We’ve been searching for a memory-safe programming language to replace C++ in Ladybird for a while now. We previously explored Swift, but the C++ interop never quite got there, and platform support outside the Apple ecosystem was limited. Rust is a different story. The ecosystem is far more mature for systems programming, and many of our contributors already know the language. Going forward, we are rewriting parts of Ladybird in Rust.
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I was enthusiastic about LadyBird until I learnt that the guy leading the project i s a white supremacist, via pivot-to-ai.
Now I hope either someone else takes it over, or that it crashes and burns.
Came here to say this.
I don’t think you should be able to make claims like this without hard proof.
Do you have any information about this?
Edit: So I found out where you read that, and that article is wayyy over thinking that comment.
I think the Twitter comment could be taken multiple ways and it would be fair to give them the benefit of the doubt.
How many times do I have to give him the benefit of the doubt though?
First it was the “using they in documentation is political ideology” Github issue, then he publicly defended DHH when people called him out for being a white supremacist, he implied tech companies are discriminating against white people with diversity policies, and he tweeted that he hopes young people will carry on Charlie Kirk’s legacy.
If one or two of these things happened in isolation, I could maybe understand giving him the benefit of the doubt as a non-American (for that last one) non-native English speaker. But all of these things taken together? I personally don’t think I can look past that.
To be fair I hadn’t heard of some of these, so I think you’re right. I wouldn’t go so far as as to say he’s a white supremacist but it definitely seems like he has an “ideology”
Edit: The more I read about it the more it’s pissing me off. Especially defending DHH who wrote that trash article about London (I’m not a Londoner but I’m a Brit who’s there enough with work to know he’s talking absolute shit).
That’s fair, I assume most people probably aren’t following ladybird that closely so it’s easy to miss. It just bothers me because shrugging off small individual problems and ignoring a bigger trend is arguably what let people like DHH get a platform in the first place.
If any creator can separate work from personal and the product is good I really couldn’t care less with what they use their own time for.
I’m pretty sure you could find people with other unsavoury opinions in the devteams for both chrome and firefox, what then?
Rest in peace to this browser.
Andreas Kling’s ladybird? Don’t wanna touch that with a 10ft pole.
https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/
Hyperborea.org is that owned by a racist or is the domain ment to be making fun of it?
If any creator can separate work from personal and the product is good I really couldn’t care less with what they use their own time for.
I’m pretty sure you could find people with other unsavoury opinions in the devteams for both chrome and firefox, what then? Lynx?
Oh. Welp, if it’s going to be vibe coded I’m out.
Guess I got excited about this browser for nothing.
I was enthusiastic about this project. But I am afraid these recent tangents will only reduce momentum.
@Beep@lemmus.org @technology@lemmy.world
Ah, the smell of irony by the morning! Adopting a programming language often praised by its “safety”, while the entire pretension of “safety” is alchemically transmuted into a sewage and deliberately flushed up (not down) by a clanker who drinks from the cesspool with the same determination and thirst that of a Chevy Opala gurgling down entire Olympic pools worth of gasoline.
Being serious now, the foreseeable future for Web browsing is definitely depressing: Chromium needs no introduction (used to be an interesting browser until Google’s mask “don’t be evil” fell and straightforwardly revealed their corporate face and farce), Firefox have been “welcoming the new AI overlords” for a while, text browsers (such as Lynx) are far from feasible for a CAPTCHA(and Anubis)-driven web… now, one of the latest and fewest glimmers of hope, an alternative Web browser engine, is becoming the very monster the fight against which was promised to be the launchpad purpose (“They who fights with monsters should be careful lest they thereby become a monster”). I wouldn’t be surprised if Servo were to enshittify, too. Being able to choose among the sameness is such a wonderful thing, isn’t it?
I mean, I’m not the average Lemmy user who got this (understandably) deep hatred against AI, I am able to hold a nuanced view and finding quite interesting uses (especially when it comes to linguistics) for the clankers (especially the “open-weighted” ones). However, this, to shoving AI everywhere and using AI to “code for you”, it’s a whole different story. A software should be programmed in the way programming (as posited by Ada Lovelace) was intended to, not “vibe coded” by a fancy auto-completer who can’t (yet) deal with Turing completeness, especially when it comes to a whole miniature operational system that browsers became nowadays. When coding a whole OS, AI shouldn’t even be touched by a two million light-years pole, let alone by a two-feet pole.
Why leave WebKit out?
@paraphrand@lemmy.world @technology@lemmy.world
Oh, right, WebKit, I forgot mentioning it, thanks for reminding me of it!
It’s the engine I likely used the least throughout my digital existence. I mean, I likely used Lynx more than I used WebKit, hence my forgetfulness.
However, if we’re talking about the WebKit-based Linux browsers (such as Konqueror), IIRC, they’re a bit out of spec when it comes to the “modern Web”: WebKit’s adoption of latest specs tends to be slower than Firefox and Chromium.
Now, if we’re talking about Safari specifically, then… it’s part of Apple’s walled garden, one where even “Firefox from App Store” is actually a reskinned Safari (at least in iOS).
Be it Safari or Konqueror, deep inside, the WebKit engine seems to me like the “Apple’s Chromium”, so mentioning WebKit doesn’t really improve the awful prospect for browser engines that we’re facing nowadays.
However, if we’re talking about the WebKit-based Linux browsers (such as Konqueror), IIRC, they’re a bit out of spec when it comes to the “modern Web”: WebKit’s adoption of latest specs tends to be slower than Firefox and Chromium.
WebKit-GTK is up to date. 30 seconds of research in your favorite search engine and you would have found it out.
@woelkchen@lemmy.world @technology@lemmy.world
It takes the same 30 seconds of using caniuse.com (screenshot below), which doesn’t list WebKit-GTK specifically, but lists Safari (which is WebKit under the hood), for it to become clear how many things are missing from Safari implementation (which is WebKit).
To be fair, yes, there are many bleeding edge features, some of them implemented only on WebKit/Safari, but those Safari-only features are kind of proprietary features (prefixed by
-webkit-). Similarly, there are indeed many features still missing from Firefox while already implemented for the two other engines (such as CSS@function).But my point, which I should’ve gone into further detail earlier, is that WebKit, primarily maintained by Apple (originally authored by Apple, and a trademark of Apple since 2013), doesn’t have the same, browser-focused teams found on Mozilla (whose main product is Firefox) and Google (whose main product is advertisement through their platforms, including Chrome, so Chrome is part of their main focus just because that’s essential to keep the ads running and telemetry sneaking on the user). Apple is more focused on other businesses, such as hardware and UI, Safari and WebKit are their side-project.
Chromium needs no introduction (used to be an interesting browser until Google’s mask “don’t be evil” fell and straightforwardly revealed their corporate face and farce), Firefox have been “welcoming the new AI overlords” for a while, text browsers (such as Lynx) are far from feasible for a CAPTCHA(and Anubis)-driven web…
To me the hope lies in Firefox forks
@INeedMana@piefed.zip @technology@lemmy.world
Yeah, me too. Unfortunately, the forks can only get so far in removing upstream AI garbage and other proprietary/corporate-oriented whistles-and-bells. If, say, some AI feature becomes so ingrained inside Firefox upstream, so deeply it ends up becoming some hard dependency for fundamental functioning of the browser (i.e. a feature that, if removed at the code-level, would render Firefox simply unable to function), no WaterFox, IronFox, Fennec or LibreWolf would be able to keep up with the latest versions: they’d either need to do a hard fork trying to independently maintain an entire codebase for a browser, or they’d need to use downgraded versions.
Not even to say about licensing shenanigans. We’ve seen many open-source projects suddenly changing their licensing to include legalese thin letters. We’ve seen open-source projects requiring developers to sign up some kind of NDA before being allowed to contribute with code. Seems like initially-open licenses aren’t written on stone when it comes to big projects, and Firefox is a big project.
The universe of open-source software is being slowly hijacked by corporate interests. This is not different with Firefox, which (as I said in another reply to someone in this thread a few minutes ago) is Mozilla’s main product (if not the main product, it’s certainly among their main projects). The same Mozilla which has been pivoting to AI (e.g. acquisition of Anonym; subtle phrasing changes from “About Firefox” page which used to state how “Firefox will never sell your data”, now this phrase is gone).
I use WaterFox on a daily basis. It’s by far the best browser I’ve been using. I tried LibreWolf but it doesn’t really likes my Portuguese ABNT2 keyboard (which has accents I use often), even after disabling ResistFingerprint, so I ended up sticking with WaterFox. On mobile, I use Fennec on a daily basis, and I’m worried about the end of “sideloading” on Android which will likely mess with its installation. But I’m aware of how both browsers rely on upstream code from Mozilla Firefox, whose enshittification is already an ongoing phenomenon. And that’s really depressing when it comes to the future of browser landscape, because we’re hoping for a true alternative. Servo is the last bastion of said hope (until it gets EEE’d by corporate interests, given how Linux Foundation itself is increasingly surrounded by corpos.
I’m more of a GNU/Stallman person who values autonomy and libreness as non-negotiable principles. I’m only using Android because I’m stuck with it due to certain societal impositions (banks and gov apps), otherwise I’d be long using a custom phone, which wouldn’t even be Linux, but something way more “unorthodox” for a phone such as FreeBSD or Illumos/OpenIndianna, systems of which I already used on a PC environment and got quite fond of.
Gross
Every minute that passes, Gemini (not the Google one!) looks more viable, which is already a shame because as I described in lemm.ee before it went down, that itself feels like “Gopher but in the format of a brutalist buttplug”.
What we need is some sort of return to HTML + CSS 1.0, or a web engine that simply ditches JS, so that development can be tackled by Individuals again.
Separation of server styles, server markup and client styles is definitely something Gemini lacks, not having server styles at all.
But it’s not as much a problem of browsers as it is of the environment in which information is shared and propagated. While we still connect to websites using a browser, those websites will behave however their owners wish, inflating web standards and requiring complex browsers.
I was dreaming of something like “hypertext Usenet”, and making descriptions of another system I was interested in trying to make, I am still not even close to that, and I’m not sure I’m still interested, because it appears NOSTR now has much of what I wanted in its standards.
Basically if you imagine a system for propagating posts addressable by ids and with markup inside, referring to styles and containing hyperlinks by ids to other posts, you can throw away the idea of a website, and still have the hypertext web. That markup can be anything, while the URLs in the links leading to images and such (and other pages) are using those ids or are at least Blossom-compliant.
I think NOSTR of new protocols is the one most likely to eventually attain such functionality. People here wouldn’t like it, I suppose, because of huge intersection with Bitcoin community and because most clients and client libraries are for the web. But there’s now a C client library, functional enough, and architecturally NOSTR is worlds above the thinking of designers of Lemmy, for example.
Someone could theoretically fork ladybird and strip out the AI, but it would be a lot of work.
Not that much, there’s a git log, just find when they started doing AI and fork from just before then
common ladybird l
I’m still gonna try it. Downvote away. 🖕fuck the Lemmy hivemind poutfest.
