Ladybird Proves You Can Just Build a New Web Browser

Kindof. It's impressive and definitely a worthwhile endeavour.

But they did need to attract a large amount of investment and sponsorships.

The lead developer has worked on browsers at Apple and there is probably only a handful of people on the planet who can do what he's doing.

If you follow his updates and listen to his interviews, you get a sense of what a massive undertaking this is and how much expectation management is involved.

I'm very interested in the concept of new browsers that are not intended to browse modern HTML+CSS+JS spec, but maybe something completely different. Web content varies so wildly from one context to another and I wonder if all of the spec is really needed for certain use cases: if I just want to read news, or if I just want to tell the audience what services I provide and what my phone number is, do we really need to involve WASM and canvas and web workers?

Ladybird couldn't have come around at a better time. I feel it's a much better candidate to fill the shoes Mozilla was intended to (but squandered).