I donate to Ladybird and Servo, and I hope they succeed. We need serious competition and a check on Mozilla (not to mention Chrome and Safari).
That said, I’m sad that neither Ladybird or Servo are licensed under strong copyleft licenses. We need user-oriented browsers now more than ever, and strong copyleft enables that. I worry that, even if these engines are successful, they will be co-opted by proprietary browsers and eventually superseded by them.
This happened before - both Chrome and Safari ultimately derive from KHTML, Konqueror’s browser engine. If KHTML had been licnesed under the GPL instead of the LGPL, Chrome and Safari (and not just their engines) may have been free software today. Or, at the very least, it would have been much more difficult for Apple and Google to get started.
That said, I wish Ladybird the best. There donation = no influence policy is excellent, and I really, really hope they can stick to it in the long term.
That would not have changed much, since browser engines are million-manhours projects and a small group of devs doing that voluntary, just isn’t enough.
Isn’t servo mostly a Mozilla-led project? I thought servo would probably just replace gecko as the engine firefox used if it ends up succeeding
Good, the world is in dire need of competition in this arena.
Once Servo is finished, we might have a browser rennaisance (I hope)
That would be nice. I know lately I’ve been playing around with gopher sites with command line browsers. It’s been fun seeing what others have made.
A good breakdown on their progress: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200604
Politics aside, I’d be curious to see how far something like this can go. Can’t not think of Opera Software - even they were not successful while they were using their own proprietary tech.
I’ve been testing it out, it’s pretty fucking rad.
same slogan everywhere, plant pictures for a strong greenwashing aesthetics, old white men smiling reassuringly. 5/7 homepage.
I love it when I see Ladybird come up! ESPECIALLY now with the ongoing enshittification of FF lmao
