'Ladybird' Browser's Nonprofit Becomes Public Charity, Now Officially Tax-Exempt

The Ladybird browser project is now officially tax-exempt as a U.S. 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

Started two years ago (by the original creator of SerenityOS), Ladybird will be "an independent, fast and secure browser that respects user privacy and fosters an open web." They're targeting Summer 2026 for the first Alpha version on Linux and macOS, and in May enjoyed "a pleasantly productive month" with 261 merged PRs from 53 contributors — and seven new sponsors (including coding livestreamer "ThePrimeagen").

And they're now recognized as a public charity: This is retroactive to March 2024, so donations made since then may be eligible for tax exemption (depending on country-specific rules). You can find all the relevant information on our new Organization page. ["Our mission is to create an independent, fast and secure browser that respects user privacy and fosters an open web. We are tax-exempt and rely on donations and sponsorships to fund our development efforts."]
Other announcements for May:

• "We've been making solid progress on Web Platform Tests... This month, we added 15,961 new passing tests for a total of 1,815,223."

• "We've also done a fair bit of performance work this month, targeting Speedometer and various websites that are slower than we'd like." [The optimizations led to a 10% speed-up on Speedometer 2.1.]

This is what I wanted

[xack]

Mozilla is just a sockpuppet of Google now and the fact they don't make an actual attempt to compete with them and just leech of search money has been slowing the web for years. Ladybird needs to make a pledge not to take any Google funding to stay independent and not to repeat the same mistake.

Re:

[DrMrLordX]

How much of that money is spent on actual browser development?

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[test321]

Or you use, contribute or donate to Palemoon. They already have a working browser, a developer community, a user base. They probably need much more to continue playing catch up with the modern web, but you can use Palemoon today! (while Ladybird is pre-alpha) Well I agree the missing part is Palemoon isn't developed by a registered non-profit/charity.

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[DrMrLordX]

Palemoon is fine, though if there are any really good Chromium forks out there it might be easier to support one of those instead.

That being said... are there any really good Chromium forks?

Re:

[DrMrLordX]

For example ungoogled Chromium, Thorium, Bromite, etc.

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[caseih]

Problem is every fork of Chromium is almost certainly going to lose support for manifest v2 addons like ublock origin, unless they spend some serious time and money and actually maintain a real fork. With chromium losing manifestv2 and not looking back, it will get harder and harder for these soft forks to maintain support for manifestv2 even if they want to. Unless some of them want to hard fork chromium and shoulder the burden of development without a whole lot of code from chromium.

Manifest v2 going aw

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[test321]

I use ungoogled-chromium for websites that fail with Firefox. It is *not* a fork, it is a patchset applied to every new chromium release, that removes any reference to google servers / services / call home. The downside for me in all chromium-based browsers is extensions. I'm not sure if anybody operates alternative extension repository, so you'll need to go to google servers to get extensions.

Re:

[DrMrLordX]

Have you tried any actual forks that aren't Brave/Opera/etc? And yeah makes sense that ungoogled Chromium isn't an actual fork.

Re:

[test321]

Unfortunately I cannot help, my browsing needs are very simple, me testing would not be very useful for your use case.

Palemoon may not be worth salvaging

[Excelcia]

I have heavily used and to some extent still do use Palemoon. They started off as a Firefox fork that reversed some of Mozilla's more egregiously stupid decisions and back-to-back-to-back releases that broke everything. They then got lost when scripting changes and Web Assembly became a thing - they were seriously overwhelmed. Instead of getting to work they got angry. They couldn't admit they were in over their heads, and any time a user went on their forum talking about more and more web sites that didn't work, the authors, moderators, and even senior community members would gank them. It got bad - really bad. They were blaming web sites for using WASM, blaming users for wanting to use those sites, and angry at the world that their pet browser was bit-rotting before their eyes. Blaming everyone except themselves.

I have to admit, I was pleasantly surprised when a year or two ago this seemed to somewhat change. They seemed to decide to get busy instead of just getting angry, and they started pulling Palemoon up by its bootstraps. Or were trying to. It is, unfortunately, still not usable without going to extreme measures, like using a stream-editing plugin [github.com] with secret-sauce search and replace patterns to tweak web sites on-the fly replacing problematic constructs. You can find forum threads where users will pass back and forth arcane search-and-replace scripts that make advanced regex look readable, and sometimes it can be made to get some web sites working (for some definitions of 'working'). Even then, Github, All Discourse-based forums, and many other places like banking sites are buggy, or just outright unusable. Their efforts seem to have stalled and Palemoon is losing ground again.

They also still shoot themselves in the foot with weirdness too, like they block all tor access from every domain they use. And not just the forum - If you use tor, you can't even upgrade the browser, or view release notes. I was going to try and get Palemoon some money from the Tor project to possibly get adopted as the official Tor browser, something given Palemoon's stated privacy goals seemed like a good match. But they will have none of it. There was some sort of knife fight between project admins some years ago and it got ugly where apparently tor was used for part of it and now their project owner is allergic to it.

All in all it was a laudable browser with laudable (stated) goals for a while. But it's still unusable, and I couldn't any longer in good conscience recommend to anyone to actually donate them money.

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[PleaseThink]

One of the initial things Palemoon did was strip out a bunch of accessibility features because they didn't want to bother supporting them. I've never looked at them again after that. Kudos if they're actually trying to do better now, but the way they started was doomed.

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[bsdetector101]

Just tried Palemoon....looks like a throw back to the 1980's Windows graphics and looks... Looks kinda like an early version of Windows IE !

Unfortunately it's BSD

[Excelcia]

They will likely get funding, because it is, unfortunately, all BSD 2-clause licensed. Which means anyone can lift it and change it without giving anything back. They will likely get lots of funding, but there will be little actual community engagement. Who wants to donate development time to give code to some corporate entity that they can use without compunction.

They will get a lot of quiet corporate donations, and most of the development for it will be paid. This isn't the kind of "open" project I want to see for a new browser.

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[allo]

BSDL is not bad for a browser engine. You should want people to be able to use it. Electron uses chrome, because Gecko is hard to embed. Mozilla had it's projects for making Gecko usable for other webapps.

Mozilla Prism was great for creating "desktop versions" of webapps, now only "chromium --app" is left, which (other than Mozilla prism) doesn't use the default browser for external links, but Chrome(ium).
Mozilla tried chromeless (and marketed it as Prism alternative) to allow to build custom browsers (toda

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[registrations_suck]

Kinda sad when people find something to bitch about in regards to other people GIVING AWAY their money.

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[Narcocide]

If it can get accepted into Debian, people will probably use it and maybe even support it. If it can't, then well, like Palemoon, nobody outside of Slashdot will even know it exists.

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[registrations_suck]

This.

Additionally, why do so many products have such stupid names?

Healthcare, Banks, Government

[Tokolosh]

What happens when sites refuse to work with this browser? This kind of nonsense is already a thing. Do RFCs still matter?

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[needless login]

No one will notice or care: "We would like to do Windows eventually, but it's not a priority at the moment"

Not a Charity

[dubner]

What's with that headline, Editor David? Ladybird is a non-profit, not a charity. Having IRS 501(c)(3) status makes an organization tax exempt, not necessarily a charity.