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.
No.
If khtml had been GPL, it simply never would have been used for chrome or safari, some other engine would have been picked.
Anything but real open source for these types of companies
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
Iirc it started its life that way but Mozilla abandoned it and the community picked it up
Servo is developed by Igalia at this point. Mozilla is not involved.
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.
Good, the world is in dire need of competition in this arena.
To go along with the alt right stuff, one of their major donors is Shopify.
So what?
Shopify willingly hosted and sold Kanye’s swastika shirt.
Why is this relevant to this sponsorship and the development of the browser? I wouldn’t mind Kanye donating himself if that ensures that we get a great browser. Who cares where the money comes from?
Wow. So if Nazis contributed to a project you like that’d be ok cause that’s what I’m reading from your reply…
Yes. Support is unidirectional not bidirectional.
Holy shit… Dude you need to reevaluate your world view.
Nazis go to cinemas and pay tickets, supporting the cinema’s business. But that doesn’t mean the cinema endorces nazism. Your logic is simply flawed.
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Looks like a confused Swedish dude that when questioned about his use of English pronouns defaults to not wanting to get political. Is there more besides a misguided decision to avoid relevant political topics?
I think we should chastise people that insist on not getting political, but not necessarily boycott everything they do. Or at least we should apply the same moral demands to Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft or Google when choosing which browsers to support. Which of them is the least bad?
There is nothing political about acknowledging peoples’ existence.
Don’t think we should be scared of the word “political” or “ideology”.
Yeah, that too… Everything is political if you want to really get into it. People just want to be able to ignore it until it directly affects them.
Indeed. It’s a privilege to be able to stay inside your little circle and say “we don’t do politics” or “ no ideology here”.
ugh transphobia rots people’s brains
it’s not too hard to just be a decent person ppl
Sure, but there’s no transphobia here. Stop spreading nonsense.
Ok, you keep saying that but never explain why/how. Like, why refuse such a small change so aggressively?
The documentation has long since been changed.
Note that the anon user is able to become root without a password by default, as a development convenience. To prevent this, remove anon from the wheel group and it will no longer be able to run /bin/su.
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/commit/a2a6bc534868773b9320ec3ca7399283cf7a375b (this seems to have also switched to gender neutral language in other parts.'of the documentation and comments as well).
Original drama: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814
Ok, fair enough then. Could have been a simple misunderstanding.
The change was accepted after a short conversation. So to talk about “refusing a small change so aggressively” is total bullshit, like you’re trying to start a fight or something.
Again this shit. This have been debunked many times, yet people still write this nonsense.
Totally excessive in view of the facts.
There are so few alternative browsers and the collapse of the privacy is so global. That seems to me a minor point in relation to the goal.
Transphobic main dev […]
Do you have a source?
Don’t be a dick. The dev is not transphobic, and you know it.
I didn’t know anything about this, but it doesn’t sound as bad with context.
edit: Removed link to a site which shouldn’t be receiving more traffic. I should have vetted it more thoroughly.
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I don’t know. But rather than just accepting the assertion, I did a cursory search. This turned up and I perused it. I didn’t see anything damning and thought maybe somebody could clarify. I am absolutely not trying to defend anybody, but I didn’t spend much time on it. Sorry folks.
Maybe he is a bad guy. Truly, I didn’t know.
That blog post is pretty ridiculous, IMO.
You’ll see the alt-right do that a lot, for some reason.
There’s real criticism, but they always mix it in with some made-up complaints like the slavery thing, which is some of the most obvious sarcasm I have ever seen on the internet, but somehow taken literally by the author of the post.
IDK if he’s a transphobe or whatnot, but his reaction to the change in language was indicative of, at the very least—with the most charitable of interpretations—, a disregard for inclusive language and, more realistically, some philosophy that doesn’t allow for “others” to participate because the existence of those that aren’t male is “political,” somehow.
You might not see it, because you haven’t seen it enough times to recognize it, but it happens again and again and again… But it’s always quiet.
“Don’t make this political,” “ideology isn’t welcome,” stuff like that. Statements that sound reasonable, but are only wielded to quiet those aiming for inclusiveness and acceptance of marginalized people.
It might sound like a less-than-generous interpretation, a bit callous and over-zealous, but it’s just patterns. I hear wolf, I say wolf.
Also, I thought that article had a really funny passage:
One activist (“cafkafk”) seen below, within the GitHub repository for the developer being attacked, celebrating the fact that other activists – organized on “The Fediverse” – had arrived to harass the Ladybird developer.
This alone made me think that it might be satire, but I don’t think it is… The Fediverse, huh? OK.
I would’ve rejected the PR too, but not for violation of that rule, but because one-line changes that merely fix a comment waste everyone’s time reviewing it, and are often just to build someone’s resume. I’ve even seen some that remove trailing whitespace.
If you want to fix it alongside other changes, go for it (and the reviewer said as much on the PR). But if you’re only interested in sending in drive-by commits to build a resume or something and aren’t actually interested in helping, then it should be rejected as noise.
If there’s a broader pattern of this, maybe that’s cause for concern. But if it’s literally just this instance, I could see the dev being annoyed at drive-by PRs.
I would’ve rejected the PR too, but not for violation of that rule, but because one-line changes that merely fix a comment waste everyone’s time reviewing it, and are often just to build someone’s resume.
That’s exactly what I was talking about. You’re taking what they said reasonably, because you’re probably a reasonable person! However, look at what they’re actually saying. The issue wasn’t framed as being a “drive-by,” though later that’s what they claimed. It was about ideology. It was about politics. They didn’t pull up rules about one-line changes to justify not accepting them, they pulled up rules about talking politics.
The problem wasn’t that it was a meaningless PR, the problem was that it was a meaningful PR that they disagreed with.
And, quite frankly, disagreeing with that does make you an asshole, at the very least, and a transphobic misogynist, at worst. There were at least a few PRs open about similar issues, too.
Look, I’m not calling him a transphobe or a misogynist; I’m just saying this was an asshole thing to do, and it was done in an asshole way, and that allowing this sort of thing to exist, especially in FOSS, is not good. That’s all.
Check this out: https://mkultra.monster/tech/2024/07/03/serenityos-and-ladybird
The issue wasn’t framed as being a “drive-by,” though later that’s what they claimed. It was about ideology.
But that’s the problem, it’s both a drive-by, useless change and a politically motivated one. If you show up to a project and submit a change that violates multiple rules, it’s dealer’s choice which one to pick.
With asynchronous discussions like this, it’s impossible to know their motivations, so it’s helpful to assume the best instead of the worst.
Check this out: https://mkultra.monster/tech/2024/07/03/serenityos-and-ladybird
From that:
In order to not look like I’m just repeating myself over and over, here is another pull request where a user fixed the specifically gendered language, and was denied
Here’s the PR in question. It was merged, probably because it didn’t just change “he” to “they” in one spot (but did just that in a few spots), but actually fixed confusing language.
And then after it was merged, there were tons of irrelevant comments about the policy and other PRs.
The one I pulled here included changes from the other rejected PRs. Maybe this was by a different reviewer, idk. That said, it’s still a little iffy since it’s just fixing grammar and especially pronouns that aren’t really relevant to the code it’s commenting.
I probably would’ve accepted that last one because it fixes stuff in a lot of places rather than one (quantity has a quality of its own), and accepting it will hopefully stop PR spam.
Look, I’m not calling him a transphobe or a misogynist
He may be. Idk.
My criticisms here go to everyone involved:
- reviewer should’ve rejected the PRs because they’re noisy, not because they’re “political”
- submitter shouldn’t just submit a 1-line grammar fix in a comment
- github users shouldn’t brigade, discussion should be technical
- blog author should be more accurate (see above)
It’s stupid drama all around.
Fixing comments is fine. If you’re going to only fix comments, at least fix a bunch of them at once, and ideally more than just a pronoun or grammar mistake here and there. English isn’t everyone’s first language, so assume the best and don’t waste everyone’s time with useless changes.
Sigh, you do have a point.
Maybe this was by a different reviewer, idk.
It was. Some other member of SerenityOS, not the person behind Ladybird (awesomekling).
blog author should be more accurate (see above)
That’s fair. I’ll say though, the blog post is dated from 1 day after the PR was actually merged. It’s not unreasonable to think that, when they wrote it, it really hadn’t been merged and they only saw the initial denial citing the policy.
He may be. Idk.
Yeah, I was just trying to say that that wasn’t the point of my rant. I get it I get it.
It’s not unreasonable to think that, when they wrote it, it really hadn’t been merged and they only saw the initial denial citing the policy.
That never happened on this PR. The only human reply before the merge (aside from the submitter) was this:
Please fix the commit messages (see BuggieBot’s comment); and maybe this can go in one commit? Doesn’t really need to be 5 separate ones.
And this is BuggieBot’s comment:
Hello!
One or more of the commit messages in this PR do not match the SerenityOS code submission policy, please check the lint_commits CI job for more details on which commits were flagged and why.
Please do not close this PR and open another, instead modify your commit message(s) with git commit --amend and force push those changes to update this PR.It’s a completely different.
This, plus the tone of the blog post looks like they were on a crusade instead of trying to accurately portray events.
Sorry to beat a dead horse here, my point is that we all need to be careful jumping to conclusions, especially in FOSS where discussion almost exclusively happens asynchronously in text and with people with different backgrounds. Pretty much everyone involved failed at that.
I agree with the rest.
A good breakdown on their progress: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43200604
I’ll be great. The big question is how long it’s left until a stable release
Ladybird says 2026. Given the current state and progress, I believe it may be quite usable by then. I use it sometimes for basic surfing and leaving forum comments. It works surprisingly well often though it is still far from general use. I think the dev team tries to use it themselves for things like Discord and GutHub. They did a demo last month where it “almost” ran Gmail.
I am not sure that Servo has set a timeline. I expect it to take longer.
If you don’t mind my asking, what forums do you use? I’m trying to find new communities.
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.
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
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.
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Ladybird is a brand-new browser & web engine.
Congratulations on completely misunderstanding the comic.
Ladybird is not a new standard. It is a new implementation of existing standards. Nobody has to change or adapt anything.
It still has some of the same problems as the comic, though not to the same extent, it doesn’t need to be a standard for the comic to make sense, it’s also about market share. Having yet another browser has the potential of diluting the market and making people just go for the default.
I might agree if it was another Chromium browser or something, but this uses its own rendering engine and thus directly opposes Google’s dominance on web standards. Currently, there are only 3 major rendering engines:
- Blink - Chromium browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, etc)
- Gecko - Firefox browsers
- WebKit - Safari, GNOME Web (Epiphany), and Konqueror
Ladybird and Servo (Mozilla R&D project) are new ones, and Ladybird seems to have more traction.
Engine diversity is important. Browser diversity… a bit less so.
Excellent edit. Did you make it?
I actually saw someone make the same edit, but I couldn’t find it in time, so I made my own edit.
