Ladybird browser spreads its wings
Ladybird is an open-source project aimed at building an independent web browser, rather than yet another browser based on Chrome. It is written in C++ and licensed under a two-clause BSD license. The effort began as part of the SerenityOS project, but developer Andreas Kling announced on June 3 that he was "forking" Ladybird as a separate project and stepping away from SerenityOS to focus his attention on the browser completely. Ladybird is not ready to replace Firefox or Chrome for regular use, but it is showing great promise.
Kling started working on SerenityOS in 2018 as a therapy project after completing a substance-abuse rehabilitation program. The SerenityOS name is a nod to the serenity prayer. Prior to working on the project, he had worked on WebKit-based browsers at Apple and Nokia. Eventually he made SerenityOS his full-time job, and funded the work through donations, sales of SerenityOS merchandise, and income from YouTube. (Kling posts monthly updates to his YouTube channel about Ladybird, as well as hacking videos where he walks through working on various components in the browser, such as the JavaScript JIT compiler.)
Linuxiac:
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Ladybird Is a New Browser Initiative Backed up by $1M
The web is a cornerstone of modern civilization. However, despite its open nature, the financial backbone of the web’s most popular browsers is predominantly tied to advertising revenues from tech giants like Google.
For good or bad, this financial dependency can lead to compromises in user privacy and a lack of diversity in browser technology. Major browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Opera are based on Google’s Chromium project, highlighting the pervasive influence of a single company’s technology.
At the same time, Apple gets billions of dollars to set Google as the default search engine on Safari, while Firefox also makes hundreds of millions annually through a similar arrangement.
3 more article:
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Ladybird
Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine. Driven by a web standards first approach, Ladybird aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security.
From its humble beginnings as an HTML viewer for the SerenityOS hobby operating system project, Ladybird has since grown into a cross-platform browser supporting Linux, macOS, and other Unix-like systems.
Ladybird is currently in heavy development. We are targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.
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Ladybird on Debian Stable
I’m so excited about the Ladybird browser. I have grown disillusioned by Mozilla over the years, there was a time that they gave me a ton of hope, I even had a FirefoxOS phone at some point. I have not felt that way in a long time. On the other hand, Andreas Kling inspires me, so I was so excited to see him focusing on this now.
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Ladybird, a Truly Independent Web Browser - Initial Charge
From the project’s homepage: Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine. Driven by a web standards first approach, Ladybird aims to render the modern web with good performance, stability and security.
A day later some more:
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Ladybird is a thing now
Ladybird started as a part of Serenity OS, but recently the main dev left the OS part and decided to fully focus on the browser. And now he has a million dollars secured for development. He even hired (HIRED!) full-time developers. Hell has frozen over; there is a viable way out of Mozilla/Google duopoly. I am excited, but there are three things that makes me worry. It’s not that they have money, or that the money comes from a billionaire. They are attacking a moving target, and Google can break the web faster than the can try to fix it. Any help is welcome.
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Ladybird Browser
Back in 2018, while other Web developers were celebrating, I expressed my dismay at the news that Microsoft Edge was on the cusp of switching from using Microsoft’s own browser engine EdgeHTML to using Blink. Blink is the engine that powers almost all other mainstream browsers; all but Firefox, which continues to stand atop Gecko.
The developers who celebrated this loss of rendering engine diversity were, I suppose, happy to have one fewer browser in which they must necessarily test their work. I guess these are the same developers who don’t test the sites they develop for accessibility (does your site work if you can’t see the images? what about with a keyboard but without a pointing device? how about if you’re colourblind?), or consider what might happen if a part of their site fails (what if the third-party CDN that hosts your JavaScript libraries goes down or is blocked by the user’s security software or their ISP?).