Finally, another web engine is being developed to compete with Chromium and Firefox (Gecko), and they’re also working on a browser that will use it.
Hot take: Since it’s a BSD licensed browser at some point in the future, there’s going to be a company that funds it brings it to mainstream with their flavor, and then will over throw chromium in time. Replace an ‘evil’ with another ‘evil’.
Luckily Gecko still exists. And who knows, maybe Servo will make it one day (but the odds are stacked against both them and Ladybird anyway).
I feel you… Fingers crossed dude. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride
It’s nice and all but usage of Swift is kind of not great.
Why is Swift bad?
Also, I noticed the project has taken donations from mostly non-foss companies. Let’s hope they stand by their principles
Welp, I haven’t seen anyone learn Swift other than for Apple stuff these days. So I wonder how many can actually contribute to the code. It’s also made by Apple, so yeah. It would have been more performant and secure (both of which are pretty important in a browser) if it was written in a more low level language. For example Rust.
It is currently written in C++. They are looking to switch to Swift.
They looked into Rust but decided that GUI work was a pain and that they wanted something more object-oriented.
“More performant” citation needed. Very well written Rust might be extremely fast, yes, but Rust is also a hard language to get right. Swift is far from a slow language and I would not be surprised if the average rust programmer barely if at all manages to beat out the average swift programmer in terms of speed. As for the amount of programmers interested, hard to tell, but given the sheer amount of Swift devs I’d not be surprised if there were quite a few interested ones and I am unconvinced Rust programmers are statistically more likely to be interested in Browser development.
lol
Benchmarks mean nothing. These aren’t the results of code written by an average programmer. Edit: and as a general note I would also like to point out the relative inconsistency of the results in terms of factor, only further reinforcing my point. I like Rust and all but we do need to admit it doesn’t magically solve all our problems.
Benchmarks mean nothing.
You’re free to suggest another method of comparing the two languages’ performance. This is the best we’re have, and Rust wins in every single benchmark shown there.
These aren’t the results of code written by an average programmer.
Citation needed.
I like Rust and all but we do need to admit it doesn’t magically solve all our problems.
I never said it did. I simply pointed out that it’s demonstrably faster than Swift.
While Rust would probably have been a good choice for implementing a new browser, I don’t think Swift deserves the criticism it’s getting in this thread:
- Swift was created by the same person who created Rust, and has many of the same nice traits
- Swift is a modern language that is easy for plenty of developers to pick up; I’d place it in the same family as Rust and Kotlin
- Swift grants access to a large pool of native iOS/Mac developers
Shoulda built it in Julia.
As someone insecure in their masculinity I don’t know if u would use ladybird. Now if it was MANbird I would.
Sure, nothing is more masculine than having a preference for men.
They should have called it ManDrill. Nothing more masculine than drilling a man.
Consider Edge you edgy man.
How is it progressing so fast compared to Servo? Isn’t Servo being developed for a longer time?
Tom Servo?
What’s the problem with the gecko engine?
i’d like to see a revival of webkit and an open source browser that uses it
Doesn’t Safari still use WebKit?
it’s the only one i knew about before the other comment. with more browsers using it, we may not need to build another engine from scratch to broaden competition
I think this is the argument that the Ladybird people have made:
- Chrome is dependent on Google ( obviously )
- Edge is dependent on Google ( based on Chromium )
- Firefox is dependent on Google ( 80% of revenue )
- Safari is dependent on Google ( $4 billion from Google )
- most other browsers are dependent on Google ( use Chromium ) - Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, etc
Ladybird is intended to be a truly independent browser and especially independent of Google.
Safari isn’t dependent on Google. It was just a no-brainer for Apple to take a free 20 billion dollars from Google for setting the default search engine to something most users would want anyway.
I used luakit for awhile. Really fun to only use keyboard, but definitely lacking features that makes “modern” websites not suck so hard
I feel like this is a dumb question but why do web engines need constant development? I thought we had an established standard for HTML. Once a web engine matches that standard isn’t that sufficient?
some reasons that I can think of:
- performance improvements (e.g. JIT)
- new standards (e.g. WASM)
- vulnerabities
- new features (e.g. web engines weren’t always sandboxed)
Some of the new features most people aren’t aware of us that I used recently :
- WebXR, make a Web page immersive and work in the browser of VR/AR headsets, e.g Meta Quest, Lynx XR1, Apple Vision Pro, etc
- WebBlueTooth, connect to a BT device, e.g a Lego controller in order to move actuator, data from sensors, etc
- WebUSB, connect a device and update its firmware, e.g SmartWatch, mechanical keyboard, etc
- GamePad API, use a gamepad or joystick to play from a browser window
- Realms in JavaScript for “better” sandboxing, it’s a relatively new feature of the language so the engine must be updated
So… sure none of that really helps to read a 2D Web page (like this one on Lemmy) but they pretty much all help to achieve better cross-platform support. By using the Web rather than native to connect to hardware then it is instantly delivered without having any OS specific driver to build and install. Practically speaking it does make the browser increasingly complex but IMHO it is worth it.
PS: I probably also used some modern CSS so there also the engine (which is ridiculously complex by the way) has to be updated too.
There are features that constantly get added. It’s not only HTML (maybe the html part is stable, I don’t know), but there’s CSS and most importantly JavaScript.
Also, browsers don’t always follow the standard exactly. Some features get added that aren’t in the standard.
established standard for HTML
That is constantly changing.
Like CSS or JS, or other modern web technologies nowadays browsers are capable of.
I don’t know if it’s a good idea to build a new engine from scratch… Maybe it is but I don’t know, behind an engine you need to have support and development, so this thing needs to be improved and supported along the versions to be safe, so I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not 🙃
All the code is hosted on GitHub. Clone it, build it, and join our Discord if you want to collaborate on it! We’re looking forward to seeing you there.
So much for freedom when everything is done thru proprietary services under US jurisdiction.
