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This is such a non-issue
Ladybird is run by a bigot. I wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole.
Is he the one constantly spewing hateful shit in the Issues on GitHub whenever people ask him to not use only “he” and “him” in the docs?
That dev definitely doesn’t seem like the best human around, but this is all around terrible to me. Calling the project “dehumanizing” and “vile” because of this is ridiculous. Are people really willing to have their browsing tracked and sold rather than using a browser that has an assumed gender in the documentation? Not saying that they shouldn’t use gender neutral language, but as the original issue said, it’s a minor nitpick, let’s be honest. It’s also something that’s representative of one dev as a person, not of the project as a browser. Additionally, it could be something as simple as the dev coming from a gendered language, where the word “user” itself is masculine, and doesn’t see it the same way as English speakers asking for neutral language.
Yeah that was the thing that alerted me.
Can you elaborate ?
Dammit, again? What did this developer do…
I’ve only tangentially picked up things about this but this is an example for it
(For some context, if you didn’t already know this, Ladybird originated from a SerenityOS component and the first reply is from the lead dev)
Oh… That’s… Disappointing. Firefox it is, then, for now.
It’s weird… It makes “business” sense, too. If you want people to use your stuff and you can choose to appeal to more people, why wouldn’t you? I think we’ve reached the stage of normalcy now where using “they” and “them” are not in itself something that would necessarily scare away right-wing users (given you want to keep appealing to that attractive market, too.)
Well, in that case, I hope it gets forked into a super gay version in the future lol
At least there’s other projects too…
This is the way 🌈
_They_dybird
mastoqueerz
Wow 😳
was that nukeop? that Guy is a known asshole. He was also quoted Saying licenses don’t matter and threw a huge fucking hissy fit when someone forked his project and gave it a copyleft license because of making such a stupid statement. Unfortunately the website archiving the drama is down, and I could only find an archive if the first iteration of it (it had at least 2 more paragraphs after this) https://archive.is/UT9Xe
Hey it could be worse. It could be the completely and utterly worthless MIT license.
…I have no idea what this is referencing. Duckduckgo?
Its a new Browser build from the ground up. I think its called ladybird.
Good interview with the Dev for anyone who is interested in more of the details from this thread, like why Swift? What’s so hard about browsers? Etc. https://youtu.be/z1Eq0xlVs3g
It’s a monumental effort really, building a browser engine from scratch and taking it to daily driver usable is probably among the most difficult programming challenges. It’s way easier to build a new Linux kernel from scratch than a browser engine lmao
Even Microshit tried and gave up because it was so hard
Can someone eli5 why that is?
Because if a website doesn’t work in your browser, but it works in everyone else’s, no one will say “oh that website’s badly written”, instead they say “what a shitty browser”.
So you have a huge web standard you have to respect, and then all the websites with non standard code you have to make work anyway.
Even Microshit tried and gave up because it was so hard
They also failed at building operative systems, so not sure they are the best example.
Even Microshit tried and gave up because it was so hard
Not exactly. Yes a browser engine is one of the most, if not the most, complex pieces of software.
But if it was almost impossible to create a web engine then this, or KDE’s KHTML, or Servo, or NetSurf, or Kraken, or you-name-it wouldn’t exist.
Then how come (one of) the most powerful tech company in the world couldn’t make it, you ask? They already had a “functional” web engine. But what they had from the beginning was absolute shit that did not respect any web standard. And oh boy we people who fought against that shit trying to support it do know. Its baggage was immensely huge and shitty that after a while and the speed Chrome was taking over they found it was easier to yeet it altogether, and I do hope that piece of shit is burning in hell because it made our lifes so miserable.
Note that Opera did the same thing with their web engine - they gave up with it mostly because they found easier to jump in the Blink bandwagon, without realizing they were making Opera just another Chromium skin without much value, contrary to what Presto was.
Kinda what could happen if one day Microsoft decided to try make Windows to be as functional, fast and permissive as Linux.
What happened to the logo. I swear like 2 years ago it was a picture of an actual ladybird
Accelerated Firefox timeline.
That used to be a picture of an actual Phoenix and then a red panda before it got streamlined.
If ladybird keep going at this rate, everyone will be trying to cancel them by the middle of next week
How hard is it to do some web searches first before you announce a new name for your project?
I’m downloading this and contributing to prove the haters wrong. Y’all are gonna regret not being able to say “I toad a so” like me.
i’m sure they will appreciate your BSD 2 Clause contributions at Microsoft HQ
Is it that difficult to implement a CopyLeft licence ? Well we do have Servo (A modular browser engine) in development & SeaMonkey is a thing too (Which is an entire internet-application suite)
with mandatory male pronouns for users in the documentation.
(and no politics allowed!)
can I get some context for this, what is the reference to? I stopped caring about new browsers and now just use Firefox 🤷♀️
it’s about the ladybird browser. i edited my comment to add details.
mastoqueers
That was a good laugh! thanks for the explanation ❤️
I don’t understand why everyone wants to jump ship to a whole new browser, when the governance of a browser is the real issue to solve regardless of which browser is supported. A good stewardship model has to be established by people of integrity, technical skill, and funding. From there forking making a hard fork of Firefox is way cheaper and easier than trying to invest in one that’s not even finished.
BSD is freer than GPL. Fight me.
Yeah but GitHub defaults to GPL, so checkmate nerd 😎
The GitHub owned by Microsoft? That GitHub?
I won’t fight you because I agree. But a lot of people think it’s more free to have freedoms end when it comes to proprietary forks and such.
To me, that’s just one less freedom.
Copyleft protects the freedom of the user, regardless of who is the developer, I think that is way more important if what we want is to make software for humanity rather than pragmatic business choices.
It is a point of what you regard as real freedom, do you wish to eventually lock in your users or let who might fork/take over your project do that?It is one less freedom.
BSD is freer for programmers (or frequently their corporate overlords), but not for people using the software.
That’s false. Derivative software that doesn’t use the BSD licence has no bearing on the BSD-licenced software itself. For example, Sony using FreeBSD for the PS3 operating system has zero impact on the freedom of a FreeBSD user. The GPL, on the other hand, directly infringes on the user’s freedom to fork and redistribute the software.
The GPL, on the other hand, directly infringes on the user’s freedom to fork and redistribute the software.
that’s plain bullshit. under GPL, you are free to fork it and redistribute it
You’re not unless you keep the licence.
well of course. you can’t betray the will of upstream: to not feed the rich. not a big ask.
but the user, as you said, has no reason to object to that, because it protects them from parasites
This argument only works if you assume everything that isn’t the GPL is feeding the rich.
The only “freedom” the GPL infringes on is the ability to take the freedom the code originally had away from an end-user.
That’s also false. The GPL doesn’t only restrict non-free licences, it restricts any licence change on the derivative work. If I fork a GPL project and want to redistribute my changes with a free licence such as MIT, the GPL will prevent it to protect itself. It’s an authoritarian licence that doesn’t respect your freedom.
I fail to see how the share-alike nature of the GPL is “authoritarian” and “doesn’t respect your freedom”.
It is built to guarantee the freedom of the user. It’s imperfect, as it has to work within the constraints of the copyright system, but it’s a hell of a lot better than licenses like MIT for propagating freedom to end users.
Here’s a real world example:
If I want to root my android device with KernelSU or build a custom ROM, I need to recompile the heavily customised kernel built by the vendor for my specific device. Because Linux (the kernel of android) is under the GPL, the manufacturer is compelled to give the user the same freedoms that were given to them, which means I can download the source code and do this.
If Android were based on, say, the FreeBSD kernel instead, this would be impossible. There would be very few, if any, android custom ROMs, because the vendor could, and would, withhold the modifications they made to the kernel.
You’re again assuming that the GPL only restricts non-free licences. This is not the case. If I add a feature to a piece of GPL software, I can’t use BSD on my new code even though the new code isn’t derivative work. Hell, if I write a completely independent piece of software that links to GPL software, my new software has to be GPL even though not a single line of GPL code was used. All of this also applies to free licences like BSD. The GPL doesn’t protect freedom, it protects itself.
You’re assuming that the GPL protecting freedom and protecting itself are mutually exclusive. They aren’t. Again, the GPL is written to ensure the code remains free forever.
Also, I’ve already pointed out the flawed nature of licenses like MIT and BSD, and if the GPL could be relicensed to them, it would provide a very easy way for proprietary developers to strip the freedom from the GPLed code when passing a derivative on to their users.
It is unfortunate that it cannot be relicensed to other copyleft licenses, as that would not pose such a problem, but without an explicit list of licenses it can be relicensed to I’m not sure that’s even legally possible under copyright.
Copyleft is the true path
Let’s see how ladybird writes docs in the future. Will they assume the user is a man and shut down any corrections for being political?
Not only C++ but also Swift, which just feels strange
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 have evaluated a number of alternatives, and will begin incremental adoption of Swift as a successor language, once Swift version 6 is released.
that is actually really goofy, didn’t know about that
Swift is a pretty fully fledged systems language at this point … however, it’s far from tried and tested for use cases like this and cross platform support is still garbage, so still a pretty questionable choice.
I’m never going to be one to dog on something before I try it. If it’s good and can offer the same or better experience as Firefox then sign me up. The biggest sticking point for me, though, is potentially losing Firefox’s massive add-in library. I really like my uBlock Origin and Restore YouTube Dislike and my VPN extension and Metamask and all the other crap I’ve got there.
you can try it now if you want and it does work surprisingly well, but their timeline is still “alpha in 2026”
Yes. Good filters and privacy/security are an absolutely vital requirement today. Unbreaking things and adding features via extensions or something are also good.
I think I could get by with Bitwarden/uBlock as a minimum. Addons like enhancer for youtube are super nice though.
That’s not controlled by Google…
It is also important to note that the license is still foss and GPL compatible. In the future they could made it GPL.
Every contributor needs to have signed a CLA in order for the license to be changed
BSD license is the only thing that annoys me. Chrome not by google.
