Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
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Title: SerenityOS Creator Is Building an Independent, Standards-First Browser
Called 'Ladybird'

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/24/1732...

A year ago, the original creator of SerenityOS posted that "for the past two
years, I've been almost entirely focused on Ladybird, a new web browser that
started as a simple HTML viewer for SerenityOS." So it became a stand-alone
project that "aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability
and security." And they're also building a new web engine. "We are building a
brand-new browser from scratch, backed by a non-profit..." says Ladybird's
official web site, adding that they're driven "by a web standards first
approach." They promise it will be truly independent, with "no code from
other browsers" (and no "default search engine" deals). "We are targeting
Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version on Linux and macOS. This will be aimed
at developers and early adopters." More from the Ladybird FAQ: We currently
have 7 paid full-time engineers working on Ladybird. There is also a large
community of volunteer contributors... The focus of the Ladybird project is
to build a new browser engine from the ground up. We don't use code from
Blink, WebKit, Gecko, or any other browser engine... For historical reasons,
the browser uses various libraries from the SerenityOS project, which has a
strong culture of writing everything from scratch. Now that Ladybird has
forked from SerenityOS, it is no longer bound by this culture, and we will be
making use of 3rd party libraries for common functionality (e.g
image/audio/video formats, encryption, graphics, etc.) We are already using
some of the same 3rd party libraries that other browsers use, but we will
never adopt another browser engine instead of building our own... We don't
have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable
changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment. We
would like to do Windows eventually, but it's not a priority at the moment.
"Ladybird's founder Andreas Kling has a solid background in WebKit-based C++
development with both Apple and Nokia,," writes software developer/author
David Eastman: "You are likely reading this on a browser that is slightly
faster because of my work," he wrote on his blog's introduction page. After
leaving Apple, clearly burnt out, Kling found himself in need of something to
healthily occupy his time. He could have chosen to learn needlepoint, but
instead he opted to build his own operating system, called Serenity. Ladybird
is a web project spin-off from this, to which Kling now devotes his time...
[B]eyond the extensive open source politics, the main reason for supporting
other independent browser projects is to maintain diverse alternatives - to
prevent the web platform from being entirely captured by one company. This is
where Ladybird comes in. It doesn't have any commercial foundation and it
doesn't seem to be waiting to grab a commercial opportunity. It has a range
of sponsors, some of which might be strategic (for example, Shopify), but
most are goodwill or alignment-led. If you sponsor Ladybird, it will put your
logo on its webpage and say thank you. That's it. This might seem
uncontroversial, but other nonprofit organisations also give board seats to
high-paying sponsors. Ladybird explicitly refuses to do this... The Acid3
Browser test (which has nothing whatsoever to do with ACID compliance in
databases) is an old method of checking compliance with web standards, but
vendors can still check how their products do against a battery of tests.
They check compliance for the DOM2, CSS3, HTML4 and the other standards that
make sure that webpages work in a predictable way. If I point my Chrome
browser on my MacBook to http://acid3.acidtests.org/, it gets 94/100. Safari
does a bit better, getting to 97/100. Ladybird reportedly passes all 100
tests. "All the code is hosted on GitHub," says the Ladybird home page.
"Clone it, build it, and join our Discord if you want to collaborate on it!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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