. You don't have to reverse engineer what other engines are doing all the time.

The standards documents themselves have improved over time, and are relatively comprehensive at this point. Again, you don't have to reverse engineer what other engines are doing, the spec is relatively comprehensive.

Ladybird has chosen to not add a JIT compiler for JS and Wasm, reducing complexity on the JS engine. They're already reached (or exceeded) other JS engines on the ECMAScript Test Suite Test262 (2).

There's a big differential between the level of investment in Chromium and the other engines - in part because Chrome / Chromium are often doing R&D to build out new specifications, which is more work than implementing a completed specification. There's also a large amount of work that goes into security for all three major engines - which (for now) is less of a concern for Ladybird.

I'm confident that the Ladybird team will hit their goal of Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version on Linux and macOS. They'll cut a release with whatever they have at that point - it's already able to render a large swathe of the modern web, and continues to improve month-on-month.

(1) https://web-platform-tests.org/ (2) https://test262.fyi/

The Chromium codebase also implements requirements that you may not need to take on for just a web browser, e.g. all of the infrastructure to make it ChromeOS, including for example being a Wayland compositor and a lot of other stuff. The projects are somewhat apples to oranges.

All of the above?

a) the modern WEB is stupidly complicated, it jumped the shark a while back b) enterprise development practices make this an almost certainty (though I haven't studied the code) c) it is targeting a subset, but this has 0 to do with it being a toy or not

Why does C automatically make Ladybird a toy/hobby project? Don't you think there can be room for specialized sofware? Let your Netflixes and whatever run in separate Chromium containers (they already do on your TV anway) and make the web browser efficient for browsing the web and just that.

The practical trade-off is that it is very, very difficult to secure a modern browser. Major vendors employ large teams of full-time security engineers and still ship vulnerable code with regularity. Companies such as Brave don't, but they get the benefit of getting many of the Chromium security features for free. Ladybird won't.

The thing that works in your favor is that Ladybird is very niche at this point, so unless some well-resourced adversary hates you specifically, it's unlikely that you'd be targeted.

Obviously there are many types of security vulnerabilities, but one thing that should start paying off for Ladybird eventually is the move to a memory and race safe language (Swift). Of course, that will be a gradual process (they haven't really started yet and they will be using the Swift C++ interop so there will be C++ parts of the browser for years to come).

They do also benefit from using off-the-shelf libraries like Skia, OpenSSL, image libraries etc. that the other browsers are using too. Previously they were rolling their own for everything but changed after the split from SerenityOS.

Will they, or it will be like Jank, just a kind of side endevour without commitment to actually make use of?

It isn't as if Swift developer experience is that great outside Apple's ecosystem.

While I would definitly use it when on Apple's ground, I feel less inclined to thouch it for anything related to cross platform GUIs.

I don't think they'd use Swift for GUI building. Ladybird's GUI's are platform-dependent (Qt on Linux, AppKit on Mac, etc). From what I understand they want to use Swift as a replacement for C++.

I haven't done a lot of Swift, but I did play around with it recently, and it seems to work fine even outside of the Apple ecosystem. It has a LSP you can use so you don't need XCode, they even develop a first-class plugin for VSCode.

It is very ruff, you cannot rely on random packages to actually work cross platform, a bit like .NET Core early days.

The idea of a future where Swift can be productive on non-Apple systems is definitely in place. The reality is that it will be several years before the tooling is mature enough to consider for time/cost sensitive endeavours. That is, if Apple maintains their interest in that direction by then.

>It isn't as if Swift developer experience is that great outside Apple's ecosystem.

That is indeed a serious problem for aspiring contributors to the project.

> It isn't as if Swift developer experience is that great outside Apple's ecosystem.

I keep hearing this - and have for years - but is it actually still true? Sure, you're never going to get Cocoa on non-Apple platforms, but with first-party VS Code support and a lot of the surrounding tooling open-sourced, is it all still [~that much worse than XCode~] as bad as all that?

Yes, unless you only care about doing CLI applications using the standard library, or having something to be Webserver endpoint.

Naturally most packages on the ecosystem assume libraries that don't exist outside Apple ecosystem.

Just like in the early .NET Core days, there were tons (and still are, hence businesses stuck in .NET Framework) that were actually wrappers to DLLs and COM based libraries.

Even Swift website acknowledges that the best use cases are command line and server stuff, the sweet spot is for server side applications for developers on Apple ecosystem, after all macOS servers are no longer something Apple sells.

Yeah I fear their choice of Swift will stifle cross-platform contribution.

Major vendors also employ teams of engineers to steal your data, identify and locate you, so it cuts both ways, depending on your threat model.

Well, it's hard to say because every browser engine is old. There are layers upon layers of code in every engine. And the old stuff wasn't really designed with security in mind.

Ladybird does have another slight advantage in that it only has an interpreter for JS and wasm, instead of maintaining multiple tiers of JIT compilation for both. That choice materially reduces the surface area for exploits.

Just installed Waterfox a couple hours ago. ( https://www.waterfox.net/ ) I'm getting fed up with all the latest Mozilla bullshit to the point I'm ready to switch browsers.

Ladybird is starting to look good too, from an end user daily driver perspective, technically it has been impressive for a long time.

One other thing I'm really hopeful is to embed Ladybird engine in a "first class" way. Think of if as an Electron alternative but in a sane way.

Waterfox looks worth a try, but I opted for LibreWolf because it's verified on Flathub and Waterfox is not. It looks like the Flathub version of Waterfox was packaged the same BrowserWorks Ltd that makes Waterfox, but they didn't take the extra steps to get verified so we can't be sure. Hopefully they can remedy that. Browsers are too important to install from untrusted sources.

For what it's worth, it's the opposite situation on Windows: The Waterfox installer is signed (even with an Extended Validation certificate), the LibreWolf installer isn't.

Another thing that surprised me is that there is a Waterfox Android build in the Play Store. Reviews of that are however mixed.

Similar on macOS, the LibreWolf team (somewhat understandably) refuses to pay for Apple's developer account to notarize their builds, so every update I have to remove the quarantine extended attribute (Homebrew can do this as part of updating now) or the OS helpfully tells me my browser is damaged and needs to be deleted.

Librewolf is available on Microsoft Store officially tho

Waterfox got bought by an advertisement company System1.

Not surprisen that Waterfox can be signed by Microsoft.

It's been independent again since 2023, so multiple years

Did you check for changes in its Article of Board or Incorporation?

Stealth BoD(s)?

> One other thing I'm really hopeful is to embed Ladybird engine in a "first class" way. Think of if as an Electron alternative but in a sane way.

I have the same hope. If it were performant enough I would find reasons to use it for gamedev, even with quirks.

Waterfox got bought by an advertisement company System1. You should looka at Zen Browser or Librewolf instead.

It's been independent since 2023, so multiple years

Servo is already embeddable, you can use it in Tauri (https://servo.org/blog/2024/01/19/embedding-update/) or Qt (https://www.kdab.com/embedding-servo-in-qt/).

I’m very excited but how will this survive without some sort of monetization?

In the old thread I see the non-profit was seeded with $1M. That’s 5 good US developers for 1 year. What next?

Andreas Kling is pouring his attention into this. He's a grit elemental. I believe he will accomplish this no matter how many people tell him it's a doomed effort, impossible, whatever. What happens in the longer term depends on if enough people value what he and his team does.

Looking at what FF has recently decided about selling out its users, I think demand will catalyze.

I love that term “grit elemental”! Hopefully Chris will continue to support the project. Fun rabbit hole learning about all this.

It says on the website they aim to always maintain 18 months of runway.. so basically scaling up and down as needed.

They get sponsors through enthusiasm, which is the way it should be for a project like this.

After reading their website, I know that I am going to request my company to donate, so there’s at least one more contribution.

Not just enthusiasm.

Companies like Shopify will invest because a healthy ecosystem is good for their bottom line in the long term. Monopolies are not good for them in the long term.

Why does it need to be accomplished without monetization?

I'd gladly pay for a good browser, that respects my privacy. Quite frankly we all need to start opening our pockets for this; the idea that big companies will benevolently supply stuff like this to us for free without trying to spy on us is naive.

I think it's more that without monetization, how will the project continue to exist?

I think the term monetisation is being used in a broad, VC/corporate investment/selling services etc sense. Donations or paying for the browser also takes care of money.

Perhaps, instead they can get 5 good developers from elsewhere for a decade /s

Why the /s. The idea that you can only get qualified developers for silicon valley salaries is absurd. It's not like tech companies in europe generally pay that much and they do just fine.

This is the SerenityOS browser split off into its own project. I have respect for Andreas and hope this browser continues to mature.

This is the first time I'm looking at SerenityOS and I really appreciate the Win98 vibe. Also this opening line from their FAQ:

  Will SerenityOS support $THING?
  Maybe. Maybe not. There is no plan.

Good - we already have an overload of scrum/agile driven planning sucking the life out of the joy of programming in our corporate lives.

Let him enjoy making a great browser.

I think the browser is a bit more organized (OP is referring to the OS), but I do hope they maintain the tinkering vibe, too.

This seems so much more relevant in light of the recent Firefox new terms and conditions. I think the writing was on the wall but I didn’t wanted to see it.

It might be time to explore librewolf or Vivaldi again

Brave blocks more stuff than Vivaldi, FYI.

https://privacytests.org/

I would say

#1 LibreWolf

#2 Brave

Does brave still do the purchase referral code swap thing?

Brave is, and always has been, super scummy.

Can you elaborate?

Wasn't their entire original premise the Basic Attention Token? It was some kind of crypto that you'd buy and then the browser would block ads for you and instead pay a small amount to the website owners. Problem was if the website owner wasn't part of the program they'd just keep the tokens for themselves, something like that.

No BAT wasn't the controversey. Unless you count the "Tipping any website but if the website didn't accept BAT it went back into the pool".

The controversy came when it was found out they were inserting their own affiliate code into links. That's scummy.

OK that does ring a bell. The whole project always seemed a little on the scammy side and I wasn't sure what the browser actually brought to the table that Firefox didn't, so why even check it out?

Much better performance on less powerful hardware (I don't care about synthetic benchmarks, do your own testing and you will notice the difference).

Vertical tabs. Built-in tor support, built-in efficient adblocker that supports ublock origin rules, but is complied into native code.

More anti-tracking and anti-fingerprinting measures (in total, and only counting those enabled out of the box). Configurable shortcuts for absolutely everything. Probably something else I'm forgetting.

Plus a bunch of crypto bullshit, but it's disabled unless you make an effort to enable it.

There's far more that.

Privacy violations - https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/nxce6t/brav...

Bundling crapware

https://community.brave.com/t/brave-has-become-malware/51041...

A little research proves that this crusade by this guy against Brave is poorly researched https://np.reddit.com/r/brave_browser/comments/nw7et2/delete...

Ok totally authentic account with no posting history.

Purchase referral code swap thing? As far as I know, nothing like that has existed. There's a ton of FUD "reporting" about Brave out there intended to drive users away.

There was a function that'd suggest a campaign partner while typing things in the address bar (eg. "binan" for binance.com, it'd show an ad for binance as one of the dropdown suggestions). For one day, it had a bug that if you wrote a complete url (eg. binance.com) in it and that matched a campaign partner, it'd give the ad as a suggestion. The bug was fixed within one day of being reported and the whole ad suggestion thing turned off by default.

As far as I know, they've never done anything to referral codes within websites. The current browser does have a function where if you right-click a link, it gives you an option to copy a clean link by stripping tracking nonsense out of it. Eg. X links just become plain links to tweets and so on.

Even if I agreed with the “block ads and then show our own” business model, which I don’t, I will never install a web browser, or any other application, that includes a cryptocurrency wallet.

Sadly, this also includes Signal at the moment, but I won’t be moved.

And remember when KeyBase added that crypto crap? Downhill then dead.

I'm not baiting or anything, just purely curious --why not?

And what do you use as an alternative to Signal?

https://simplex.chat/

I'm lucky enough that all the people I communicate with regularly use iPhones, so, I use iMessage.

Brave's optional stuff is opt in. If you don't like seeing the little icon for the Brave Wallet you can right click it to hide it.

"Yes it comes with awful stuff but you don't have to use it" is not an argument. There are plenty of alternatives without that awful stuff in the first place.

It's awful, in your opinion. Clearly plenty of people enjoy it, and it provides a simple means of monetization that's far more on the up-and-up than the typical alternative of - 'spy on users, profile them endlessly, secretly monetize them.'

I also am unaware of any reasonable alternatives with similar functionality and compatibility. Single click access/tweaking of a native ad blocker, auto-https, script blocker/toggler, anti finger-printing, and much more is just awesome. And for better or for worse the Web is built to target Chrome and so Chromium based remains desirable, even if it is clearly becoming more onerous to decrappify it over time. It may eventually prove unsustainable, but we're not especially close to that point yet and at that point a fork would probably still be more desirable than a new root.

I'd amend this list to place anything that can run UBO (the real version, not kneecapped lite version that now runs on chrome) at the top. AFAIK that still only includes Firefox and derivatives.

Vivaldi is still supporting Manifest v2 for the moment but said they will drop support once Chromium upstream drops support.

Opera has has said they will continue to support them going forward.

Also related is Mozilla's apparent removal of their promise not to sell user data: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...

Additionally, it's worth noting the Vivaldi is Chromium-based

I switched from Arc to Vivaldi and have been mostly happy with the it. Arc has a very polished UI, but has a number of annoying UX decisions. I've found I could customize Vivaldi to a point where it's basically Arc without the UX annoyances.

Is there a guide on that? Would love to check it out!

I just wish this was GPL (or any other copyleft licence). With everything that's happened over the past decade I would have thought it was obvious. If you contribute to permissively licenced software you are working for corporations for free. If you contribute to a copyleft project you are working for the community. I just don't want to see history repeat itself. If this ever gets good enough it will be eaten by big tech just like everything else. Copyleft is what we need. Stallman was right.

Good timing with these other HN entries on the front page:

Mozilla deletes promise to never sell Firefox data

Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge

Looks like it will be an alternate browser kinda day in the top stories...

It does not seem like Ladybird supports uBlock Origin, at least I cannot find any references. Does it?

the browser is in pre-alpha, so it's not that it doesn't support it, it's that the groundwork hasn't been laid yet.

Give it time

aka "no, it doesn't support it yet"

I keep longing for a day when FOSS crowd realize that their goals are political, not technical, in nature, and thus require broad political action, numbers, solidarity and force more than yet another project promising what previous dozen failed to achieve.

But I do not have much hope.

GPL is all about politics, that is Richard Stallman's background regarding his world view and how it applies to computing.

All other FOSS licenses are only a rebranding of Public Domain and Shareware variants that we used to have, with the respective commercial value when used as carrot for commercial products.

Yes, Stallman and his generation was more aware of this reality, yet we are losing it. It is similar across all dimensions of the society, where younger folk take for granted what was gained only after long struggle, as a result losing it, bit by bit.

> GPL is all about politics

People use this excuse to make open source software about politics that has nothing to do with software, ownership etc.

It is no excuse, it is literally Richard Stallman's view on the four user freedoms, how to enforce them legally, and naturally all of those that agree with his point of view.

Note that all the hobby stuff I have on Github created by myself, unless forced by existing licenses, are GPL based.

Even though I am not into FOSS politics, I once were, that time is long gone.

My take is that 15 years of booming software market and endless high paying jobs made people indifferent to the way open source software was/is being exploited by tech as a form of unpaid labour, because a) having an open source portfolio ended up being a kind of resume or bragging card that help get you a high paying job and b) the money being spread around was big enough that people didn't really care anyways. Nobody was starving.

I think it's shifting. I think we'll see a return to copyleft licenses as people realize the stuff they're writing that is actually valuable is just a couple commits away from being some new AWS component they will get no compensation for, and that starts to matter a lot more.

20-25-30 years ago we were a lot more aware of this stuff. There's a reason the Linux kernel is GPL.

If corporate entities want your stuff bad enough, they can negotiate a separate license.

AWS can easily comply with the (A)GPL and still not give people any compensation for using their stuff. You have to go to a non-FOSS license if you want anything out of Amazon, but then they probably won't use your stuff anyway, unless it is popular enough that they can make lots more off it than they would have to give to you.

Look into where the term "open source" came from (the "Open Source Initiative").

Here's a quote from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source):

> Open source as a term emerged in the late 1990s by a group of people in the free software movement who were critical of the political agenda and moral philosophy implied in the term "free software" and sought to reframe the discourse to reflect a more commercially minded position.

The GPL and Free Software were always political from the very moment Richard Stallman conceived of the GPL.

Did you reply to the wrong comment?

No, I think I just misread the comment I replied to. :/

The problem with FOSS isn't a lack of politics (they have plenty of that), but tunnel vision focus on software, when everything that is going wrong with the modern Internet is based around data (who stores it, who controls it, who can access it, who pays for it, ...).

One would expect something like the similar to the GDPR to grow out of the FOSS movement, but it didn't. The FOSS movement still has nothing similar on offer. Handling of data remains a complete blind spot for the movement.

That’s a very good point!

"The problem with FOSS isn't a lack of politics (they have plenty of that)"

The point of politics is to shape society through, well, policies. Considering your point on "tunnel vision focus" I think we agree, it is just that I use the term "politics" in broader, and older, sense.

There’s noyb [1] and the various EDRi-affiliated organizations [2]. In the US, there’s the EFF [3].

[1] https://noyb.eu/

[2] https://edri.org/ https://edri.org/about-us/our-network/

[3] https://www.eff.org/

The FOSS crowd doesn't have a unified goal. Some would love to outlaw tracking in browsers, thinking they then can have Chrome without tracking. Some would disagree, and think that tracking is what enables Chrome to be as good as it is.

What are the dozen failed projects that had the same ambitions as Ladybird?

Can you really be an independent web browser when Google basically controls the W3C?

I'll be using this as soon as it comes out anyway. It's not like there are a lot of alternatives in this space, so I very much welcome fresh takes.

Yes, the web browser is independent, not the web specifications!

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but it means nothing to "own" the browser when, realistically, you're going to be playing catch-up with the whims of the one corporation that basically controls nearly all decisions on the spec.

They're not legally bound to implement every spec the W3C publishes.

The spec only has the power it does because of the market share of Google’s browser though. More people using independent browsers means less power by google to single-handedly control the spec.

They can still control the spec. Ladybird would need a seat at the table to start the change there.

But if there is more browser diversity, and less support for Chrome Only things, maybe that starts (continues?) the path of Chrome becoming IE6

You can always just ignore the spec, if you have a big enough market share.

Basically noone other than browser vendors will look at the spec anyway. The reality is effectively descriptive, not prescriptive.

Sure, without having a majority marketshare a browser can't by itself push for their new features to be supported by other browsers, but they will effectively disincentivize website owners to not use features they don't support if they have marketshare of any significance. At which point it'd be in W3C's best interest to allow Ladybird to participate, or else their work gets underutilized.

If enough people use it, websites can stop following the W3C.

Maybe I’m overlooking it, but is there any mention of how browser extensions will (or won’t) work? I imagine I’m not alone in needing a password manager and ad blocking extensions for any browser I use. Either way, looking forward to seeing how this develops!

I don’t think they are thinking of that yet, the UI is barebones, they are working on the web engine mostly.

Curious - how well does this support the 'long-tail' features? What I mean by that are stuff that relatively few websites use, but requires a large amount of code to support? Things like WebCodecs, WebRTC, WebUSB etc.

Does this have a CanIUse equivalent?

It's fairly easy to compile and give it a spin to try stuff out. It'll log to terminal everything it does/doesn't do, including things it does not support. You can also then go to https://html5test.co/ to see a bunch of stuff with relative ease.

Can extensions to be used for implementing those (and other) features? I think that they should be implemented as extensions, that they can then be replaced with other implementations (or disabled entirely).

Everywhere web developers felt a disturbance and couldn't figure out why.

One of the more important projects of our time.

how so?

I think the diversification of options for web browsers is increasingly important, because Google has made Chromium the de facto standard for the web and positioned themselves to be able to drive standards changes that Google wants, such as DRM.

And because building a browser can be so complex, even the major alternative browsers now are based on Chromium, which is controlled by a pool of Google developers. So Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave, often referenced as alternatives to Google Chrome, are still to a significant degree Google Chrome under their respective hoods.

The only truly independent browser from a credible company with reasonable market share to stand in the way is Firefox by Mozilla. There's also Safari from Apple, but if you're concerned about Google, Apple is not necessarily a reassuring alternative.

Lady Bird seems like an ambitious and credible alternative intending to fully comply with modern web standards with a seemingly inspired and committed developer at the head of it. It can help maintain a diversity of web browsing options, which is increasingly important.

Diversification is good but considering ladybird choose a liberal BSD license, there is no protection from Google, Microsoft and friends. If it ever takes off they can just do the good old embrace, extend, and exterminate on it.

We need a GPLv3 licensed browser to ensure it will always stay open.

Thing is, so was Firefox. Say, for example, Ladybird becomes a massive success. What is stopping it from going down the Chrome and Firefox route? No project is immune to money.

Can we have a "Disable Javascript" in the developer menu, pretty pretty please? Safari had this and some ding dong took it away.

Interesting, they seem to be switching to Swift soon.

Noted that as well. Could be a reflex of swift’s improved memory safety capabilities.

Wouldn’t that make it slower than if in C++?

Swift can be just as fast as C or C++. The danger, in my experience, is that it's not always clear what the performance implications of the language's many convenient abstractions are. (A random example, I recently improved one code path by over an order of magnitude by replacing some serialisation that used Codable with hand-rolled code. Still 100% Swift, just paid a lot of attention to avoiding RTTI and allocations.)

Swift had automatic memory management, so yes ()

(: Although anything can be made as slow as python yada yada)

A bit slower is good if it is safer from exploits than C and C++.

Swift is underrated, it's a good alternative to C++ for those not interested in Rust.

Just compiled, seems to be able to render websites ok, youtube loads, but pretty slow. Might be out of the scope of the project (atleast at current funding levels) however it would be cool if it had it's own search engine.

Where is the connection? A browser is a software that accesses and renders the output of services. A search engine is a web service. Totally unrelated. That is like saying it would be cool if they had their own ice cream truck...

I'd pay for a browser that came with its own ice cream truck. Don't care for a browser with a search engine.

I'll keep my eyes on this.

Considering now most browsers are either Chromium (including Opera and Edge) or Firefox-based, a new alternative built from scratch will be interesting.

Looking forward to the alpha release. Can’t / shouldn’t this be financed by the users in the end to be fully independent? Like Orion or Kagi.

Ladybird became an official non-profit[0] last year. There's also a Donorbox link in the upper-right corner of ladybird.org[1].

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40856791 1. https://ladybird.org/

Sad, still dependent on the same horrible c++ (or similar). It would have been more appropriate with using a lean C99+ dialect which you can compile with small C compiler alternatives (that is impossible to do with c++ and similar due to abysmal syntax complexity).

There is no independence at being dependent on the same ultra complex SDK.

I scanned through it, and it is actually pretty easy to read C++. Though they could use to learn what comments are.

You missed the point: c++ _is_ the issue (and usually similar language).

You could go show the world that your favorite language is better by writing a browser in it instead of complaining about the work others are doing.

I hope as many people as possible will consider donating. The donation link is in the linked page but I'm going to copy it here for convenience https://donorbox.org/ladybird

Need native windows version, not WSL

I gather there are no binaries because it's for development use ? Are we all really supposed to compile it? Really should have alpha binaries. The only download link I can find is sourceforge and it looks sketchy.

It’s not really worth running pre-alpha software if you are not a developer.

It just opens the door for non-technical people to badmouth the software complaining that nothing works and expecting a fully functional browser.

I don't understanding how post ranking works. At the time of writing the ChatGPT announcement has the following stats:

- 833 points | 10 hours ago | 652 comments | 2nd

And this post the following:

- 432 points 5 hours ago | 155 comments | 6th

Also interesting is that the EA CoC post has the following stats:

- 828 points | 12 hours ago | 222 comments | 13th

Subjective opinion: the comments here are mostly positive, the comments over there is a bit of a mix. I _feel_ that it's not quite justified as with many recent posts.

The rule I have read a lot recently says if a post gets a lot of comments relative to opints then it can get flagged/deranked. Is it the number of parent comments/replies as well, does it depend on the author and commenter's points, the rate at which points and comments occur, etc.?

A lot could be said about this. Mostly there are algorithmic factors, and in some cases there are human fingers on the scales.

> I don't understanding how post ranking works.

The system is working as intended.

Also, one of the rules of HN club: don't talk about the rules of HN club.

What's the motivation instead of let's say developing Servo?

More the merrier

I'd rather have these merge and have the labour required to replace Firefox instead of duplicating effort over a dozen browsers.

Yep, exactly. It's not like any of these efforts have enough resources to progress fast. And Servo looks by far as the best of them.

Can someone catch me up, how close are they to migrating it to Jakt?

I believe they're migrating to Swift instead of Jaht.

This posting has fortuitous timing, as of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065

Is there any possibility of getting pre-built binaries? If these can be released as nightlies or at least from time to time it will really help with the adoption.

Adoption is not wanted yet. This is pre-alpha stage software that is not ready for end users

Related. Others?

Ladybird browser to start using Swift language this fall - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41208836 - Aug 2024 (192 comments)

This Month in Ladybird: July 2024 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41123449 - July 2024 (14 comments)

Tell HN: When Firefox jumps the shark, the call to action is Ladybird - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40975596 - July 2024 (47 comments)

I'm funding Ladybird because I can't fund Firefox - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40900648 - July 2024 (234 comments)

Ladybird web browser funded by GitHub co-founder, promises 'no code' from rivals - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40870366 - July 2024 (20 comments)

Ladybird Web Browser becomes a non-profit with $1M from GitHub Founder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40856791 - July 2024 (744 comments)

Welcome to Ladybird - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845951 - July 2024 (95 comments)

Ladybird browser update (June 2024) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40838973 - June 2024 (1 comment)

Ladybird browser spreads its wings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40746804 - June 2024 (304 comments)

I'm forking Ladybird and stepping down as SerenityOS BDFL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40560768 - June 2024 (262 comments)

Ladybird browser update (March 2024) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39889576 - April 2024 (2 comments)

Understanding Complexity Like an Engineer – The Case of the Ladybird Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39342887 - Feb 2024 (55 comments)

The Ladybird browser project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39271449 - Feb 2024 (284 comments)

Ladybird browser update (July 2023) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36939402 - July 2023 (1 comment)

Chat with Andreas Kling about Ladybird and developing a browser engine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36620450 - July 2023 (65 comments)

Shopify Sponsored Ladybird Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36502583 - June 2023 (1 comment)

I have received a $100k sponsorship for Ladybird browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377805 - June 2023 (166 comments)

Early stages of Google Docs support in the Ladybird browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33511831 - Nov 2022 (84 comments)

Github.com on Ladybird, new browser with JavaScript/CSS/SVG engines from scratch - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33273785 - Oct 2022 (1 comment)

Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32809126 - Sept 2022 (473 comments)

Ladybird: A truly new Web Browser comes to Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32014061 - July 2022 (8 comments)

Ladybird Web Browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31987506 - July 2022 (2 comments)

Ladybird Web Browser – SerenityOS LibWeb Engine on Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31976579 - July 2022 (2 comments)

How are Arc and / or Brave not truly independent? I’d really like to know, TY.

Arc is VC funded, and Brave has Brandon Eich's fingerprints all over it (and he sometimes posts here) so we would have to first start by defining what we want independent to mean here, first.

I would say Brave is not independent because it uses Chromium.

Did the title change since you asked, or what is claiming that they aren't? I don't see anything on the title, the README, or the website making the claim you want defended. It just says "a" truly independent web browser, that doesn't seemingly claim exclusivity to that status.

If it uses Chromium, it's hardly independent.

They both use chromium so they’re not independent of some technology decisions made by Google.

Whether that level of independence is important is up to you I guess?

If the goal is to create a truly privacy respecting, safe browser that's focused on the web, why not write it in Rust?

Genuinely asking as I've tracked numerous CVEs in Chrome and Firefox. Also I don't have much experience with Rust, so I don't represent the RIIR community!

Your question is already asked and answered on the Ladybird.org website [0]?

[0]: https://ladybird.org/

> Why build a new browser in C++ when safer and more modern languages are available?

> Ladybird started as a component of the SerenityOS hobby project, which only allows C++. The choice of language was not so much a technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain.

> However, now that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect.

> We have evaluated a number of alternatives, and will begin incremental adoption of Swift as a successor language, once Swift version 6 is released. (More background.)

They were thinking about writing the browser in a more memory-safe language, and it looks like they are leaning toward Swift rather than Rust. https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031

You've gotten a couple of other answers, here already. I'll just add that unfortunately I don't have link but there's a podcast interview with Andreas out there where they go into more detail about this. He said that they tried write some features in Rust and the development team just didn't like working in the language, I think the overall reason was that object-orientated programming was not a first-class citizen in Rust.

One other interesting tidbit is that the development team was excited to try Rust, but in practice disliked it, and the reverse was true for Swift.

Put this back on HN when you can download it and try it out (like Servo).

you can do that today, I've been downloading and trying this out since before it was spun off SerenityOS

HN is (supposed to be) a technical community so pulling the code and building it is no problem

No, this post is perfectly fine where it is: a dev forum full of people who may be interested in the source code and contributing to this ongoing project.

To anyone on the fence about this --- try it, it's fast.

Fast is the last adjective I’d use to describe Ladybird in its current state

everyone using a lissajous curve for their logos nowadays; who's going to be the first to sue everyone else?

I always read it as ⇧⌘?… because its help

I have to build it to use it? I am both annoyed and excited at the same time.

How is it financed?

Nonprofit[0] supported by sponsors[1]

0: https://ladybird.org/posts/announcement/ 1: https://ladybird.org/#sponsors

Why would I use this browser instead of, say, chromium?

I'm interested because it isn't chromium

Not an expert, but as a veteran of the Browser Wars, I’m curious as to why?

Because when there is a monopoly, you are at the whims of the people that control it.

Google is evil, and Chromium has too many Google-isms. Also, monocultures are bad.

Let me guess, you wrote this on an Apple device where .. checks notes.. every browser is webkit.

Monoculture is bad. smh

macOS can run any engine. iOS cannot.

The target audience is presumably people who dont like chromium, so the question kind of self-answers.

Well this project is now more important than ever since Firefox basically sold its soul [1].

Never say "Never"... Next is Thunderbird.

Let's go Andreas!

[1] https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...

Getting to know about this through here, and tbh I believe the writing has been on the wall for Mozilla for quite a while. This honestly does not surprise me as much as I thought it would.

That being said, I am sad to see this fear of mine come true. Mozilla products were rock solid, and available on virtually every platform imaginable. I do not want to live in a Chromium and WebKit only world.

And here I was thinking opensource was immune to enshittification...

It is, but people/corporations aren’t.

You obviously never used wordpress, lol

I guess the quality here is resilience more so than immunity. I guess you can say opensource is much more resilient to enshittification.

I think Mozilla has been a good example of that but the perception has been that resilience has been crumbling for years. Without an independent business model they have been in a really terrible position from the get-go.

> Without an independent business model they have been in a really terrible position from the get-go.

That's one way to look at it, I guess. You could also look at it like a business model will inevitably enshittify.

I think forks, such as Librewolf or Waterfox, will live for a while even if (and that’s a big if IMO) Mozilla comes down. Consider donating to them (and to Ladybird).

Vouching for librewolf. Not only does it not bother me with things like pocket and "Firefox sync", it also does not track me, and the browsing experience is genuinely superior.

I didn't realize how much webgl and other cruft slowed things down until I started using librewolf.

The one improvement I'm hoping for is that the project would be checked into the official Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora package repos as those are less risky than the repo controlled by the developers.

Is it possible to do things like "send tab to device" using Librewolf? Sometimes I'll stumble upon a programming library in my feed on my phone and I want to send it to my desktop, and Firefox sync makes that possible.

I have never used that so I don't know, but I use pocket for a similar purpose.

Firefox sync is something you can enable, I believe

Yea, I use Firefox sync since I'm still using Firefox, but with the way things are going I'm looking for a ship to jump to that still supports my workflows.

Mozilla has been pink washing itself for a decade.

This has paid off incredibly well for them since anyone pointing out that it's primary purpose was to enrich the CEO while letting her band of merry women support their pet causes was called everything from a fascist to an incel.

Till today the most blatantly farcical situation was that Mozilla funded women who code boot-camps while firing all the women who code inside Mozilla.

I guess people are finally waking up when Mozilla pulled an Ubuntu and decided that everything you do through their software is something they own actually.

They also flag and harass anyone who points out the grift.

What's crazy is that Firefox on Debian has been nagging me for weeks that I won't be able to use it after March 14th?

I have never seen those nag screens in Firefox, near the bookmarks toolbar. I think that is working around Debian's policies, IIUC. I have never had software on Debian nag me to update

It seems like this is under the guise of some DRM updates, and the like.

So I'm supposed to update, and then they apply a new Terms and Conditions that I didn't agree to?

And sell my personal data, I guess because there's a big market in AI now.

Also Firefox seems increasingly buggy -- I have had to switch to Chromium for 2 particular sites, so I guess I need to find a new browser ...

---

This reminds me of the Twitter thing where they asked for your phone number for security purposes, and then used it for advertising.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/25/twitter-u...

I think Firefox is forcing updates ostensibly for one reason, but the real reason is because they found a market for data, and want to apply a new T&C

>Firefox seems increasingly buggy

Yes, seems. I think web developers are increasingly neglecting testing on it.

I haven’t found anything yet that fails just on Firefox.

But I’ve noticed I have ublock-origin installed on Firefox and when the 2 sites that I had issues with started working when that was disabled…

> Also Firefox seems increasingly buggy -- I have had to switch to Chromium for 2 particular sites, so I guess I need to find a new browser ...

Is it Firefox that's buggy or those websites that only test on Chrome?

In my experience it is usually something related to cookies that work on Chrome and not in Firefox, and in those cases I find hard to blame Firefox.

Yet, sometimes you need to use those websites fore a reason. Firefox should perhaps make it easier so users don't need to fall back to a different browser.

If it's related to cookies is it any more difficult than the two clicks to disable enhanced tracking protection for that site?

Firefox on Debian is not nagging me. Out of curiosity what reason does it give for not being able to use it in the future?

Which version of each are you running? I use esr these days (I don't remember why I switched though).

I am getting them on openbsd, I assumed it was going to be some sort of certificate issue, I was going to update, but with these recent reports of Mozilla getting ready to turn full bore into a ad company, I might just wait until after March 14th and see what happens.

What is especially funny/insulting, is there is a click here to update button, and I am like "there is approximately a 0% chance that will actually work on openbsd".

update I looked it up, they say it is a certificate issue. https://support.mozilla.org/kb/root-certificate-expiration

I got the same message on an older version of Ubuntu where Firefox isn't installed via snap. On my main machine with Ubuntu / firefox snap I do not get this msg.

Probably because snaps autoupdates without user approval.

I get it on my desnapified Ubuntu, but Ubuntu says firefox is up-to-date, and the "download update" button downloads firefox-135.0.1.tar.xz but there are ZERO docs on how to update my current firefox. And running the unzipped firefox executable gives me a message that it can't find my current config, so I guess that means no addons (ublock, privacy badger, container-tabs), bookmarks, or config.

I'm taking this as a good reason to wait for an official Ubuntu update, tho, if this thread is accurate, it looks like all I'll need to keep my current version running will be new root certs.

Or a new browser, unfortunately.

Wow what the fuck Mozilla. I’ve been complaining about the phoning home on startup and shut down for a long time but this is just disgusting.

I don't understand what the issue is with that change in wording. They seem to indicate that nothing has changed as far as privacy and personal data is concerned.

The "not selling your data to advertisers" bit is removed.

They're not linking to a change in wording? The "Does Firefox sell your personal data?" question was deleted entirely. Unless the parent comment or link was edited at some point, maybe.

Elsewhere in the commit is a change of wording. That particular part of the commit didn't have the updated statement.

Deleting or obsoleting every mention of "we don’t sell your personal data" is pretty ominous. Yes, they don't come out and say "we now sell your personal data", but why would they remove the former if they didn't intend the latter?

To be clear on https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/faq/ they changed this >>It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different. Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you, and we don’t buy data about you.

to this: >>It seems like every company on the web is buying and selling my data. You’re probably no different. Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).

Of course, saying "(in the way that most people think about “selling data“)" makes the guarantee completely meaningless. The rest of the paragraph is just marketing puffery. Its meaningless bromides about how much they value your privacy. Notice they only say they put "lots of work" into stripping identifying information provided to commercial partners (which is just another way of saying selling). Again, this is meaningless. They went from a very strong guarantee to no guarantee at all. Any company that sells your data that makes any effort at all to strip identifying information can make this claim regardless of whether personally identifying information can be recovered with a modicum of effort.

If we manage to read the next 2 questions on the list, or spend 30 seconds on a web search, one would find the link to Firefox's privacy policy which details the specific types of data they collect and how they use it, and has enumerated rights for users: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/

This is actually a much stronger guarantee than "we don't sell your data", which is not actually a strong guarantee at all. "Selling your data" is a nebulous term that means different things from person to person, and any company that doesn't literally exchange money for data could probably claim it with some level of credulity.

Speaking on "reading the next thing", let me repeat yjftsjthsd-h's comment below, which of course you ignored (a pattern for people excusing Mozilla in these recent convos):

And now without cutting it conveniently before the fun bit:

> Mozilla doesn’t sell data about you (in the way that most people think about “selling data“), and we don’t buy data about you. Since we strive for transparency, and the LEGAL definition of “sale of data“ is extremely broad in some places, we’ve had to step back from making the definitive statements you know and love. We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners (which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable) is stripped of any identifying information, or shared only in the aggregate, or is put through our privacy preserving technologies (like OHTTP).

You appear to have cut off the part where they say that actually yeah they have to stop saying they don't sell your data because they are selling your data.

reply --------

No, actually, they don't say that. They very clearly say that they don't (and don't believe most people will) consider what they are doing "selling your data", but that it may legally considered selling your data in some countries.

For example, Firefox runs ads using your language and city/country (on the default new tab page) - but no other data. I think the vast majority people would fine with the privacy implications of that, but this may be legally considered selling your data.

Being specific about what types of data they collect and how they use it is actually far superior to some nebulous promise that has no definition.

I don't have any special insight on these events but I've seen that commit linked a lot.

From a pure optics point of view, it looks extremely bad but reading some of the comments, it sounds like that repo is basically a mirror of some upstream project where terms and conditions/faqs etc are stored as pseudo-structured data and that they're migrating parts of that repo to some other project?

I feel like a lot of context is missing publicly but if I squint, that seems to be what this comment is trying to express: https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...

Don't get me wrong, I love bagging on Mozilla as much as the next person but as extremely bad as it looks, I'm not convinced that it's literally what it looks like?

I also lack any inside info, but that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous. And if you were going to slip something unpopular into a foss project policy, wouldn’t you want the public updates to be vague enough to not technically be lying about anything while also being plausibly innocuous?

> if you were going to slip something unpopular into a foss project policy, wouldn’t you want the public updates to be vague enough to not technically be lying about anything while also being plausibly innocuous?

If a company was being competently "evil"[1] then it probably would look like this!

Personally, I don't know that I consider Mozilla competent enough to reach that bar though given a lot of their previous blunders seemed like, well, blunders and not finely crafted acts of trickery.

> that seems like the kind of thing they’d clear up pretty easily if it were that innocuous

I suppose in this scenario, if it were innocuous and this is just some automated mirroring thing that someone triggered without realising the optics of, I wouldn't then automatically assume that same organisation would have a level of coordination to recognise or put out a blanket statement about the issue?

I mean, you'd think surely some amount of Firefox/Mozilla folks are very online and this would be raised internally but if this is downstream of some process owned by mostly legal and non-internet/chat using folks, it might make sense that they a) take some time to be notified, b) take some time to realise a lot of the internet is saying "What the fuck" and c) take a while to figure out what to do about it (ie; issue a press release to not make it worse? someone higher up acks and is like reverse whatever this mess is?)

My only real basis for all this is I've occasionally run into some compliance/legal types in tech and they can have extremely bad mental models of the company and product they work for so I can feasibly believe this all being accidental but in saying that, I dunno who works for Mozilla and this is very much a stereotype I'm applying.

Anyway, as above, I'm not saying this isn't malicious, just that personally I think the door is still open that this could all be a complete mess that has no real intent behind it

I honestly think that Wikipedia should buy Mozilla to fund Firefox

They should directly buy Firefox and let Mozilla perish

They have enough cash in the bank to fund development, so...

I don't think most people realize how huge Mozilla is. Their annual revenue has been flirting breaking a billion dollars for some time now and was ~$500 mil as of 2023 - primarily due to 'partnering' with Google, which was always a bellwether to anybody who cared to see it. Wikimedia has never broken $200 million per year. In other words, it's Mozilla that could buy Wikipedia, not the other way around.

But how much goes into firefox development? Maybe 2% of revenue like with Linux Fiundation and Linux kernel?

Mozilla is ads company, it does activism, outreach, it organizes Marxist conferences, management gets paid millions... Firefox development is just tiny fraction of what Mozilla does.

And frankly Wikipedia has the same overhead problem as Mozilla.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41620146

》 Mozilla isn’t just another tech company — we’re a global crew of activists, technologists and builders, all working to keep the internet free, open and accessible.

》 “Mozilla isn’t your typical tech brand; it’s a trailblazing, activist organization in both its mission and its approach,”

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-brand-next-era-o...

I do not doubt they employ 750 people. I am saying they have tons of other projects. If you go throught their blog posts, Firefox has tiny fraction of posts.

Yep, I linked that subthread cause it puts some actual numbers into perspectives.

The Wikimedia Foundation has developed many of the same corruption issues that Mozilla has. It would just be kicking the can down the road, and not very far at that.

Any particular reason to buy what they can fork regardless?

> Well this project is now more important than ever since Firefox basically sold its soul [1].

I'm still not convinced that Firefox is The Actual Devil for potentially appearing to perform .000001% of the bad behavior that is fully-baked into popular Chromium browsers.

But for the sake of argument, lets say that .0000001% > 99.99999%. What is the browser I can install+configure right now, that will perform what Firefox does every day. For ex:

    natively support containers, 
    provide fully uncrippled element control, 
    provide reader mode when *I* want it, 
    locally save and sync windows,
    provide granular redirection control,
    and the other functions that are mostly unique to Firefox ecosystem

?

LibreWolf

Why and how?

It's literally Firefox without all the telemetry and Mozilla's cloud services. Also a few privacy-related settings but it's mostly that.

I will give LibreWolf a legit look-over. My browser conversations always start with "I need containers" - which rules out everything non-Firefox.

Besides running Ffx, I'm also running Waterfox and Floorp - which just about exhausts my options for modern Ffx forks + Windows + Extensions.

Shame they don't sign their macOS builds.

Can they just sign it with their PGP key or something? Or does it require paying money to Apple for no reason?

Zen browser which is a relatively modern fork of Firefox. https://zen-browser.app

It's relatively new, but I liked using it more than other of the forks.

Seconded for Zen.

The website looks good, but as I scroll down in mobile Safari the page starts glitching until it fully crashes and Safari says an error repeatedly occurred. It doesn’t inspire much confidence when the web page for a web browser is broken.

FWIW, it works fine in FF mobile.

I rather not

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41887594

Have you tested the waters with a request for the devs to remove whatever you consider suspicious in that list?

I believe the current issue regarding Firefox is it's new terms of use, which are not presently in Zen browser. Other than that is a pretty close copy of Firefox, which is the point, and why I suggested it to parent as an option.

I did not. However considering that they have advertised themselves as "privacy-focused" Firefox alternative and can't be bothered to do the most superficial of tests, I don't think they care or are competent[1] enough to change it.

[1] https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/pull/927

If you want an actual private Firefox alternative there are already multiple long standing and competent projects such as arkenfox, librewolf, mullvad and tor browser.

Containers is key. NoScript is wonderful. I cannot live w/o containers, but I'd really like to also have NoScript.

> We’ve seen a little confusion about the language regarding licenses, so I want to clear that up. We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible. Without it, we couldn’t use information typed into Firefox to perform your searches, for example. It does NOT give us ownership of your data or a right to use it for anything other than what is described in the Privacy Notice. We’ve added this note to our blog to clarify, so thank you for your feedback.[1]

So, did the internet explode again for no reason?

[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/information-about...

The question I can’t find answered is why now?

They could have done this on literally any date and your question would apply.

Usually the answer is something really mundane. They did a privacy policy review and realized a couple of their core fewtures break the policy.

Or someone new joined the team who had an interest in their privacy policy and realized it contradicts.

There could be a thousand mundane reasons for why now.

Or it could be that they announced an entirely new leadership team last week: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growt...

And their "aquisition" of an adtech company last year, and their rollout of its data collection into the browser: https://news.itsfoss.com/firefox-ppa-ad/

And the US DoJ ruling last year that Google had an illegal monopoly on web search, and one of the mooted remedies was to bar Google paying to be the default search engine in other browsers... and about 90% of Mozilla's income is Google paying to be the default search engine.

But sure, "why now", maybe someone reported a typo or something.

Not to mention their new "AI" integration which they likely want to expand to include all interactions with the browser.

And while they were doing this privacy policy review they also just happened to delete their promise not to sell your data?

>Mozilla has just deleted the following: “Does Firefox sell your personal data?”

“Nope. Never have, never will. And we protect you from many of the advertisers who do. Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy. That’s a promise. " https://github.com/mozilla/bedrock/commit/d459addab846d8144b...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203096

Yeah, could be a mundane reason for that too....

Edit add: My sibling list some other things that just so happened to be going on...

Yes, if this happened two years ago or next week my question applies.

Mozilla needs to answer it and your “I’m above it all” snark needs to disappear.

That's ridiculous though. Performing a search is taking text I entered, concatenating it to a URL and opening that.

Nowhere in that process does Mozilla need to know about what is happening in the local browser of the user.

By that logic, and with some hyperbole, a text editor would need a license from the user to be able to turn their keystrokes into visible text display.

It smells really bad of privacy violation, data hoarding, targeted psychological manipulation (also known as advertisements), and behaviour analysis. That is why people are reacting so furiously.

> That's ridiculous though. Performing a search is taking text I entered, concatenating it to a URL and opening that. Nowhere in that process does Mozilla need to know about what is happening in the local browser of the user.

Every browser I’ve used in the past decade does “search as you type” by default. That does require local access to your browser and your key strokes.

Normal people wouldn’t use a browser that didn’t do search as you type.

But at no point does any of what you type need to be sent to Mozilla. That only needs to be between the browser and the configured search engine and nothing in between.

It's sort of weird that by that argument Chrome is ok, because Google owns both the search engine and the browser.

GP does not imply, that it would be ok for chrome to send all non-google search-queries to google as well.

> We need a license to allow us to make some of the basic functionality of Firefox possible

wow, that's scary.

So either a) the current license doesn't allow some current basic functionality or b) the basic functionality of firefox is about to change

I can't imagine how a) can be true. So b) must be true and quote implies, that firefox's basic functionality is about to change. And I do not see how it can change for the better regarding the context of the quote.

Can I backup my container configuration to a json file on disk or do I still need to sync it to the cloud to save it?

> Can I backup my container configuration to a json file on disk or do I still need to sync it to the cloud to save it?

I will guess the ability to save containers locally must be possible, based on this: Every night, my desktop ffx profiles are copied over to a VM. The VM hosts firefox as a remote app.

That remote app instance of ffx has all of my sessions and saved passwords. I can access it from anywhere over VPN and they never leave the house. I'm typing on it now.

Included in that are all of my containers - so in theory they're transportable. I've never thought to try to isolate them from the profile - but my gut says it should be possible.

Firefox has been trash for the past 10 years, let alone the Mozilla Foundation. There are some idealistic people that still vouch for them, they're only making a fool of themselves, lol.

You are so right! I'm deleting Firefox right now and installing Chrome. I don't want anyone selling my data! /s

Brave is the good one these days.

For crypto bros and those that excuse Brendan Eich

> crypto

One-time disable and completely not intrusive. No popups. Nothing. It's the equivalent of firefox's suggested sites on the homepage when you install it that you have to turn off. Do you hold that to the same standard?

> Brendain Eich

Art, artist, etc

It's not even a "one-time disable", it's off by default until you enable it and the icon in the URL takes two clicks to hide.

And more generally, lack of easy payment is at the root of so many problems with the modern Internet, that I really can't blame Brave for trying this, quite the opposite, that's exactly the kind of feature we need.

I don't have a rabid hateboner like most of HN for Brave, but I refuse to help Google/Blink expand their monopoly on the web so I'll continue to put up with Mozilla and their silliness until a decent enough competitor appears.

Which is unfortunate because WebKit is terrible outside of macOS, so every single alternative browser is built on Blink and thus indirectly giving more power to Google. The web is too important to accept a monoculture, and it saddens me to see that most of my peers have no moral fibre to resist against it.

As much as I dislike Apple, thank god they have a billion devices out there with an alternative engine, though they still happily take the bribe to force Google down your throat.

Brave is not, and has never been, the good one.

Firefox is the lesser of the evils. I hate what Mozilla is doing, but I also don't want to cede control of the web to Google. Vote with your feet. I'm hopeful for Ladybirds future.

You know what the really sad part about this is? If we switch to an alternative browser, fingerprinting makes us even more easily tracked. It's lose-lose nowadays. We need political changes to make selling off our private data no longer profitable.

For those of us that missed the memo — what is happening with Firefox at a macro level, aside from that commit message you linked?

I think it's related to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200065

HNers, become part of this! Put your skills where your mouth is and start contributing code, tests, bug reports, etc.

Get involved: https://ladybird.org/#gi

I truly can't understand. We live in world where you can potentially make business in so many ways, even if Mozilla asked me for some money to continue as a good faith browser I don't mind to pay for it. But for god's sake, can't a single human being come up with a business model that *IS NOT* related to our fucking private data?

It's a lot easier to sell user data than to ask users for money.

Because given any business model not related to your fucking private data, they can also make more money by also mining your fucking private data.

They make more money and 99% of users don't care enough to switch.

heck yeah!!

I wish I could get excited, but several design choices and aspects of the status quo we are facing have me worried:

It's already a basically bleeding edge C++. Why is it so much to ask for developers to use a more mature and established iteration so I don't need a brand new compiler?

What role is it gonna actually fill? It's not efficient enough to penetrate into the niche of Dillo or Netsurf. It's nowhere near as up to date on standards as Webkit, Goanna, Blink and Servo engines.

The swift move means LLVM-only. Yay. \s

What is supposed to sell this to normal users? Brave may be controversial, but its messaging is on point. Pale moon purging Mr. Tobin basically solved 99% of their brand issues. Vivaldi is what Opera used to be.

Google's dominance through Chromium/Chrome appears commanding. Between Pale Moon getting censored from Cloudflare sites, to Firefox becoming a controlled opposition, to Microsoft JOINING THEM. I'm sorry, but I have trouble being optimistic.

That said, I begrudgingly am ok with it. I wish they did things different.

> It's already a basically bleeding edge C++. Why is it so much to ask for developers to use a more mature and established iteration so I don't need a brand new compiler?

Because C++ got better and better in recent versions?

You are essentially asking to forego large amounts of improvements that allow for writing more maintainable code, just because you are too lazy to install a compiler that has been released 1 year and 10 months ago (in the case of GCC 13) or 1 year and 5 months (in the case of Clang 17).

I agree with your concerns in general but starting a project like this with a bleeding edge language version does make sense - by the time the code is ready to be used those language versions will be old even esoteric systems will have a compiler that supports them.

Swift is more of a concern no (only) because of the LLVM dependency but also because of the Apple dependency and no proven track record of being a good cross-platform foundation.

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