RSS is not even enabled on the Newz page on the website.

Not really. They aren't inventing new standards. They are implementing an engine that confirms to existing standards.

In this case having more browser engines not under Google's control is probably a good thing. Although this effort might've been better spent working on Servo.

Hmm. I just read the github thread that this is about. The devs made a mistake on this; but it seems to me that there is a bit of an over-reaction here. The people in the thread seem to be discussing it calmly and politely; and the issue (i.e. use of pronouns in the build instructions) ends up being resolved. By contrast, the reaction outside of the actual thread... is extreme.

Like I said, this seems like an overreaction to someone making a mistake of ignorance & indifference. It wasn't an act of malice.

Appears to be fixed now: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/24648

W3C lists 1138 separate standards currently, so if each of their three engineers implements one discrete standard every day, with no breaks/weekends/holidays, then having an alpha available that adheres to all 2024 web standards should be possible by 2026?

Yes, that is exactly the plan: "We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version"

a Herculean undertaking with too few engineers and too many standards

Yeah, as a layperson this is my take. If mozilla is struggling to stay in the game then I just don't really see how an unfinanced indie team has a shot.

I mean if they're gonna give money without demanding anything I'm sure no complaints from the devs.

Shopify or an exec there might find some value in avoiding Google owning the web, could maybe bring goodwill for the company, or they could just be looking for a write off.

Because there are only like 3 browser engines: Chrome’s Blink, Firefox’s Gecko and Apple‘s WebKit. And while they are all open source, KHTML, the last independent browser engine got discontinued last year and hasn’t been actively developed since 2016.

There’s need in the space for an unaffiliated engine. Google’s share is far too high for a healthy market (roughly 75%), WebKit never got big outside of Safari (although there are a few like Gnome Web, there’s no up to date WebKit based browser on Windows) and Gecko has its own problems (like lack of HEVC support).

So, in my book, this is exciting news. Sure it‘ll take a while to mature and it is up against software giants but it‘s something because Mozilla doesn’t seem to have a working strategy to fight against Google‘s monopoly and Apple doesn’t have to.

Because software monocultures are bad. The vast majority of browsers are Chromium based. Since Google de-facto decides what gets in Chromium, sooner or later the downstream forks are forced to adopt their changes. Manifest V3 is a great example of this. You can only backport for so long, especially when upstream is being adversarial to your changes. We need an unaffiliated engine that corrects the mistakes we made with KHTML/Webkit.

There is currently no implementation of web standards that is under a more permissive license than LGPL or MPL. I think that is a gap worth filling and if I recall that is what Ladybird is doing.

Ladybird was born from SerenityOS, which is a hobbyist unix-like (or POSIX compliant?) OS that simply aimed to do things "from the ground up". It just happened that they needed to make a browser, and the response was to make one from scratch.

From there it seemed to have brought a lot of attention organically to the point where it can stand on its own, but originally it was never intended to be a "third browser engine" from its inception.

I think it's less that it's "impossible" but rather that it's expensive.

Honestly we've in general shoved too much shit into the browser that's not strictly related to just browsing web sites.

And you "have to" support all the layers and layers and layers of added stuff, or you can't "compete".

But, at the same time, the goals of making a good-enough browser that mostly works and isn't completely enshittified and captured by corpo big tech interests is a very worthy project and 100% support what they're doing.

And for the folks who are saying “wHy n0t rUst”, you can always show me the (rust) code.

https://github.com/servo/servo

I really wish they would publish flatpaks because I can't be arsed to either build the thing or get a non-standard precompiled binary to run on nixos.

He says "powered by or funded by Google". Firefox depends on Google financially, most of the income of Mozilla comes from Google paying for being the default search engine.

They try to diversify their income (Firefox VPN, email alias service, etc.), but anything they try gets a huge backlash from the community, and still small compared to the the money from google.

The language choice was because Ladybird started as a component of SerenityOS, which is also written in C++. With this separation, they are free to gradually introduce other language(s) into the codebase, and maybe eventually replace C++ entirely, piece by piece.

In Hackernews thread about this, the head maintainer mentioned that they have been evaluating several languages already, so we'll see what the future brings.

In the meantime, let's try to be mature about it, what do you say?

Not sure if you are trying to be funny, but if not: enlighten us?

The dev has 30 years of experience with c++ and a lot of it was on browsers.

He tried to incorporate rust with the help of "JT", one of the original rust designers/devs and according to Andreas it didn't work that well due to the web being too objet oriented or something like that. They both worked together (well, mostly "JT") to create a new safe programming language called "yakt" that transpile to c++, but the project is currently pretty much dead because nobody is really working on it anymore.

They used c++ initially since it was spawned from SerenityOS, which was designed to be a mashup of win2000 and unix.

now that Ladybird is its own project, it's not constrained to that goal, and they have said they will incorporate modern languages.