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Announcing the Ladybird Browser Initiative (ladybird.org)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 months ago (59 children)

I do not understand the urge to start from scratch instead of forking an existing, mature codebase. This is typically a rookie instinct, but they aren't rookie so there's perhaps an alternative motive of some sort.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Because software monocultures are bad. The vast majority of browsers are Chromium based. Since Google de-facto decides what gets in Chromium, sooner or later the downstream forks are forced to adopt their changes. Manifest V3 is a great example of this. You can only backport for so long, especially when upstream is being adversarial to your changes. We need an unaffiliated engine that corrects the mistakes we made with KHTML/Webkit.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Why are open source software monocultures bad? The vast majority of non-Windows OSes are Linux based. Teams who don't like certain decisions of the mainline Linux team maintain their forks with the needed changes.

Manifest V3 is a great example of this. You can only backport for so long, especially when upstream is being adversarial to your changes. We need an unaffiliated engine that corrects the mistakes we made with KHTML/Webkit.

And we could get a functional one today by forking Chromium and never accepting a single upstream patch thereafter. I find it really hard to believe that starting a browser engine from scratch would require less labor. This is why I'm looking for an alternative motive. Someone mentioned licensing.

Perhaps some folks just want to do more work to write a new browser engine. After all Linus did just that, instead of forking the BSD kernel.

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