For one, AI datasets often break copyright law, frequently appropriating from artists. Executives are also trying to use it to eliminate the jobs of artists, and I feel it’s wrong to try and obsolete something people love doing.
In addition, they take a lot of power, not helping in the way of the needed changes to follow climate goals.
Clarification: Copyright laws can be annoying, and I don’t always agree with them. However, it also protects smaller artists. I think there are many cases where piracy is totally fine, though, like if a company vaults an animated streaming show and gets rid of all other ways to watch it.
I do break copyright law every single day of my life. And so far the only harm I’ve done is avoiding Disney a free pass to kill my wife.
Copyright law is bad. Sharing is caring.
Also I’ve make AI images with Stable Diffusion self hosted on my N100 server that takes way less energy than a normal computer being turned on for hours using Photoshop, so I saved the world by doing AI images instead of manually painting them.
The lesson of the Luddites is to fight the industrialist who wants to take away the pleasures of being human in the name of enriching said industrialist. Time and effort saving mechanisms should benefit the laborer, and no one else. That their movement has been labeled as being resistant to human progress or uninformed of the benefits of industrialization tells on our society’s propaganda mechanisms and our failure to teach our own history
I fail to see how is traing AI on publicly available images hurting small artists?
You don’t have to write if you don’t have time, link to explanation is good for me.
I basically use generated images in places that would not have any ilustrations before. There is no budget. When I have money for an artist I hire an artist.
For many small project is AI images or no images at all.
When you do not have money you are not hiring a 2000€/month artist to do imagery for your website. You go online to copy something or nowadays you can use AI to wrap it up. It’s a tool at people’s disposition like anyother.
And before anyone comes talking about copyright laws… shall I present them my 10 TB hard drive of pirated media? Human culture is to be shared, not gatekeeped.
you do not have money you are not hiring a 2000€/month artist
On the site I see like, one stock footage of a plant, one of a ladybird and some rando abstract graphics. What are you guys talking about here? Am I out of date? Should I ask for raise? (I’m not an artist but SW engineer, so probably not.)
So you agree with the idea that submitting a “minor nitpick” PR suggesting that the software doesn’t refer to all users as male is “personal politics” and deserves an angry response for even suggesting it?
You sure do sound like someone who would agree with Lunduke…
Being a woman or being transgender isn’t “political”. Vocally opposing inclusiveness is asshole behavior.
Not even mad that he’s not accepting a low-effort PR. It’s trivializing people’s existence as “political” that makes him shitty.
Making a low effort argument against a straw man that was never stated. You sure you aren’t a conservative?
No, I disagree with the idea of digging into years of history to drag up the one thing to be mad at and bandwagon over with a loud mob with surface level care that move onto the next bandwagon in a week. Typical to Twitter behavior. Doesn’t actually help anyone, typically hurts the movements they claim to support among everyone else.
I’m about the farthest from Lunduke you can get, he’s just not wrong in this specific instance. You don’t know me, “you sure do sound” is a silly attempt at internet games. Yawn.
It wasn’t right for people to bandwagon and harass the project, but that doesn’t mean he was right for closing this PR in the way he did. Him closing this PR is what caused the project to be attacked, not part of the attacks.
i don’t even want to click your link because it says “unhinged dishonest activists”. i have literally only ever heard the worst people with the worst opinions ever say shit like that.
From last time. TL;DR real weird vibes. This is a PR where you say “oops, that makes sense”, click merge, and go on living your life. Not whatever this ended up being.
Upgrading to gender neutral language is important.
Having a reflex to avoid politics, especially when you live in an environment where concepts like gender aren’t discussed, is understandable. It’s an attempt to do no harm that doesn’t have the expected impact. It still causes harm because simple problems like gendered language are treated with an allergic response. This is what happens when conservatives hyper-sensitize well-meaning people on social topics. Considering the world we live in, you can’t expect everyone to know how to flawlessly navigate these issues on the first try.
Their policy of “no politics” was misguided, but understandable. Everything is political. It was fashionable for decades to pretend otherwise. Many people grow up in an environment that ignores social topics. They need to be accepted into spaces where social topics are discussed, not immediately ostracized for not knowing the rules to a game they are new to.
I would like them to neutralize gendered assumptions in their documentation and learn from the experience, but that can only happen if they aren’t ostracized from the community. I want to give them a chance to learn and improve to disrupt Google’s unhealthy monopoly in the browser space.
The PR in question is also in error. It claims that the documentation assumed the gender of the user or the developer. A close reading of the requested commit reveals that the documentation instead assumes the gender of an example user named “anon” whose permissions are being altered. The documentation’s use of gender is in using a male as an example user needing their privileges deescalated. Still problematic, of course: not only men need their privilege checked from time to time.
Being female requires a society that preserves the freedom to be female and for each generation to define what that means for themselves.
The rights of all are political and need to be at the forefront of politics. The rights of women being threatened politicizes them. The political constitution of the united states chose to clearly define rights that ought to be upheld. We seem to be losing them, as they fall through judicial cracks. They were only ever built by jurisprudence updating interpretations of old text to modern values (e.g. the weakly inferred right to privacy that needs to be more explicit, upon which Roe was founded). Now connotations are being stripped, and it will take political action to restore our rights. The US Constitution is almost 250 years old, and still says enslaved people get 3/5 votes. The 13th amendment says only criminals can be slaves. That means felons should have 3/5 of a vote, not no vote, right? Broken document in vital need of a reassessment of values. It’s fallen apart and America needs a new one. It’s time for a constitutional convention and for the country to vote on some amendments, or even a new document. A document that ensures free and fair elections, with independent primaries and ranked choice voting. A document that guarantees more explicitly our rights to privacy and to seek medical care. A document that upholds labor rights and reins in greed before it can choke the country with monopolies like Google has with Chromium + solely funding Mozilla. It’s time for a new deal with the American people that can survive the courts for more than 80 years because anything we put in the new constitution will be constitutional by definition.
This is a political time. We are all political actors. We define how politics proceeds and decide whose rights are considered.
I think it’s understandable to have a few allergic reactions in a new environment until you get a grip on it. Especially if it’s not someone’s native language.
Not a strategy I recommend, but one I see often enough and understand to be benign and correctable and not necessarily indicative of problematic beliefs. It is indicative of someone needing an introduction to a facet of their communication, not someone needing to be shown the door.
Ousting people and projects from community spaces makes them vulnerable prey to the capitalist vultures. Desperation fuels the labor pool of the very worst parts of our society. Ostracization should only be done in extreme circumstances, if at all. Please seek abolitionist restoration, not retributive punishment.
It’s a one-time error the maintainer made 3 years ago (at a time when much of the US-influenced west was going crazy with polarization over the use of pronouns), not a consistent behavior of intolerance as one would expect given the level of hostility towards the project seen here. I personally find it weirder to hold such a long-standing grudge for a one-off error, and over a project one is not even personally involved with.
IDK what you mean with “speak for yourself” (don’t we always speak for ourselves? :S)
Just to clarify, i think it’s better to use gender-neutral pronouns when gender is irrelevant, or unknown. And it’s easy! I’ve been doing so writing on English online forums since more 2 decades ago.
But i don’t think it’s reasonable to get mad at someone, or even attack them, for using male pronouns instead of gender-neutral ones. It doesn’t say anything about the person being sexist or hateful. The veeery vast majority of people who do this do it out of ignorance rather than malice. And attacking someone for something they don’t even consider as a moral choice —like referring to a generic programmer a “he” instead of “they”— does nothing positive for this world, on the contrary.
Like i said earlier, it was changed to they later, to the lead dev, in german they/them is a neopronoun, and “he” is gender neutral is those situations, i assume he thought it was the same in english
I don’t understand how a German grammar situation would elicit the response from the PR. Are gender neutral pronouns “political” in Germany? Why did the dev say “personal politics” specifically?
So doesn’t that still mean that they think gender-neutral pronouns are political, i.e. they don’t accept them? I’ve also noticed the dev in question is Swedish, so I’m not sure where German language quirks came from?
Well, yeah, but in gendered languages every common noun has a gender, and gender neutral pronouns are very very new, especially 3 years ago, so even most people in those lgbtq communities use male pronouns as gender neutral.
Tldr: yeah, but its like the tiniest deal ever
Edit: wanted to add that in gendered languages using gender neutral instead of male pronouns when referring to the user in the app would be wierd
That’s why I didn’t say “transphobia” anywhere in my comment. Real weird vibes is what I’m personally sticking with until I see more. The ‘transphobic’ and ‘misogynist’ claims are a leap without further evidence, but there’s a very strong clue about the type of person someone is when they say pronouns are “political”.
Maybe you’re unaffected so you don’t give a shit. Or maybe you view gay people as scum undeserving of equal rights.
But donating money to try to reverse gay marriage is disgusting. As is donating money to a politician who said AIDS was a good thing and gay people should be cleansed of the earth by it. That’s tantamount to wishing for genocide.
It’s honestly tiring how many people in the tech/FOSS community just straight up don’t give a shit about certain demographics, or even hate them outright, and see any inclusion of them at all as “politics”.
I’m so very sorry that my view that gay people are human beings deserving of equal rights, and that we shouldn’t celebrate the idea of them all dying in agony, is so unpalatable to you 🙄
They used “they” when referring to a person, and “it” when referring to a process (the author used “he” when referring to a process calling another process, when he should have used “it.”)
It doesn’t really address the core of the issue. Also: you said something wrong and ri corrected you, while acknowledging that the text was gender neutral now. What’s the big deal?
Jumping to transphobic and misogynistic for not wanting to use inclusive language in some repo documentation is a big jump. He didn’t ever dead named anyone or refuse to use some person preferred pronoums. Its just not wanting to use inclusive language on documentation. Most, if not all, documentation I have ever read in my life don’t use the newest trend of inclusive language.
By they way accusations were written it seemed like devs were actually exposing hate speech or something like that.
Let’s not be like that, ok? At least I choose not be like that. You can destroy people lives with such accusations over basically nothing, be better.
I know that we are near Americans elections as it always makes the whole internet jumping, and throwing knives to find “the enemy”. But it could be as simple as inclusive language might be confusing for non english speakers, or might the trend change over time and it’s just a bother to keep updating with the lastest trend. Do you know how many versions of inclusive language did we have in my language? We started using ell@s, then ellxs, then ellos y ellas, then elles, then ellos, ellas y elles. It’s too volatile and little to be that mad over it. Specially when there’s people out there who truly hate anyone who is not a cis str male and is doing true hate speech over that.
If there’s more evidence of devs being evil, I will aknowledge it. But for such a little inconsequential thing (again it’s not even being against someone chosen pronoums, it’s just general documentation) I refuse to spread hate towards other human being.
I also try to use the feminine as neutral instead of masculine. -Note: I’m Spanish so our language is heavily gendered- Mostly because I think that sounds better than the trend of using a newly introduced neutral gender that sounds terrible because Spanish language never had neutral.
Also if someone gets angry for that I have always the reply “now you know a little on how women fell during all story”
But still, neutral and inclusive language is still too new and far away from normalization to get mad at people on how they use it or not use. And if you are not deadnaming or deadgendering (is that a word?) you are not really hurting anyone.
Right, reverse racism and misandry are just plain ol’ prejudice.
I guess it’s up to you whether you think being prejudice is only bad if you belong to the group systemically in power, or if you think being prejudice against someone for the circumstances of their birth is bad regardless of either party’s systemic stature, but we should be correct in our use of language.
Is this because they used “he” instead of “they” in the build instructions? … They changed that and acknowledged the mistake. Surely that’s enough. It’s the fucking build instructions. I think we can probably find it in our hearts to forgive them.
[edit] Just in case people think I’m joking. I’m not. As far as I’m aware, the critical incident that that has resulted in people calling Ladybird devs anti-trans is that they wrote ‘he’ instead of ‘they’ in the build instructions. That’s what caused the original outrage. And as far as I’m aware, there have been no other incidents. But please, if there is something of substance that I’m not aware of, post about it here.
To be clear, nobody was outraged by the devs using gendered language. The outrage was because they rejected multiple PRs to correct it under the guise of it being “political”.
The problem was more the fact that the devs viewed using anything other than ‘he’ as political, not the presence of gendered language itself. The devs themselves made a big deal about changing it. The way I see it, it’s not even about trans people. How about just women? Is including women in software developent considered political? One would hope not, but here we are…
I wouldn’t read too much into it. Using “he” instead of “it” is a mistake that a person might make if English is not their first language. It’s pretty easy to imagine that someone working on a browser would not be interesting in messing around with the pronouns in their build instructions. They made an error, and they didn’t think the error was important (which in itself was another error). But it is fixed now. Surely no harm done. They were not actively trying to impede anyone’s progress or deny anyone’s rights, or even say anything negative about anyone at all. They simply made a mistake in their use of pronouns in their build instructions. The mistake is now fixed. And although its fair to take it as a ‘warning’ that maybe there are objectionable views lurking in there, it certainly is not evidence of such views. I really don’t think it’s fair to hang this mistake over them. I’m sure that pretty much everyone in this thread has made worse mistakes throughout their lives. I know I certainly have.
I get the mistake. Wouldn’t even call it one tbh, just an oversight. But when someone points it out normally one doesn’t reply with “don’t force your political views onto me” as if non male devs was some weird “woke” concept. A simple “whoops, missed that” would have been perfectly fine and everyone would’ve moved on. With that said, having followed the whole debacle I can say it could have been handled better by both sides.
It was changed to they later, to the lead dev, in german they/them is a neopronoun, and “he” is gender neutral is those situations, i assume he thought it was the same in english
I dunno friend, after reading a bunch of comments here it sounds like this may not be true, please edit this to include the context or a source to the claim
It almost like a bot is posting this sentence every time SerenityOS is mentioned.
Using “he” insted of “they” is not enough to call someone transphobic or misogynistic. It’s like you become fascist and are targeting people for one different opinion. Which is not even true.
There are real problems transgender people are having, ladybird browser must be low on that priority.
There are real problems transgender people are having, ladybird browser must be low on that priority.
Are you trying to tell me that Ladybird inadvertently referring to a computer process ‘he’ instead of ‘it’ is not a high priority problem for transgender people? What could possibly be worse? :p
(But seriously though. I find it really weird that people are still upset at Ladybird about this. I makes me wonder if there’s some social manipulation going on. Like, is anyone actually upset about this, or is it just an excuse to attack the devs?)
Cool. But some other people have morals, and wouldn’t wish to give a chef some money if he, for example, wanted to exterminate minority groups.
Maybe you’d turn a blind eye and say “well, I’m not in danger from him, so why should I care? I just want food.” but don’t be surprised when people think you’re a cunt because of it.
Don’t put all all Ladybird devs in the same basket, there’s currently more than 1000 contributors.
Ok, Andreas Kling said some untasteful things a few years ago when it was mostly his project, but I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss the whole project for this reason now.
Welp, I haven’t seen anyone learn Swift other than for Apple stuff these days. So I wonder how many can actually contribute to the code. It’s also made by Apple, so yeah. It would have been more performant and secure (both of which are pretty important in a browser) if it was written in a more low level language. For example Rust.
“More performant” citation needed. Very well written Rust might be extremely fast, yes, but Rust is also a hard language to get right. Swift is far from a slow language and I would not be surprised if the average rust programmer barely if at all manages to beat out the average swift programmer in terms of speed. As for the amount of programmers interested, hard to tell, but given the sheer amount of Swift devs I’d not be surprised if there were quite a few interested ones and I am unconvinced Rust programmers are statistically more likely to be interested in Browser development.
Benchmarks mean nothing. These aren’t the results of code written by an average programmer. Edit: and as a general note I would also like to point out the relative inconsistency of the results in terms of factor, only further reinforcing my point. I like Rust and all but we do need to admit it doesn’t magically solve all our problems.
You’re free to suggest another method of comparing the two languages’ performance. This is the best we’re have, and Rust wins in every single benchmark shown there.
These aren’t the results of code written by an average programmer.
Citation needed.
I like Rust and all but we do need to admit it doesn’t magically solve all our problems.
I never said it did. I simply pointed out that it’s demonstrably faster than Swift.
While Rust would probably have been a good choice for implementing a new browser, I don’t think Swift deserves the criticism it’s getting in this thread:
Swift was created by the same person who created Rust, and has many of the same nice traits
Swift is a modern language that is easy for plenty of developers to pick up; I’d place it in the same family as Rust and Kotlin
Swift grants access to a large pool of native iOS/Mac developers
It’s also open-source? Like, Microsoft created C# and Typescript. Google created Go. Those get used without people bringing up their origins. Hell, Rust Javascript* was created by a homophobe. What, do you think the license lets Apple close-source everyone’s code if they choose or something?
Sorry, I’m just really tired of these low-effort comments. The only thing that should matter is the language and if it hits the goals the project needs.
Sure. It is open source, but the development is done by Apple engineers. I also would like to state that Go has trackers in it. I also don’t really care what the creator of a language is. Homophobe, sexist, racist or other similar stuff, I couldn’t care less as long as the language is good.
You couldn’t care, as long as the language is good, but you care when it’s Apple?
You’re wrong btw. Sure, Apple engineers developed it originally. But it is now in the hands of the open source community, with over 1,000 contributors on github: github.com/swiftlang/swift
Edit: To be clear, unlike something like Chromium, Apple doesn’t even own the repositories anymore. It’s fully independent.
Shopify (i.e. Shittify) being their top donor already has me looking sideways at this project. They’ll invest in anything they think they can get an edge with and if something starts to happen they’ll fuck it up and wallstreet-ify it as fast as possible if they can.
Their (Shopify’s) guru founder Tobi made a huge NFT play that went absolutely nowhere while I still worked there. They spent a lot of time and money on it, right before they laid several thousand people off.
I mean I hope Ladybird devs do a great build and go their own way without being corrupted by their donors and all that, don’t get me wrong. But whenever I see that dumb shopping bag logo I get the no feelings.
You can also read up on how the vast majority of Mozilla’s funding has been coming from Google for a very long time, and draw your own conclusions from that fact.
You may have misunderstood. It was Shopify who did the big NFT play on their platform. I don’t know much about the Ladybird team, I’m not trying to throw shade on them.
Also I’m very much cautious about them on anything browsing related. Discovered (after others also) they let their search-pages-in-a-shop get indexed.
Meaning I could go to Caterpillar, search for “Wabtec is better” and then this search url (with 0 products) would turn up in Google searches and that URL persisted. Text and all.
Basically one could spray-paint and tag sites with this graffiti. Shop admins didn’t even have means to remove it.
I read somewhere awhile back their platinum donors gave a certain tier (10k or 100k or whatever it was). To be clear I’m more than open to being surprised here, I want Ladybird to succeed. I just resent Shopify being involved in any way, I’m a little bit petty after slogging it out at that company awhile because I know what they’re all about.
it’s the only one i knew about before the other comment. with more browsers using it, we may not need to build another engine from scratch to broaden competition
Safari isn’t dependent on Google. It was just a no-brainer for Apple to take a free 20 billion dollars from Google for setting the default search engine to something most users would want anyway.
Sounds fun, but I wish there were more people who'd invest in making Firefox's Gecko more easy to use (stretch goal: revive Proton, which is Electron but Firefox) instead of pushing a ton of effort into inventing a new thing.
That said, this is coming from SerenityOS (specifically, the founder and basically the entire community concentrating on building its browser instead of hacking the OS, resulting in a split), so I understand that it might be a lot harder to port large codebases to a new OS instead of than starting a new one.
Well we wouldn’t want Proton, it would be 2000x less lightweight than electron! /s
It seems to me that Tauri is maybe a better direction to invest resources in than a direct electron-but-Firefox. Its lighter weight and better sandboxed, and can presumably be configured to run with a Gecko engine instead of a chromium-based webview. I have no idea its status, but geckoview does seem to exist.
Sounds like fun, but I wish we had a real multiplatform GUI framework that does not look like ass and does not perform like ass, so we can put the whole shameful electron era behind us.
That’s never going to happen, and the reasons are twofold:
Brands want to push their own style on people, to make themselves recognizable, and to push their ideas about UX to their users (because they obviously know better than the OS/DE/compositor/whatever people).
It’s easier and cheaper to build a web app, because there are so many web developers. It also usually allows you to give an “app” to people who want that, while giving a (perhaps somewhat limited) browser version to everyone else, reaching the maximum amount of users while maintaining only a single codebase and keeping everything more or less cohesive and looking the same.
Brands want to push their own style on people, to make themselves recognizable, and to push their ideas about UX to their users
That’s not a universal behavior though. There’s so many utilities and simpler apps made by indie developers or smaller companies that don’t care about this.
That’s technically true, but the apps “everyone” has are the opposite to that, and people are used to it and don’t really seem to complain. So if Facebook, Tiktok, Twitter, Amazon, Spotify and Aliexpress each do their own (garbage) thing, it shows other brands they can do that too, and they kinda ruin it for everyone. Basically the apps you spend most time in are probably like that, and it’s a shitty experience.
It just makes too much sense… The only way to get past electron is a better electron. Or just fix electron
We’ve been going after this concept for decades now. That’s what java swing was supposed to be, what python gtlk was supposed to be, and I’m sure there were others before that and there’s been a hell of a lot since then
It’s all trade-offs between flexibility, ease of use, and performance. Also between maintenance cost, portability, and existing library support
Electron is a good compromise. The execution could be better, but it’s come a long way. There is no one size fits all solution, but there are some decent options that handle that compromise differently
Fixing few decades of technical debt is not fun and a big question would be if their code would even be considered for existing engines.
It us so much fin it already has over 1000 contributors. It got us 1k more people that understand browsers deeply. I think that’s a huge win whatever happens with browser itself
Hot take: Since it’s a BSD licensed browser at some point in the future, there’s going to be a company that funds it brings it to mainstream with their flavor, and then will over throw chromium in time. Replace an ‘evil’ with another ‘evil’.
There was a gpl licensed browser engine someone by hobby is writing from scratch. I think theese companies supporting ladybird just do so because of license that they can proprietarify(like chromium)
I agree. However, things are so bad in the browser market that even a proprietary browser could be good news if they don’t become a duopoly and actually compete.
All the code is hosted on GitHub. Clone it, build it, and join our Discord if you want to collaborate on it! We’re looking forward to seeing you there.
So much for freedom when everything is done thru proprietary services under US jurisdiction.
Basically everywhere I go on Lemmy you’re there spouting ignorant bullshit, garbage takes, rage-bait and misinformation. You’re inescapable. This is the perfect example. You know what you’re saying is wrong. You know you’re being dishonest. Do you wanna know how I know? Because I literally told you as much less than two weeks ago when you tried spreading the same lies. But you didn’t care back then and you still don’t care now. The only thing you seem to care about going by the other things I’ve seen you post is pushing your favorite projects, and you will use all of the arguments available to do so, including the ones that you just entirely made up. You think LadyBird is the better project and are trying to spread the belief that Servo is dead to make others buy into the LadyBird hype further. But, of course, Servo verifiably isn’t dead and in fact the Servo team writes up monthly blog posts detailing their progress, which show the project developing at a healthy pace. And to top it all off, when these facts are pointed out to you, your only comeback is “means nothing”. Clearly you’re not the kind of person to let facts tie you down.
Heh, I thought about blocking them like a thousand times, but they are sometimes sharing neutral or interesting information so I’m just trying to ignore this type of comments
Only reason I unblocked them was in case I needed to refute their claims anywhere. Suffice to say though, for anyone reading this, a good rule of thumb is if Possibly Linux says it, decent chance its untrue
Maybe I made to many assumptions. All I saw was on the about page they said they started under Mozilla and moved to the Linux foundation. Maybe I’m to quick to jump to conclusions but it doesn’t look like it has that much momentum. To be fair neither does Labybird. The big thing about Ladybird is that it is completely independent and already has a decent amount of funding. Maybe Servo is bigger than I realized. At the end of they day we need diversity.
I didn’t mean this as a personal attack. It seems like you have some previous knowedge of Servo which is completely fine. You are welcome to block me if you so wish. At the end of the day you don’t have to care about what I say. While I don’t suspect this will turn into harassment I will note that I will block you if you start trying to “chase” me across the fediverse. I have had issues in the past where someone starts going though and replying to every one of my comments everywhere.
We don’t have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment.
We would like to do Windows eventually, but it’s not a priority at the moment.
This is how you make “critical mass” adoption that much more difficult.
As much as I love Linux, if you are creating a program to be used by everyone and anyone, you achieve adoption inertia and public consciousness penetration by focusing on the largest platform first. And at 72% market share, that would be Windows.
I hope this initiative works. I really do. But intentionally ignoring three-quarters of the market is tantamount to breaking at least one leg before the starting gate even opens. This browser is likely to be relegated to being a highly niche and special-interest-only browser with minuscule adoption numbers, which means it will be virtually ignored by web developers and web policy makers.
LadyBird is an unusable pre-alpha-quality web browser. The fact that they haven’t bothered porting to Windows yet is both thoroughly unsurprising and entirely meaningless. In its current state, it wouldn’t become popular either way. But I guess Linux users have this weird inferiority complex where everything must instantly be dropped to port to Windows even when it makes little sense to do so.
Linux users tend to give much better bug reports than Windows users (if they do at all). That alone is probably a good enough reason to do Linux first. There are many more good reasons when the first goal is getting it functional and not getting as many users as possible (who will probably hate it if they’re not a technically skilled user because there will be bugs).
You’re making an assumption their first priority is the number of users. I would suspect that isn’t true, and they’re aware Windows has more users.
Ladybird was originally started as a browser for SerenityOS, a POSIX operating system. Well into the project, they decided to make it cross-platform but that still meant POSIX ( Linux and macOS ). As interest ( and sponsorships ) came in from outside SerenityOS, focus moved more and more to the browser and away from SerenityOS.
Just recently, Ladybird decided to split from SerenityOS, allow more outside code, and in fact has dropped SerenityOS as a supported OS.
The project is fairly pragmatic. I am sure they will add Windows support as the core browser engine matures.
Right now most browsers are based on an engine owned by Google with a small percentage based on Firefox, which has historically depended on Google for significant funding. Not a great situation.
For something as important to modern life, its beneficial to have more diversity, if only to add different security flaws to it then exist in Chrome and Firefox.
I feel like this is a dumb question but why do web engines need constant development? I thought we had an established standard for HTML. Once a web engine matches that standard isn’t that sufficient?
There are features that constantly get added. It’s not only HTML (maybe the html part is stable, I don’t know), but there’s CSS and most importantly JavaScript.
Also, browsers don’t always follow the standard exactly. Some features get added that aren’t in the standard.
Some of the new features most people aren’t aware of us that I used recently :
WebXR, make a Web page immersive and work in the browser of VR/AR headsets, e.g Meta Quest, Lynx XR1, Apple Vision Pro, etc
WebBlueTooth, connect to a BT device, e.g a Lego controller in order to move actuator, data from sensors, etc
WebUSB, connect a device and update its firmware, e.g SmartWatch, mechanical keyboard, etc
GamePad API, use a gamepad or joystick to play from a browser window
Realms in JavaScript for “better” sandboxing, it’s a relatively new feature of the language so the engine must be updated
So… sure none of that really helps to read a 2D Web page (like this one on Lemmy) but they pretty much all help to achieve better cross-platform support. By using the Web rather than native to connect to hardware then it is instantly delivered without having any OS specific driver to build and install. Practically speaking it does make the browser increasingly complex but IMHO it is worth it.
PS: I probably also used some modern CSS so there also the engine (which is ridiculously complex by the way) has to be updated too.
AFAICT that’s correct for WebBluetooth indeed, as it’s only implemented by Chromium (and thus all browsers relying on it) but for but for WebUSB wicg.github.io/webusb/ it’s still being discussed at the W3C level so even though not standards (which I don’t think W3C even produce, only API specifications, e.g HTML isn’t a standard whereas Bluetooth is) thus allowing others to possibly implement it.
To clarify Firefox is my main browser, but (sadly) for those very specific cases I’m relying on Chromium (WebXR on standalone XR devices, even now Wolvic switching to Chromium as a backend).
It’s an important point as by doing this Google is pushing for it’s own set of technologies and is pushing for it’s own engine which comes with a lot of business (namely ads) related “feature” e.g Manifest v3 that aren’t good for privacy.
That is also interesting to consider on “why” a browser keeps on evolving, i.e having the most “advanced” browsers does give an edge and pushes competition away.
HTML used to be a pretty set standard, maintained by the W3C. HTML5 was retired in 2018 (5.2 in 2021). Now it is a Living Standard that changes often and is maintained by a consortium of browser vendors.
I don’t know if it’s a good idea to build a new engine from scratch… Maybe it is but I don’t know, behind an engine you need to have support and development, so this thing needs to be improved and supported along the versions to be safe, so I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not 🙃
There was a gpl licensed browser engine someone by hobby is writing from scratch. I think theese companies supporting ladybird just do so because of license that they can proprietarify(like chromium)
ladybird.org
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