Its sponsorship only of an open source browser, with no telemetry, advertising, crypto, etc, etc built in.

Sponsors get listed as sponsors, thats it.

Yes, and their donations are limited to 100k a year per corporation/organization

Interesting that they did that.

People always imagine this as "I will pay you $100 to kick the puppy" and of course they would never.

But what actually happens is that you have a long-term donor. You rely on their help (they're paying for you to be able to hire a nice college intern who's really smart and has been fun to have on the project). They never tell you what to do so you see them as more of a friend than anything else. It's perfectly normal to get some lunch with friends and talk. You're stuck on some problems and they have some good connections that help you out. That might even be worth more than $100k, but it's not money at all so it's OK that they're helping you like this. They also talk you up, which is like free advertising except you didn't ask for it so that also doesn't count. Anyway, at some of the lunches they're telling you about what's going on with them and there's some problems they're dealing with that you could help with. They don't ask for help, of course, because they know you're independent. But being independent means it's OK for you to do what you want. Even help a friend out who didn't ask for help so they're not influencing you...

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.

Anyway, Omarchy and Ladybird are both run by fascists. Omarchy makes this pretty obvious from the outset – on the home page the big YouTube poster image prominently features SuperGrok, which is a pathetically transparent dog-whistle to signal alliance with Elon Musk’s fascist politics. Omarchy is the pet project of David Heinemeier Hansson, aka DHH, who is well known as a rich fascist weirdo.2 One need only consult his blog to browse his weird, racist views on immigration, fat-shaming objections to diverse representation, vaguely anti-feminist/homophobic/rapey rants on consent, and, recently, tone-policing antifascists who celebrate the death of notable fascist Charlie Kirk.

Speaking of tributes to Charlie Kirk, that brings us to Andreas Kling, the project lead for Ladybird, who tweeted on the occasion of his assassination:

RIP Charlie Kirk

I hope many more debate nerds carry on his quest to engage young people with words, not fists.

– @awesomekling

I was not prepared to learn these things today.