In the monthly Ladybird Browser update video which we’ve placed below, SerenityOS founder [Andreas Kling] announced an interesting development. The browser has been forked from the OS that has been its progenitor, and both projects will now proceed separately. This frees the browser from the SerenityOS insistence on avoiding external libraries, and allows it to take advantage of stable, fast, and mature open source alternatives. This is already paying dividends in compatibility and speed, and is likely to lead further towards a usable everyday browser as time goes by.
As the world of fully-featured web browser engines has contracted from a number of different projects to little more than Google’s Blink and Mozilla’s Gecko, Ladybird has found itself in an unexpected position. It is vital that the browser market retains some competition and does not become a Google monoculture, so while it might not seem so at first glance, the news of Ladybird going alone has the potential to be one of the most far-reaching open source stories of the year.
If you’d like to try Ladybird you’ll have to get your hands slightly dirty and build it yourself, but we’d expect ready-built versions to appear in due course. We took a look at an earlier version of Ladybird last year, as well as SerenityOS itself.
A browser that isn’t based on Chrome, WebKit, or Firefox? Noice. Midori was my preferred alternate browser / bootable USB browser for years but it’s taking a turn now. This is pretty exciting and I’ll start using it on Linux once it’s packaged.
Err.. this separation is old news (beginning of june I guess).
What IS new though, is that ladybird has some serious backing now, in all different ways: visibility, business-networking AND money : https://ladybird.org/announcement.html
Anyone else hear “Laaaaaaaay-dy bird” in Hank Hill’s voice?
I didn’t, I was thinking about President Johnson’s wife.
No wonder this proud b***h was named after our former First Lady!
UK ladybird = US ladybug
I didn’t know gender is political now.
Are you serious? How is this “ideologically motivated”? Do you (and this project owners) get triggered at the mere sight of a gender neutral “they”?
Not to mention, that “rule” was added half a year after the PR was rejected. PR made in May 2021, CONTRIBUTING.md modified to add that in Dec 2021. I guess basic fact checking is too ideologically motivated as well.
You got it backwards. A person pushed a simple PR replacing a “he” with a “they”, which the main Ladybird dev closed with a “your personal politics aren’t welcome here”, *then* added the verbiage about ideology in CONTRIBUTING.md.
Also, I don’t think including the other 50% of earth’s population in some FOSS project documentation should be a “cause”, political or controversial – but I guess that’s too woke for you.
Normal people wouldn’t assume the user is always a male, and using a gender neutral text isn’t something revolutionary.
That Kling refused this is enough for me to conclude he isn’t someone I have an interest in.
Now get lost you sick refuse. :)