- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- linux@lemmy.world
Exiting news for the lady bird browser. https://ladybird.org/
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Neat. But it’s kind of concerning to see yet another OSS project hitch it’s community resourcing to Discord.
Yeah, it’s a bit at odds with their “free from corporate influence” angle. Absolutely no reason to not use Matrix.
How does the make it non free from corporate influence. The hate boner towards discord is getting ridiculous sometimes. Yeah it sucks to use a repo thats not googleable and not open source bur discord is an objectively better user experience than matrix
How does the make it non free from corporate influence.
Do they require Discord and depend on it? Yes.
Is Discord corporate? Yes.
Are they then still free from corporate influence? Nope. H Simply put, if Discord suddenly implemented weird rules the Ladybird devs would have to comply with, they’d simply have to follow suit or break their main communication channel.And of course something will likely happen like that. They couldn’t help themselves, so it’s inevitable.
We see these things differently. I would argue that Matrix clients are better organized than Discord. That said, not only is Discord a privacy nightmare, but ilthe interface is only pseudo-organized at best.
I find the Discord interface to be utter chaos.
All the Matrix clients are buggy using far too many resources & the protocol is slow as balls about joining new rooms while being wasteful about data duplication for throwaway bits of text/multimedia. I don’t think eventual consistency is the right model for chat & following Slack & Discord’s model is the way.
Slack & Discord both use eventual consistency?
Btw I agree with you that Discord is better UX than Matrix, but your comment doesn’t make much sense
Sorry for clarity. The eventual consistency model is a result of wanting decentralization for Slack/Telegram/Discord’s design of thinking the entire history needs to be saved for chat rather than seen as ephemeral (which allows for better search & resilience, but at a major cost to storage, but also a knock-on effect of folks treating chat as permanent which is why we have huge, cut-off information silos on these chat platforms that the rest of the net can’t index & often trawling the search is difficult so the repeated questions/answers are common since a simple web search doesn’t yield good results). When you take away the concept that all text & attachments need to be seen from origin til the end of time, you would never bother in all the work of cloning the entire history & reassembling it on every server listening to the conversation. …Which is why many chat protocols forgo the more then enough history to keep you up to speed with a conversation & structured forums + feeds used to be the primary way to ask questions & make announcements (where simple programs could parse the data instead of needing gobs of natural language processing for chat soup when it is pulling multiple duties).
How does the make it non free from corporate influence.
Do they require Discord and depend on it? Yes.
Is Discord corporate? Yes.
Are they then still free from corporate influence? Nope.Simply put, if Discord suddenly implemented weird rules the Ladybird devs would have to comply with, they’d simply have to follow suit or break their main communication channel.
TL;DR: The Ladybird browser, which was written from scratch and aims to be an alternative to corporate-backed browser, now has a non-profit organisation behind it. Also, it got additional funding of 1 million dollars. The end.
Ah, now I can be excited for them and move on with my day. I get that video presentations can be great for feature releases that need visual aids, but I don’t want to sit through a video for details that can be summed up in two sentences.
Thanks, this was hugely helpful. For some reason half the comments here made it about politics.
Interested to see where this new software actually goes.
This is very exciting
It’s great to build a completely open browser from scratch and I want to follow updates from the project. They have a Twitter account but not Mastodon sigh
And Discord for communication
The other day I was reading some GitHub issues involving an issue I was also having and the maintainer of the project was directing people to their discord server to talk about and hopefully resolve the issue. On top of that, they came back to the GitHub issue and just posted that after some discussion (on Discord) the issue had been resolved. Totally useless to me and anybody else who might be searching for that thing.
sorta understandable though
I was wondering why it was written in C++, but the FAQ already beat me to it.
Why build a new browser in C++ when safer and more modern languages are available?
Ladybird started as a component of the SerenityOS hobby project, which only allows C++. The choice of language was not so much a technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain.
However, now that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect. We are actively evaluating a number of alternatives and will be adding a mature successor language to the project in the near future. This process is already quite far along, and prototypes exist in multiple languages.Glad to see they are open to using safer languages. C/C++ was great for its time, but we really need to move on from them.
As someone who has done no programming since taking C++ in high school more than 20 years ago, what do you mean by safer language?
C and C++ require more manual management of memory, and their compilers are unable to let you know about a lot of cases where you’re managing memory improperly. This often causes bugs, memory leaks, and security issues.
Safer languages manage the memory for you, or at least are able to track memory usage to ensure you don’t run into problems. Rust is the poster boy for this lately; if you’re writing code that has potential issues with memory management, the compiler will consider that an error unless you specifically mark that section of code as unsafe.
I’m not sure why people keep pushing that myth on C++. It’s been a decade we have smart pointers. There’s no memory management to be done ever.
Using the old ‘new’ is like typing ‘unsafe’ in rust. Even arrays/vectors have safe accessor.
Am I missing something?
It’s been almost a decade since I used C++ and had to verify, but after some quick searching around it looks like it hasn’t changed a ton since I last looked at it.
You can use smart pointers, and certainly you should, but it’s a whole extra thing tacked on to the language and the compiler doesn’t consider it an issue if you don’t use them. Using new in C++ isn’t like using unsafe in rust; in rust your code is almost certainly safe unless marked otherwise, whereas in C++ it may or may not be managed properly unless you explicitly mark a pointer as smart.
For your own code in new codebases this is probably fine. You can just always make your pointers smart. When you’re relying on code from other people, some of which has been around for many years and has been written by people you’ve never heard of, it becomes harder to be sure everything is being done properly at every point, and that’s where many of these issues come into play.
The part you’re missing is that while C++ does have newer safer ways of doing memory management, all the old ways are still present, in wide use, and are easier. Basically, C++ makes it easy to do the wrong thing and hard to do the right thing, and most codebases are built around the wrong things. It’s often easier to just rewrite it in rust than it is to refactor an existing code base, so if you’re going to expend that effort why not do it in a language that has stronger safety guarantees, a better dependency and build management system, and a growing community?
Thank you!
Go and Rust mostly
We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.
I will watch this from afar with great interest.
I wonder what’s in it for Shopify. This seems like an odd thing for them to sponsor, or a very expensive FU to Google.
Sounds like Tobi’s on another side-quest.
This does seem like a Tobi ideological thing, doesn’t it? Ugh.
I used to follow Ladybird/SerenityOS stuff but their takes on “political stuff” is just… too bad.
Very interesting. Not what I was expecting on a Monday morning.
This is the first I’m hearing of Ladybird. Looks really interesting and glad to see there are more options for browsers coming
#1 sponsor is Shopify, how does that affect the indepentness?
How can you be “independent” if you have sponsors? All sponsorships are in the form of unrestricted donations. Board seats and other forms of influence are not for sale.
…per the FAQ.
Why are we shouting?
As long as it doesn’t become a way for Shopify to shovel ads and collect data it isn’t a problem. We will watch with great interest
Your client is interpreting “#1…” as “# 1…” and making it a title
Ladybird is extremely amazing project. Andreas is a good person, with great community around him. The only thing I didn’t like is the new logo - it is very meta-ish. Looks very corporative, and doesn’t really resemble browser :(
We need more browser engines, especially those that are under NFP ownership. WebKit and Chromium have become too dominant.
Godspeed to them.
For sure going to use a webbrowser from some random programmers/organizations.
“I know what a lot of you are thinking” Yeah what about Firefox? “It’s impossible to make a new web engine” Um… No … Probably not that hard really with pretty decent standards these days. Performance JavaScript is probably pretty hard and a lot of the fancier protocols.
Seriously, what makes you better than Firefox?
Whatever, another choice isn’t bad I guess.
Firefox has its own set of issues. It is the best we have right now but we could benefit from another choice.
