This Month in Ladybird – October 2025 | Hacker News Reader

This Month in Ladybird – October 2025

ladybird.org

175 pointsexploraz49 comments

Good progress this month! Good to see it running on Windows now, even if I don't use Windows myself anymore. That'll help boost adoption once it releases.

True open source web browsers on Windows, and MacOS, are dead in the water.

This is because of the lack of Widevine CDM, and the majority of people wanting to stream stuff using services like Tidal, Netflix and Spotify.

They will also want to use a single browser for everything, which in practice means Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari.

Ladybird will very likely not have access to Widevine, because of the cost, requirements, and Google as gatekeeper. Some developers of small opensource Chromium/Electron based browsers also earlier tried and Google simply said no.

And even if they have reverse engineered the CDM extension (which will make Widevine work, not unlike a small hack/workaround with regard to Chromium and Chromium forks) it will not work because all browsers using Widevine on those two platforms require something called VMP (Verified Media Path) which is, as far as I understand, a certificate and verification library supplied by Widevine embedded within the browser.

Without VMP embedded in the browser streaming from popular commercial providers such as Netflix will not work on Windows and MacOS, even when the Widevine extension is in fact active.

Believe me, I checked.

IMO all of this is not only set in motion to (try to) protect from piracy, but also to kill any serious competition from small parties like LadyBird, and to keep the browser market firmly in the hands of the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google. Because who will use a browser in 2025 unable to stream content, or without hacks at 720p maximum? (looking at you, Brave and Netflix)

This also means that browsers like Brave, Vivaldi and Firefox are in fact not true opensource browsers because their respective public repositories do not contain the assets needed for VMP signing.

On another note, at this moment the majority of people should be glad that browsers with corporate backing and enough income like Brave (whatever you might think of Brendan Eich's ideas), Vivaldi and Firefox exist because without them you would have no serious choice on Windows or MacOS at all.

I don’t know about you but I am perfectly content to use a free browser and open either a nonfree browser or an app if I want to use a feature that is not available in my preferred software.

I don't know about you but I am very sad that I can't really recommend a browser not made by evil-mega-corp (or their associates) to friends and family because for some stupid reason that I can't explain to them, they aren't allowed to view high quality streaming video with it.

“It doesn’t work with Netflix, but I just open Chrome when I want that”

is that really so hard?

DRM is not a good thing

For casual users there exist a huge chasm between "everything just works" and "everything works except x, y, z and those you must open seperately with Chrome"....

I think many people will rather just use the 1 thing that does everything perfectly well, rather than switch back and forth between two browsers because one is slightly better "most of the time" but also completely unusable some of the time.

For me, I am thrilled to be able to make Ladybird my main browser eventually, and consume my streaming in other apps and browsers.

Well, they want me to view free movies if I use free browser, then

You mean gratis movies using a libre browser. They are not the same concept.

The term gratis is a really convenient way to put it!

You can use “costless” if you like.

yeah, that's a problem for me like losing access to E! and TLC when getting rid of tv service box, legacy media platforms bye bye, hello copyright violation in sweet sweet high bitrate 4k

Does Widevine CDM work on Firefox on Linux?

If so, why would Google allow this but not for other OSS browsers?

It doesn't, this is also the reason that streamers like Nvidia Shield or Apple TV are the only two choices if you want to view 4K content at all.

I have been using firefox on linux for a little more than a decade now and haven't realize I was missing on anything so I guess it's probably not a real problem.

Netflix et al work on Linux but are limited to 480p.

Without the propietary Widevine, maybe.

720p

Which is not a big deal when you are watching on a laptop screen.or via a projector.

and yet ~some devices are constantly pwned, and pristine UHD WEB-DL's are being ripped automatically.

> Does Widevine CDM work on Firefox on Linux?

It does, but it's L3-only (software-based), not L1 (hardware-based) [0]. Streaming providers can then decide which content they'll let you access depending on the level. Speaking from experience, some providers work perfectly (full HD content with no issues), others only give you a really low-resolution stream, and others refuse to work entirely.

> If so, why would Google allow this but not for other OSS browsers?

When EME [1] was first released, Firefox had ~10% market share, and it would look pretty bad for Google to exclude another major browser maker. Smaller browsers don't have the political clout necessary to convince Google to give them access.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widevine#Architecture

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_Extensions

How is withholding Widevine CDM not anti-competitive behaviour?

@EU

You can build Firefox without Widevine if you don't like DRM. The browser itself will work just fine. A few specific websites won't, by design: they do not want to work on computers that will let you save the high-res video they serve to a file.

Without EME, we'd still be stuck with Silverlight or ActiveX DRM in these browsers. There are browsers without Widevine that stream just fine; they use FairPlay and PlayReady instead. The current situation is still a significant improvement over the days when "free" web browsers were still a thing.

This isn't a web browser problem, it's a video streaming problem. As it turns out, the vast majority of people care more about streaming Netflix than they do about software freedom.

The minority that wants a truly open browser can buy DVDs and Blurays, or pirate the content they want to stream.

If Ladybird is willing to agree to the right terms and sign the right paperwork, I'm sure they'd get Widevine support eventually, but obviously they wouldn't be able to publish the source code for any of it.

> This is because of the lack of Widevine CDM, and the majority of people wanting to stream stuff using services like Tidal, Netflix and Spotify.

Well, there's a niche.

Personally I have zero interest in Netflix and Spotify and I don't even know what Tidal is.

Wanting to stream multimedia content from commercial streaming services is definitely not a "niche."

never claimed such thing

people who are not interested in these things, or can use separate systems for those things, are a viable niche for a pure-OSS distribution of Ladybird

I don't know the usage numbers so I might be way off, but with Smart TVs becoming a more common thing I can't remember the last time I tried to stream video on my computer.

Am I in the minority here? Do we have stats on what the breakdown of streaming traffic is by Mobile / TV / Desktop?

I'm another that tends to stream directly on a TV. Or a tablet.

It's very possible it's a workaround to the streaming on PC situation though.

I don't have a TV and I believe this is the case for a larger fraction of the population than say, 20 years ago.

Also I believe a lot of households have a single TV and the rest of the household use a laptop to stream from anywhere in the house.

If they'd just have used an Electron stack from the get-go, it would have been cross platform already

If they were happy with using an existing browser engine, they wouldn't be writing one from scratch

I agree, they can write it from scratch and compile to web-assembly. That way they can use Electron for the UI layer. </s> (apparently needed)

That makes no sense, they're writing a browser engine...

I always wonder why there are no download links. Alpha, beta, something at least.

Its pre alpha, you can build it from source.

Yeah, it's quite easy to do from a normal laptop. The instructions are very clear and straightforward. Have played around with it a few times.

I use these on Mac https://sizeof.cat/project/ladybird-builds/

Alpha is supposed to come out next year. Until then they don’t want to offer downloads so people who don’t understand software development don’t download highly unstable pre-alpha software and judge it based on that. Those kind of first impressions can stick.

I try to read blogs and hackernews on ladybird. Ofcourse it crashes sometimes but at the moment its pretty adequate for basic html+css.

This will be what Otter Browser failed to do in order to create a widely used browser written in QT after Konqueror under KDE3 days. And, well, the same with Falkon/Qupzilla.

Ladybird might be the next Opera but without reusing the Blink engine making it a Chromium clone. And, OFC, fully libre.

I’m impressed how well Google maps works already.

Seems though as if the WPT score is not super meaningful in measuring actual usability. The growth of passed tests seems suspiciously uniform across browsers, so I guess it has more to do with new passing tests being added and less with failing tests that got fixed.

>We’ve continued to make solid progress on WPT this month. There has been a significant increase in passing subtests, with 111,431 new passing subtests bringing our total to 1,964,649. The majority of this increase comes from a large update to the test suite itself, with 100,751 subtests being added - mainly due to the Wasm core tests being updated to Wasm 3.0.

They fixed ~10k tests, but indeed this month is a bit of an exception as there were lots of new tests added.

A large amount of tests includes rendering text and basic elements correctly, which is an incredibly difficult problem. Getting JS to render right is one thing, but preventing bugs like "Google Maps works but completely breaks when a business has õ in its name" requires a lot of seemingly useless tests to pass.

Fixing a few rendering issues could fix all of the tests that depend on correct rendering but break, so I think the rate at which tests are fixed makes a lot of sense.

https://wpt.fyi/results shows that even the big players have room for improvement, but also has a nice breakdown of all the different kinds of tests that make up the score.

Very cool! Impressive how they are improving and developing month by month! I sounds like they aren't far away from having a useable browser, but I think remembering hearing Andreas Kling tell that it's still years away from "finished"?

Due to getting some funding [1] they have been able to onboard more paid people [2].

I'm super excited to see this as an alternative to the mainstream browsers. It's also interesting how quickly it pulled in-front of projects such as servo that have been going since 2021 and received a lot of backing over that period [3].

[1] https://ladybird.org/#sponsors

[2] https://ladybird.org/posts/mike-shaver-joins-board/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(software)

While I truly admire how much progress they’ve made, and respect that everyone should pursue whatever they feel like doing with their time, it still feels to me like such a waste that it’s not written in a modern memory safe language.

I fear it’s ultimately going to be the most promising, least safe browser to use.

But hey, I want to be proven wrong, so I still gave them some money…

They've started to gradually use Swift in the last year or so.

There still isn't a solid plan, which worries me a bit. This is going to end up as a rewrite of a rewrite.

That's not to say it isn't realistic, but it's definitely going to be interesting.

I also think Swift will bring in more contributors

>here still isn't a solid plan, which worries me a bit. This is going to end up as a rewrite of a rewrite.

Why are you worried? Isn't the development journey the whole raison d'être of Ladybird?

Cool! I thought it was only planned for the future

Reply on news.ycombinator.com