Ladybird Browser Gains Cloudflare Support to Challenge the Status Quo (linuxiac.com) 103
An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog Linuxiac:
In a somewhat unexpected move, Cloudflare has announced its sponsorship of the Ladybird browser, an independent (still-in-development) open-source initiative aimed at developing a modern, standalone web browser engine.
It's a project launched by GitHub's co-founder and former CEO, Chris Wanstrath, and tech visionary Andreas Kling. It's written in C++, and designed to be fast, standards-compliant, and free of external dependencies. Its main selling point? Unlike most alternative browsers today, Ladybird doesn't sit on top of Chromium or WebKit. Instead, it's building a completely new rendering engine from scratch, which is a rare thing in today's web landscape. For reference, the vast majority of web traffic currently runs through engines developed by either Google (Blink/Chromium), Apple (WebKit), or Mozilla (Gecko).
The sponsorship means the Ladybird team will have more resources to accelerate development. This includes paying developers to work on crucial features, such as JavaScript support, rendering improvements, and compatibility with modern web applications. Cloudflare stated that its support is part of a broader initiative to keep the web open, where competition and multiple implementations can drive enhanced security, performance, and innovation.
The article adds that Cloudflare also chose to sponsor Omarchy, a tool that runs on Arch and sets up and configures a Hyprland tiling window manager, along with a curated set of defaults and developer tools including Neovim, Docker, and Git.
It's a project launched by GitHub's co-founder and former CEO, Chris Wanstrath, and tech visionary Andreas Kling. It's written in C++, and designed to be fast, standards-compliant, and free of external dependencies. Its main selling point? Unlike most alternative browsers today, Ladybird doesn't sit on top of Chromium or WebKit. Instead, it's building a completely new rendering engine from scratch, which is a rare thing in today's web landscape. For reference, the vast majority of web traffic currently runs through engines developed by either Google (Blink/Chromium), Apple (WebKit), or Mozilla (Gecko).
The sponsorship means the Ladybird team will have more resources to accelerate development. This includes paying developers to work on crucial features, such as JavaScript support, rendering improvements, and compatibility with modern web applications. Cloudflare stated that its support is part of a broader initiative to keep the web open, where competition and multiple implementations can drive enhanced security, performance, and innovation.
The article adds that Cloudflare also chose to sponsor Omarchy, a tool that runs on Arch and sets up and configures a Hyprland tiling window manager, along with a curated set of defaults and developer tools including Neovim, Docker, and Git.
Hyprland (Score:2, Informative)
a Hyprland tiling window manager, along with a curated set of defaults and developer tools including Neovim, Docker, and Git.
In case you're wondering, Hyprland is a WM alternative that doesn't support remote login. It does tiling, but it doesn't do compositing as well as Compiz, and is a bit slow.
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Since when can a WM prevent remote login? Or do you mean you cannot log into other machines from Hyprland? That would be excessively stupid.
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Indeed, that is excessively stupid.
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Ladybird?
They may be turning off close to half their potential audience....men.
Sounds too feminine, girly.....
Say what you want..."be progressive", "It shouldn't matter what it's called"....etc.
But you're not going to change nature or societal norms/culture....and a lot of guys are going to think this is geared towards women and may not even give it a try....
Branding is an important thing....ask the ad agencies that spend bi
Re:Hyprland (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't worry GP, LadyBird Pro Extreme Edition is probably right around the corner.
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How about "Ladybird Killer Edition"
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How about "Ladybird Killer Edition"
It'll go over better than LadyKiller (Bird Edition).
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They could use some more gender-neutral name, like Ladyboy.
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If you don't want to use a browser because it's named ladybird, you are an idiot.
Who do you think uses the web?
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You really think dudes wouldn't use a computer called "Amiga," or name their favorite gun "Vera," or their favorite baseball bat "Lucille?" Captain, please don't refer to the Enterprise as "she," or Cayenne8 will think you're .. "progressive!"(?!?)
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Amiga sounds too much like something an immigrant might say. We speak ENGLISH in this COUNTRY!
And what about "Lady Liberty" ? It seems incredibly weak and effeminate for the USA to have a woman represent something as MANLY as liberty!
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You really think dudes wouldn't use a computer called "Amiga," or name their favorite gun "Vera," or their favorite baseball bat "Lucille?" Captain, please don't refer to the Enterprise as "she," or Cayenne8 will think you're .. "progressive!"(?!?)
I do not refer to my favorite "baseball bat" in the feminine.
(Even though it GOES in the feminine...)
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Who gives a shit what the browser is named, if it works and isn't a conduit for sending all your data to a privacy-raping megacorp?
How about they worry about building a functional and fast browser before they start bikeshedding on the name?
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While I applaud this new effort...they REALLY need to consider a name change.
Ladybird?
They may be turning off close to half their potential audience....men.
Sounds too feminine, girly.....
It's the name of an insect. A type of beetle [wikipedia.org]. And, just like other beetles, there are male and female ones!
Absurd masculinity (Score:2)
Sounds too feminine, girly.....
The Hill family's dog, a 13 year old purebred Georgia bloodhound, is named Lady Bird, and is adored by the most manly of men we know: Hank Hill.
"If we're really being honest, never having a girlfriend, never having sex with a woman, really makes you more heterosexual, because honestly, dating women is gay." -- Nick Fuentes
Re:heroes we need but don't deserve (Score:5, Informative)
What competition are you talking about? We need standards compliant browsers that don't ship personal data back to a corporate overlord and allow for extensibility and use how the users themselves want. That pretty much IS Firefox or Waterfox or Seamonkey or Icecat or whatever other Gecko-based browser you want. If you *really* want another alternative, Mozilla is working on Servo, written in rust. I can't imagine this Ladybird browser is somehow more compliant or memory safer than Gecko, other than having Yet Another Corporate Sponsor attached to your personal data. At least with Mozilla they have an incredibly strong track-record of focusing on user's rights and privacy.
The problems I have with Firefox are NOT firefox themselves, but rather websites that want to ensure you are using Chrome or require some windows/chrome specific extension. That's not Firefox's problem but rather the nature of the websites trying to enforce this (the majority of which work if you switch the user-agent to be Chromium based.)
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Mozilla IS a corporation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:heroes we need but don't deserve (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to nitpick - Sure its a corporation but Mozilla Corp is not out to enrich shareholder value or even make a profit - its fully owned by the Mozilla Foundation without a rich board or venture capitalists trying to expand the profit footprint. The corp status is for tax convenience. Unlike OpenAI which has a similar structure, Mozilla Foundation has complete control over the corporate side. The Gecko and firefox source is 100% open source promoting open standards using open projects. Mozilla has proven time and time again they actually have the Open Web and Users Privacy at heart. They make deals for search crap with Google to keep funding them since Mozilla operates at a loss, and due to people like you who think "they shat themselves" people can't or won't contribute either time or code to the project.
Also......ladybird won't work on Windows any time soon, nor on android or iOS. So keep applauding 'competition' that's not aiming to compete with the majority of users....
PS - for the record I have nothing against this project, wish them well, and hope it does one day become a viable alternative, but I don't see that happening any time soon. There's a reason no one writes an HTML/JS engine from scratch....its bloody hard to write an engine like this around decades of evolution without sacrificing some area of support.
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(sigh) I know, don't feed the troll, but this is for other people who might believe your nonsense - https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2024/mozilla-fdn-2023-fs-final-short-1209.pdf [mozilla.net]
Keep in mind also that Mozilla foundation is losing money since some money came from USAID. (even the US Govt at one point wanted an open standards browser).
Disclaimer: I do not nor have ever worked for Mozilla, though I've worked with a few people who have. Your average corporation wastes A LOT more money o
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Remember WHY the internet behaves this way. (Score:3, Informative)
We should remember WHY the internet behaves like one big data mining operation now. Because most people are too fucking cheap to pay, and now consider it offensive (and somehow “racist”) if you have the nerve to actually charge money for your online service to avoid what everyone now does.
You, are now The Product being bought and sold. We fucked this up by allowing Greed N. Corruption to charge nothing, and it cost us everything. We even believed them when they called it “social”
Re:heroes we need but don't deserve (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox started as an alternative to Internet Explorer, after Netscape killed itself. Those two browsers were busy fighting the browser wars, where each would add a new non-standard feature every month to lure away people from the competition. That was the ugly side of competition.
Then came Firefox, which adhered to the HTML standard and the new related standards (like CSS). That gained traction very fast, as web developers loved it, and sometimes even made websites that were hostile to the non-standard browsers. Google Chrome came along, and Google understood that their browser should be standards compliant too. In the early days of Chrome, if Google wanted to add new features, they did this via the standards committees.
Then, Firefox got bought, sorry, sponsored by Google, and rapidly turned to shit, so people ran away screaming to Chrome.
Somehow, Mozilla still thinks they are independent while doing everything what Google wants them to.
To make a long story short, Internet Explorer died, and almost everything is now Chrome or Chrome-based. There no longer is any competition.
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Netscape was not suicidal.
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That is not how I perceived it. The last released version had some really nasty JavaScript flaws and Netscape did not fix them. That left Internet Explorer as the only viable alternative.
It was really a shame, as Netscape sort of invented the modern internet, with encryption, sessions and their cookies, etc. Netscape had a brilliant team of programmers that really knew what they were talking about. But at some point the Netscape organization just gave up.
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Netscape was not suicidal.
Some would argue that rewriting the entire browser [joelonsoftware.com] - the company's crown jewel - from scratch was a suicidal move. At least in hindsight.
I used Netscape and was a total fanboy when version 6 came out. It was terrible and like many users, I stuck with version 4.x hoping they'd improve version 6, but eventually gave up and moved to IE 6, which itself was a vast improvement over IE 5.
Netscape's fate should be a warning to any dev teams arguing to throw it all out and redo everything from scratch (see also: W
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Some would argue that rewriting the entire browser - the company's crown jewel - from scratch was a suicidal move. At least in hindsight.
You forgot to add: rewritten by outsiders who had a history of failure.
"Coders at Work", JWZ: "So basically they [Netscape] acquired this company, Collabra, and hired this whole management structure above me and Terry. Collabra has a product that they had shipped that was similar to what we had done in a lot of ways except it was Windows-only and it had utterly failed in the marketplace."
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Yes, it was. Netscape 4 was a horrible crash-fest, and started the trend of "value-added" bundles like Netscape Communicator. I remember writing fully syntactically correct HTML at the time and Netscape 4 would just show a blank page due to parsing errors. Netscape 6 was so slow and unstable it was unusable.
Apple pre-installed Netscape on MacOS 8. All the Apple people at my university were explicitly replacing it with IE 5.5 Mac Edition, because we all knew Netscape was garbage. When Apple people shun
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What competition are you talking about? We need standards compliant browsers
Standards compliance is a good idea, but recently the W3 has been taken over mainly by Google.
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Servo is no longer run by Mozilla, https://servo.org/ [servo.org]
In 2020 it laid off all the Servo developers and transfered governance to Linux Foundation Europe
You can test right now the nightly builds https://servo.org/download/ [servo.org] (of course unless you are in iOS)
Re: heroes we need but don't deserve (Score:1)
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Indeed. Chromium can be used in privacy-preserving, ad-blocking and other useful contexts. Chrome mistreats you in any way Google wants it to.
Re: heroes we need but don't deserve (Score:4, Interesting)
Cloudflare has been making some bold moves lately and I'm trying not to get my hopes up but so far they seem to be following Google's original (and discarded) mantra of doing no evil.
Given their enormous reach, it's not an exaggeration to say the future of the web depends on Cloudflare *not* turning evil.
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Heh? How the fuck is trying to track me six ways from Sunday, then refusing to let me access a website because I won't let them doing no evil?
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In what way are you being refused access simply because you're avoiding tracking? Try and frame your answer in a way that makes you not sound like a machine or piece of malware.
I've never been denied access to a website by Cloudflare. Ever. Not while running obscure browsers, not while surfing on VPNs, hell not even while using ToR exit nodes.
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Your experience is not universal, and neither is mine. Nevertheless, I am frequently blocked from legitimate human-directed access to content in a browser due to their bogus attempts at a transparent Turing test. And perhaps you'd be better off not invoking "no true Scotsman" unless your intent truly is troll.
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It depends on the site. Sometimes it's a hard block that persists indefinitely, but sometimes a site will load if reloaded immediately, opened in an incognito window, or revisiting it later. On other sites a page may load, but if I don't keep interacting with the page it reloads itself at some point and gets trapped in an infinite loop of CloudFlare denial. I checked my history the other day and in less than 24 hours a background tab affected by this had refreshed 2,500 times.
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You do realize that Cloudflare is not a black box you pop in front of your site and magically does what it does, right?
If it "depends on the site" then the problem is probably with the site configuration blocking rules, cache control behavior, etc. It's a CDN and WAF, and the operator of the site needs to know what the fuck they're doing.
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Of course I do. However, CloudFlare has also insinuated itself into the role of de facto gatekeeper for the internet and I am therefore unwillingly to absolve them of responsibility for user hostile outcomes due to the use of their platform even if it some would deign to argue that these stem from their clients' (mis)configuration. At a minimum their shitty product could detect that a page has already reloaded 500 times in a row and stop before doing it any more.
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Would you similarly not insulate Snap-On Tools from responsibility if some fly-by-night hack in a disreputable mechanical garage "fixed" your car insufficiently with a Snap-On impact wrench?
Or is that toolbox somehow immune from your judgement where this toolbox isn't, because *reasons* ?
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I've been denied. More than once. Every so often I find myself stuck in a verification loop where cloudfare says something like we're checking your browser, and then keeps redirecting back to the same check over and over again. Cloudfare really doesn't like Firefox with uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.
I'm all for this (Score:5, Insightful)
Another rendering engine is always welcome, and having backing from a company the size of CloudFlare means it might actually get some traction and be taken seriously. The Apple-Google duopoly needs some shaking up by someone with clout... and unfortunately that's not Mozilla (I say that as a Firefox user).
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Yeah I had hopes for Zen but that's not panning out.
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We can just wish that they would also support Servo as that's a rendering engine that it supports right now all the platforms (except iOS because Apple doesn't allow that)
https://servo.org/ [servo.org]
no noscript (Score:3)
It does not support; it does not support WebExtensions APIs. I'm guessing it won't support other ad-blockers as well. So no dice, not on my machine, not yet anyhow.
Re:no noscript (Score:4, Insightful)
I would guess that "supporting HTML" is slightly higher up on the list of to-do than supporting extensions.
WebExtension support I would expect once it's actually done and likely in a usable state, right now it's likely more of a curiosity and I'm sure it can only render the most basic of websites at the moment.
I would likely even doubt the alpha release (scheduled for summer 2026) will have support for it, or expect that you can't go more than a couple of pages without it crashing.
Even Apple took an already established engine (KHTML) to create WebKit, though I'm pretty sure when Apple did it over two decades ago they didn't expect it to become the dominant browser engine. (Granted, Blink is dominant, but it is a WebKit derivative).
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Regardless, no ad-blocking? No interest from me.
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Many people can build an app around an open source web engine that supports plugins and scripting. The rendering engine is the hard part and the bottleneck.
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It's a pre-alpha.
If you are expecting every single thing to work right now and be feature complete, then you don't know what "pre-alpha" means.
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At the moment it is basically an engine with some wrapper to try it out around it. It's up to you and others to create an actual browser using the engine.
Cloudflare is the bane of the Internet (Score:3)
Nothing is more of a pita for my Internet use than Cloudflare's robot challenge. It is absolutely terrible, repeatedly challenging me, sometimes without any access in between.
I'll stay away from anything with their name on it.
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That just means you do not understand that details matter.
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Blame AI.
Everybody that I know who has implemented Turnstile (or similar things like Anubis [techaro.lol]) has done so because they are getting absolutely pounded by bots scraping content to feed their LLMs. Reasonably-well-behaved bots used to be 20-30% of my traffic, but that's surged to over 70% recently. Several of my sites were DOSed on multiple occasions until we got Turnstile setup.
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Cloudflare predates generative AI by decades.
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the parent [slashdot.org] wasn't talking about "Cloudflare" and neither was i — we were talking about turnstile [cloudflare.com].
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Some people know how to write good C++. And you won't find a more modern programming language than recent C++ standards.
Re:C++?? (Score:4, Informative)
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In general the only people who like Swift have been brainwashed by Apple to say it's the best language ever. It's an ok language.
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So they're kind of like the Rust cult?
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Yep, the Linux Kernel (written in C!) is obviously an unusable, insecure mess and will never work well.
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C++ is similar to Rust, but intended for devs that don't need training wheels. And then there's JavaScript [wegotthiscovered.com] ...
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is similar to Rust, but intended for devs that don't need training wheels.
Training wheels? Rust is more like a unicycle. If you add a second wheel, good luck figuring out which wheel should own the chain and which should borrow it.
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Because they want it to be fast, and are planning to hire competent engineers who don't write code riddled with buffer overflows and null pointer references?
If you're so concerned about c++ code being unsafe and obsolete, make sure you aren't running any of the following operating systems, as they are surely making use of C++ code in their kernels:
Windows
MacOS
Linux
iOS
Android
FreeBSD
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macOS used to have a limited subset of C++ in the kernel, inherited from NeXTStep (no exceptions, etc.), although I don't know if that's still the case. But Linux is famous for having no C++ in the kernel (only C and Rust), and Android uses the Linux kernel. They used to even be opposed to changes to headers to make them successfully compile when #included in C++ projects. Are you sure there's actually C++ in the other kernels on your list?
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Fine.
Let's go ahead and expand the scope to include device drivers, middleware, firmware, etc.
Happy?
You can split hairs if you like, or you can accept that there's still a shitload of C++ out there, running just as secure as any other language written by competent engineers.
KOTH (Score:5, Funny)
Boomhaur: "I dunnoman newfangled renderengine gonna buggy n'all lottavolving standards, man."
Gribble: "It's all part of the browser conspiracy with the Government and Google spying on you. That's why I don't use the web --- GOD, they EVEN CALL IT the "web". Rusty Shackleford, on the other hand has an Internet profile. You can take your Illuminati Browser and shove it up your ass. I fear that we have lost Hank."
Hank Hill: "Ladybird is a trustworthy and reliable browser, with a keen sense of smell, and she is so loyal she would do anything to protect you. I'll tell you what."
Joseph (to Bobby): "Are you sure your Dad knows what the Internet is?""
that boy ani't right (Score:2)
that boy ani't right
WebKit (Score:4, Insightful)
WebKit from Apple? This made my knee jerk. How could they have forgotten KHTML?
Then is realized that it's been like 20 years since WebKit started. 20 years?!?!
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Thinking of Webkit I wonder why no open source community came up with a new engine before Ladybird. I mean the KDE project could just have picked up KHTML again (or fork Webkit/Blink as new base) and continue development. They obviously once had the manpower for a browser engine, so one wonders why everyone gives up before even starting.
rendering engine AND LICENCE VARIETY IS GOOD (Score:2)
I came to find ladybird while searching for BSD licensed browsers. Having FOSS license diversity is good IMHO (I do not subscribe the "one lincense to rule them all" school of tought).
Also, aside from rendering engine diversity, ladybird has very interesting, new and stronger security concepts.
Too bad it is not really multiplatform, as windows is a second class citizen, compared to elementaryOS Twhere the project originated), BSD,MacOS and linux
Not that I care, i use MacOS,but stilll...
Looking forward to us
Re: rendering engine AND LICENCE VARIETY IS GOOD (Score:3)
LadyBird originated from SerenityOS
Ublock? (Score:1)
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It's pre-alpha. You'll be lucky if it supports HTML5.
How about you give them time to actually make the HTML rendering engine work before we worry about plugin engines and all kinds of other crap?
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Komrade, please post in English.
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Does mother russia pay by the post or pay by the hour, commarade?