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Announcing the Ladybird Browser Initiative (ladybird.org)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 97 points 2 years ago (38 children)

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.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    Also Gecko's development is led by people thinking that it being usable outside of Firefox\Thunderbird is a bad thing. There was a time when Gnome's browser was based on Gecko, not WebKit. And in general it's influenced by bad practices.

    SerenityOS is an amazing project, of course. To do so much work for something completely disconnected from the wider FOSS ecosystem, and with such results.

    So it's cool that they've decided to split off the browser as its own project.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    That's always struck me as odd, but I'm also very much an outsider looking in. A "gecko electron" does sound intriguing though.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    I wonder why Microsoft decided to switch from their own engine to Blink, they could've switched to Gecko and keep the web a little bit more free

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago

    Mozilla doesn’t seem to have a working strategy

    Guess they couldn't replicate the "own everything that people use to get stuff on the internet and make secret breaking changes to constantly mess up other browsers" strategy.

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago (14 children)

    Could they not add HEVC support? Or is there some technical limitation that meant starting from zero was a good idea?

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  • [–] 6 points 2 years ago

    HEVC is almost entirely down the the licensing. This section of the wikipedia page details it pretty well.

    The tl;dr is that the LA group wanted to hike the fees significantly, and that combined with a fear of locking in led to the mozilla group not to support HEVC.

    And it's annoying at times. Some of my security cameras are HEVC only at full resolution, which means I cannot view them in Firefox.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (12 children)

    They could, probably. My guess is, that it’s either a limitation of resources, the issue of licensing fees or Google‘s significant financial influence on Mozilla forcing them to make a worse browser than they potentially could. Similar to how Firefox does not support HDR (although, to my knowledge, there’s no licensing involved there).

    The biggest problem most people have with Mozilla is said influence by Google, making them not truly independent.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    Google probably is putting pressure on Mozilla, but if the options are licensed HECV or open royalty-free AV1, the choice is pretty clear for a FOSS project.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Yes but: HEVC is the standard for UHD content for now, until AV1 gets much broader adoption. And judging from how long HEVC took to be as broadly available as h.264, it’ll still take a while for AV1 to be viable for most applications.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (4 children)

    The good news is no streaming service even supports UHD in browers (except Netflix on Edge?) because of DRM. So I don’t see the value.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    My Jellyfin server does and on Firefox it needs to transcode to h.264

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    WDYM "independent" ?

    Isn't mozilla / gecko more or less independent?

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    They get most of their money from google for the "default search engine deal" make of that what you want. For me personally it doesn't sound fully independent.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Seems a little idealistic.

    If ladybird actually achieves any sort of userbase they would take the same deal in an instant.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    Based on the community being quite succsessful so far despite being made by volunteers, I don't think they will.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    Making a web browser that’s fully compatible with modern standards is not easy nor cheap (and worse it’s a moving target because the standards keep evolving). I’m rooting for these folks but eventually money will be an issue.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    No webkit browser on Android either. If there was gnome web for Android id switch in a heartbeat

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Does anyone know why there are barely any WebKit based browsers? WebKit is open source and at least Safari works really well. Is it hard to work with? Do people just hate Apple that much? Is there some limitation?

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