There used to be multiple different brands of browsers on the internet that had their own kernels.
Now, the browser market is almost dominated by Chromium's Blink kernel and Apple's Safari's WebKit kernel, while Firefox Firefox uses Gecko's kernel has a very low market share.
Safari is primarily used in the Apple ecosystem, so the real control of the browser market is Google's Blink kernel, and most browsers are now built on Chromium and do not have their own kernel.
However, I didn't expect that there would be new players entering the browser market at this time.
That participant is the latest nonprofit, Ladybird, which is developing a new, user-trackless browser from the ground up.
About Ladybird
A new non-profit organization in the United States, called the Ladybird Browser Project, has been formed to develop the Ladybird web browser, which is based on a new engine that does not borrow code from other browsers.
Led and planned to execute by Chris Wanstrath and Andreas Kling, Ladybird confirms that it seeks to challenge the status quo with a new web browser that is completely independent of corporate interests.
Funded by a $1 million endowment from Wanstrath and his family, Ladybird aims to disrupt this model by providing a new, ground-up way to browse the web.
Chris Wanstrath is a well-known figure in the tech world, having previously co-founded and former CEO of GitHub, a platform that fundamentally changed the way developers collaborate. His vision for Ladybird is influenced by his commitment to open source values and his desire to innovate freely without being bound by corporate interests.
Andreas Kling, President of Ladybird's Browser Program, has extensive experience, having worked at Apple for Safari and Nokia for WebKit (the engine behind many of today's browsers).
So far, the browser project has received sponsorship from many well-known people or organizations in the industry, including $100,000 sponsored by the e-commerce site Shopify and $1 million sponsored by the founder of Github.
Technical details of Ladybird
The software has been open-sourced on GitHub and uses a permissive BSD-2-Clause license, which means it is free software and approved by open source initiatives.
https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird
Originally an HTML viewer for SerenityOS, Ladybird was created by Kling in 2018 as a Unix-like operating system for x86-64 processors. Last month, Kling handed over SerenityOS to a group of maintainers and said that all of his attention is now focused on the Ladybird browser, which he forked into a new top-level project for Linux and macOS.
He also said that, unlike SerenityOS, Ladybird will "leverage the larger OSS ecosystem," meaning it will use other open-source libraries for certain features. However, the FAQ states that "we implement Web standards ourselves", ruling out the possibility of fully adopting third-party engines. The existence of a small number of independent implementations is dangerous for Web standards, as it makes it more likely that a single vendor will establish a de facto standard.
Telasi, who also donated $1 million to the project, said in an article that "every major browser engine" is "funded by Google's advertising empire." He included Safari because Google paid Apple to make it the default search engine, and Firefox had a "similar deal."
Last year, Kling answered another question, which was to assume that the web is now too complex to build a new browser. Kling continues, "Today's ECMAScript, HTML, and CSS specifications are (for the most part) top-notch technical documentation, with algorithms that require a lot less effort and guesswork than they did in the past. ”
The Ladybird browser running on macOS
Some users have already downloaded the source code and easily built Ladybird on macOS, as there is no binary version available yet.
The browser is fine to browse and work on many websites if some layout issues and slow performance can be tolerated, but trying to access Google Mail throws the error "This browser or application may not be safe", even the "Learn more" link doesn't work for us, and the debug window pops up with a ton of errors.
Please note that the browser is not yet ready for official use. The product readme states: "Ladybird is in pre-alpha and is only suitable for developers. ”
Google Mail is not available to Ladybird users
The launch of the project has been well received by open web enthusiasts, with people commenting that "I think this is a huge gift to people who love the Internet", others saying "Awesome, Andreas, thank you for your efforts to maintain Internet neutrality", and many more comments that were published on Hacker News and also sent to Kling.
Why does Ladybird perform better than Mozilla?
"We set a much narrower goal than Mozilla, hoping that focusing solely on the browser would keep us simple and be more financially sustainable," Kling said in a Hacker News post.
Ladybird is written in C++. According to the project's homepage, the choice of language can be traced back to the language that Kling was "most familiar with" when creating SerenityOS, but the team is now "evaluating multiple alternatives" and plans to add a second language to the project soon.
Kling confirms, "Our next language will be a memory-safe language. ”
The task for this small team is daunting. According to Kling, there are currently only three employees on the team, with three more joining next month.
Because of the technical challenges of developing a competitive web browser, as well as the marketing challenges of convincing people to switch from Chrome, Safari, or Edge to another browser.
According to statcounter, Microsoft Edge is currently the most popular browser, accounting for more than 88% of the market share. Firefox using Mozilla's Gecko engine has a market share of only 2.75%.
Why develop from scratch
The Ladybird browser does not use any existing browser kernels, such as the Blink kernel, WebKit kernel, or Gecko kernel, nor does it use code from any other browser engine.
The browser will develop a completely new browser kernel from scratch, and the project will fork from SerenityOS and no longer be bound by the system.
In addition to the browser kernel being developed from scratch, other aspects such as images, audio, video, encryption, graphics display, etc. will be implemented using third-party open source libraries, which can shorten the development cycle and reduce duplication of work.
Will there be a mobile version:
There are no plans for Android or iOS yet, but the browser team will be working more on the mobile version once the desktop version stabilizes.