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Comment by bastawhiz | Hacker News Reader

If the goal is browser diversity, is the answer really Firefox? Or is it one of the active in development projects from people who are motivated to do something new?

What exactly is Firefox going to do differently to grow its market share? Or just "more of whatever the last fifteen years have been"? Unless they have a plan to do better it seems foolish to trust that they'll steer the project miraculously towards success.

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> If the goal is browser diversity, is the answer really Firefox? Or is it one of the active in development projects from people who are motivated to do something new?

The former. Ladybird is currently not practically usable, it is unclear whether it will ever catch up to the main engines, and even if it does, it is unclear whether it will ever reach the market share that Firefox has. It is a nice project but science fiction at this point.

ladybird is passing more than 90% of the browser test suite. that's not science fiction.

Passing tests and has abysmal performance on basic web features. Not to mention how many security issues are present. Its unserious to suggest it as an alternative at this stage. It make people think they dont have to support firefox because there is alternatives just around the corner.

nobody is suggesting that it is a viable alternative, i am just arguing that it is not imaginary science fiction either

the acid test is surfing the web. it doesn't matter how many tests it passes if users can't get to the sites they want and use them the way they want because their browser doesn't support some feature properly or because gets rejected by the sites for not being Chrome/Safari/Firefox.

if sites break despite passing all tests then the tests would be incomplete.

as for detecting that the browser is not chrome/safari/firefox, the days where you could trust the user agent value to reliably identify a browser are long gone. ladybird will just have a value that will make it pass any checks.

How much does Firefox pass? 99.99%?

Right. I think the "last mile" compliance is where it gets most challenging.

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