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Ladybird Browser Gains Cloudflare Support to Challenge the Status Quo (linuxiac.com)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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[–] 63 points 11 months ago (5 children)

This is very encouraging:

Ladybird uses a new browser engine called LibWeb that is being created from scratch by the development team.

Browsers that rely on Chromium / Blink rely on Google. Firefox relies on Google for its funding, so any browser based on Gecko relies on Google. If they can make a browser engine that has rough feature parity with Chromium but doesn''t rely on Google that's very healthy for the web.

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  • [–] 21 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    You do know the difference of "built by" and "partly funded by", right?

    What exactly is your problem by Mozilla/Firefox being partly funded by Google?

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  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    The standard point is most around how big that 'partly' is, and how attached a project can become to that part. If a project has, for easy math, a $10M bankroll and $5M comes from, say, Goog or MS, the project can face a moment where the corporation comes and says, 'we don't like that you've implemented this feature that interferes with our control of users. We're pulling our funding unless you remove it.' (more realistically, 'we see you have allocated some dev time to this feature request we don't like. Cancel it before the public can demand it.') If that happens, you have to have a project lead with some real rectitude to say, 'okay,' and just cut their budget in half. The more diversely sourced a FOSS project's funding is, the harder it is to control, and vice versa.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    Wauw, that's crazy speculations. Google buys a service from Firefox, that doesn't give them the right to manage Firefox. Give me 1 example where Google did what you say? Otherwise, let's archive that fantasy rambling as paranoid speculation.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)
    1. It's a standard discussion point, not my argument in particular. It's the same one as for why it's a problem to have so much corporate money behind news media, political campaigns, and just about anything else.
      But
    2. It's all speculation, both the idea of priority manipulation happening and your idea it does not. The general population doesn't know anyone at these projects, so everything has to be discussed in vague generalities. You can say 'I trust X never to take a bribe, because I know X.' but you can't say 'I trust all members of the profession X is in, because they are in that profession.'
      Saying you don't trust Google is just sensible. Saying you don't trust management at something like Mozilla because they are faceless management, (not that all the things said about choices made inside Mozilla are likely to encourage trust) though a bit generalizing, is also fairly understandable. As such, it's not at all unusual that people are going to hold some distrust for the combination of the two, especially when one of the big drivers of Firefox usage is specifically that it's supposed to be more respecting of privacy than chrome or edge. The user base is already primed to be distrustful of tech companies, and not through paranoia but experience.

    I'm not saying manipulation of Mozilla by Google is guaranteed to happen but it's honestly less speculative to expect creepy activity from google, a company for which the business model is 'do sneaky shit on the internet,' than to assume absolutely everything going on is totally trustworthy.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    So not a single example, but paranoid speculation, based on your general distrust. That's fine - you're allowed to feel that way.

    It's a silly and stupid fallacy, to say that it's speculation that they are not being manipulated. But no, it's not speculation, it's the general principle to say that something needs proof. But I guess you are always in a state of flux. "Be weary of gods, because we can't prove they are there, but I believe they are - because someone else can't prove that they are not there..." That's so incredible silly.

    But thanks for the talk. Now, please go find some other paranoid person to share your speculations with.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    That's not how the null hypothesis works. You are presupposing the negative and then ignoring the possible, and even the probable, to maintain it. Treating corporate malfeasance as unlikely as the existence of gods is skepticism ad absurdum. Corporations acting in ways that are harmful to their employees, customers, and neighbors isn't the nebulous 'must have been the spirits' activity of religion. It's the history of corporations.

    Google management is perfectly willing to engage in suspicious practices. It's basically their business model. Since you need examples because apparently you haven't been paying attention in your day to day life: Google tracks as much as they can of what their users and adjacent people do. This occurs even after they 'opt out' of the tracking. This is well known but here is an AP article talking about it if you've somehow made it to 2025 not knowing about it. Google makes deals to obtain data on people from other sources as well, including personal medical data (e.g. Project Nightingale), again without consent. The idea that the people at google, or any large corporation, would ignore the incentives of their business and not apply any pressure to align Mozilla with their interests when they spend millions of dollars per financial quarter on lobbying, and many times that on PR, is absurd. Expecting them not to seek profit is akin to expecting a living organism not to seek food. Trying to hold the null hypothesis of 'We must first assume nothing wants food' and then ignoring common experience until a peer reviewed double blind study can show you the patently obvious is just not feasible.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    Bla bla bla...

    You have no proof of any wrongdoing by Mozilla, you are just paranoid. Feel free to waste your time arguing, just to justify your paranoia. You might find a paranoid audience, but it's not me.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Ah yes, you've never been murdered before, therefore there's no reason to assume someone might kill you if it suited their goals, and certainly no reason to assume someone who has killed other people would think of you as a target. The null hypothesis is that no one wants to kill anyone, so I guess murder just never happens at all.

    Idiot or troll, I gave you a chance but I'm done with you. I hope you learn some epistemic humility before someone teaches you in a way you don't like.

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  • [–] 0 points 11 months ago

    Bla bla bla

    Stupid people really don't get it, and they can't be taught online. I feel for you... you might want to entertain the notion that you could be wrong about quite a lot of things. And about me too - but I can see, that is also not something that you are capable of.

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  • [–] 6 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    "Partly funded by"?

    Google contributed roughly 83% of Mozilla's income from 2020-2023, and 89% of overall income since 2005.

    https://windscribe.com/blog/windscribe-expose-mozilla/

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    That's what you call "partly". You know, unlike "solely"...? So what is your question here?

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  • [–] 15 points 11 months ago (3 children)

    Ironically, we already had that - Microsoft's first version of Edge was using their own engine. On release, it had the highest W3C compatibility score.

    Google started shitting on it (including things like serving clear HTML version of Gmail because "the browser is outdated" if it detected the Edge user agent) and massive self-delusion campaigns of "Edge is just Internet Explorer" eventually killed the thing and forced MS to switch to Chromium.

    I have Ladybird installed and I check it out every now and then, but I honestly doubt that a bunch of random developers will succeed where Microsoft failed. Unless Cloudflare somehow chips in and forces Google's hand into compatibility, but I don't know if even they are big enough to do that.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 child)

    Personally, I think if the engine was closed source, then we didn't in fact "had that". Maybe Microsoft had it, not us.

    What makes things like chromium, firefox and webkit actual ecosystems is that they at least have an open source basis. Edge isn't an ecosystem, it's a black box. We don't even know whether it's true or not that it was its own thing or just they sneakily used bits and pieces of chromium from the start anyway.

    User Agent checks is the easiest thing to overcome. Had edge's engine been open source we would have had spins of it resolving the issue within hours. There are many examples of "random developers" succeeding where big companies tied by business strategies (I bet they had business reasons to keep a distinctive user agent) didn't, to the point that the web runs on servers using FOSS software.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    Personally, I think if the engine was closed source, then we didn’t in fact “had that”. Maybe Microsoft had it, not us.

    Well, yeah, in that aspect, you're correct. I meant that as a "we had a non Google-reliant engine".

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 child)

    Yes, I understand that. But in my view, Microsoft is the one that might have had "a non Google-reliant engine" (if it's true that they didn't rely on Google code).

    They just let us use it under their conditions, for the limited time they decided to make it available to us.. but it was never "ours". We were just contractually allowed to use it, but we didn't really "have" it.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Semantics. I agree with you in principle, but the matter of fact is that we ended up with effectively zero choice over the browser engine.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    Yes, the matter of fact is that the reason why that choice was taken away is because everyone except MS was forbidden from "having" that engine. It might have still been alive today in some form had it not been an exclusive MS-owned thing.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago

    I imagine the reason that Cloudflare is doing this now is that Google just got off with no punishment from their antitrust loss.

    Anybody who competes with Google now has to worry that they'll do to them what they did to Microsoft. And, with Trump's DOJ, the government will probably just ignore it if Sundar Pichai shows up with a shiny bauble for Trump. So, I'd imagine that Microsoft, Cloudflare, Amazon (AWS, Twitch), and Meta, among others, might all decide to fund an alternative browser.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    doubt that a bunch of random developers will succeed where Microsoft

    Ladybird doesn't have to be profitable and the org cannot be bought.

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  • [–] 3 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Not what I meant.

    Microsoft - in theory - had the finances to push their browser to peoples homes. Be it by baking it in to Windows, by ad campaigns, etc., etc. And they still lost to Google's control over the Web.

    Ladybird, by comparison, is an obscure no-name product, being made by a controversial figure, with (relatively to MS) zero ability to market itself to the wider audience. All Google has to do is make their products completely inoperable under Ladybird and, other than some extremely committed power-users who want to "de-google" their lives, nobody will use it.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    You are right, but as you noticed, we don't argue the same thing.

    eventually killed the thing and forced MS to switch to Chromium.

    Ladybird is not threatened to be killed by whatever anybody but the developers do.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Ladybird is not threatened to be killed by whatever anybody but the developers do.

    It absolutely is. If Google forces incompatibility on it (like it did with Edge) ordinary users won't switch. Because the majority of ordinary users are still deep in the ecosystem.

    All it takes is for Google to block high quality streaming on YouTube and the browser will never go outside of 2-3% market share.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    That's not bad.

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  • [–] 2 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    What's not bad? Ladybird sitting at floor-leves of market share?

    If we want to threaten the status quo in any way, it absolutely is. Firefox has 2.26% and - in terms of defining standards or forcing changes upon Chromium - it's 100% irrelevant.

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  • [–] [S] 11 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Firefox relies on Google for its funding, so any browser based on Gecko relies on Google

    Google introduced Extension manifest v3 to effectively to kill/handicap AdBlock extensions.

    Mozilla, though getting funding from Google to make google its default search engine, officially decided to keep supporting Manifest v2.

    Adblockers are direct challenge to Alphabet’s ad revenue which is still their biggest cash cow.

    That speaks a valume about how much control google has on Mozilla decision making process.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    Mozilla, though getting funding from Google to make google its default search engine, officially decided to keep supporting Manifest v2.

    For now. Google probably isn't too concerned since they have a more than 70% market share, and nearly 90% if you count all Chromium-based browsers. Firefox has managed to do what Google wants, which is "exist" and "not meaningfully compete with Chrome". If that changes, Google might lean on them harder.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 11 months ago (1 child)

    If that changes, Google might lean on them harder.

    If you remember, at one time Firefox used to hold 30% of total browser market share, and it was pro-privacy organization back then as it is now.

    Even at that time Google was not managed to influence their decision making process.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    That speaks a valume about how much control google has on Mozilla decision making process.

    It doesn't say anything about that at all. Just because you're paying for something doesn't mean they have to do it your way. It is at most something to keep an eye on.

    Google pays them for two reasons. To be the default search engine giving them substantial marketing and ad space, and to keep them floating and independent to lessen their probable status as a monopoly.

    In fact, in the recent antitrust ruling, Google is precluded from even making exclusive deals with them.

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  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

    I just wanna say that we have Webkit. After Google moved over to Blink Webkit has not stopped development.. and it even has multiple big names behind it (like Apple, but also Valve partnered with WebkitGtk maintainers, and many devices like Amazon's Kindle are heavily invested on it) so it's not gonna go away anytime soon. Specially with Safari being the second most used browser on the web, right after chrome and several times more users than Firefox.

    On Linux we have some browsers making use of Webkit (like Epiphany, Gnome's default browser) that are thus independent from Google or even Mozilla. I'm not sure if there's any browser like that for Windows though.

    There's also Netsurf, they also have their own rendering libraries, but development for it is super slow, I've been following them for a couple decades and they still haven't got a stable javascript engine, so it only works for the most basic of websites. The plus side is that it's very light on resources, though.

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