Ladybird seems to have received a nice boost in momentum in the past two years. If you've ever watched one of Andreas videos on YouTube you'll find he's incredibly driven and knowledgeable in this area. I can imagine someone like him would go from being a "10x programmer" to a "100x programmer" with AI assistance. I am not entirely sure to what degree AI is being leveraged to speed up development, but I am indeed happier I might be able to ditch FF and begin using their browser soon.
> Ladybird seems to have received a nice boost in momentum in the past two years.
I'm still very interested in the project and look forward to each monthly update, and I can empathize (though not agree) with the reasoning, but something is off ever since they announced the decision to close the project to outside contributions. It's still Open Source, but only a self-selected group of maintainers gets to write and merge code, at least for the time being.
Somehow that's not the "a new independent Open Source browser" future I thought we had signed up for with our attention.
Again, I understand all the arguments for why at this particular time they feel that they cannot afford the energy expense required need to run a community. First-hand, actually, because I am involved with running a very large one myself.
But it makes me think a lot about the value proposition of the product. Re-creating Firefox/Chrome can still be a useful exercise, but from an end-user POV another exchangable web browser will not rock their world. Wouldn't the real product be healthy governance?
The flood of low effort AI-contributions makes accepting anonymous contributions impractical nowadays. They'd waste hours reviewing things of no value. I know because it happened to several of my moderately successful projects. At some point I had to stop caring. I now only review the PR if the message is a single unformatted paragraph with few emojis, I find this to be a good signal that it was made by a human and not an agent (the code could still be LLM but a human cared enough to write their own message). I'm sure I will miss genuinely good and valuable contributions, but the signal-to-noise ratio is just too low.
It would be 100x worse for them because who wouldn't want to have a browser in their contribution portfolio when seeking a job?
I agree with your concerns but also think that a new viable browser engine will be such a benefit to the health of the open web that I'm willing to overlook such irregularities, at least for now. sqlite doesn't accept contributions either and it's done well for itself, and if Ladybird ends up going sour there's always the possibility of a fork. This is similar to my stance towards Firefox: despite the actions of Mozilla Corp, having at least one non-Blink engine is too important, and for friends and family that I care about, working ad-blockers are essential so there's no practical alternative.
> Again, I understand all the arguments for why at this particular time they feel that they cannot afford the energy expense required need to run a community. First-hand, actually, because I am involved with running a very large one myself.
This is a problem brought on by AI, and does not seem fair to imply it's Ladybird's problem to solve.
Writing a browser/engine from scratch is a massively ambitious undertaking by itself. I don't expect them to also solve the tangential AI problem that every other open source project is contending with. Others can step up for that one.
> It's still Open Source, but only a self-selected group of maintainers gets to write and merge code, at least for the time being.
That is the way the BSDs are developed and they're free software. If you want to you can pull the code and modify whatever you want. Let them get the thing up and running first, then see how the project handles external contributions. If they somehow fail to see the brilliance of some external contribution a fork will soon take over from where they dug themselves in, something which has happened many times over in free software land: Firefox (took over from the Mozilla Suite), Libreoffice (took over from Openoffice), Nextcloud (took over from Owncloud), egcs (took over from gcc, later became the main gcc branch), etc.
Linux had an existing population of Unix engineers who had a strong incentive to build something that could replace the Unix systems they were paying for.
Ladybird doesn’t replace something developers are already paying for, so the incentive to make substantial, high-quality contributions is much weaker.
Feels like the old "browser wars" days again. Between AI productivity, and Google losing the grace to bloat the web specs, I wouldn't be surprised if it starts to take market share away from other browsers as soon as it's stable.
I didn't expect to see Twitch working so soon!
Ladybird seems to have received a nice boost in momentum in the past two years. If you've ever watched one of Andreas videos on YouTube you'll find he's incredibly driven and knowledgeable in this area. I can imagine someone like him would go from being a "10x programmer" to a "100x programmer" with AI assistance. I am not entirely sure to what degree AI is being leveraged to speed up development, but I am indeed happier I might be able to ditch FF and begin using their browser soon.
> Ladybird seems to have received a nice boost in momentum in the past two years.
I'm still very interested in the project and look forward to each monthly update, and I can empathize (though not agree) with the reasoning, but something is off ever since they announced the decision to close the project to outside contributions. It's still Open Source, but only a self-selected group of maintainers gets to write and merge code, at least for the time being.
Somehow that's not the "a new independent Open Source browser" future I thought we had signed up for with our attention.
Again, I understand all the arguments for why at this particular time they feel that they cannot afford the energy expense required need to run a community. First-hand, actually, because I am involved with running a very large one myself.
But it makes me think a lot about the value proposition of the product. Re-creating Firefox/Chrome can still be a useful exercise, but from an end-user POV another exchangable web browser will not rock their world. Wouldn't the real product be healthy governance?
The flood of low effort AI-contributions makes accepting anonymous contributions impractical nowadays. They'd waste hours reviewing things of no value. I know because it happened to several of my moderately successful projects. At some point I had to stop caring. I now only review the PR if the message is a single unformatted paragraph with few emojis, I find this to be a good signal that it was made by a human and not an agent (the code could still be LLM but a human cared enough to write their own message). I'm sure I will miss genuinely good and valuable contributions, but the signal-to-noise ratio is just too low.
It would be 100x worse for them because who wouldn't want to have a browser in their contribution portfolio when seeking a job?
I agree with your concerns but also think that a new viable browser engine will be such a benefit to the health of the open web that I'm willing to overlook such irregularities, at least for now. sqlite doesn't accept contributions either and it's done well for itself, and if Ladybird ends up going sour there's always the possibility of a fork. This is similar to my stance towards Firefox: despite the actions of Mozilla Corp, having at least one non-Blink engine is too important, and for friends and family that I care about, working ad-blockers are essential so there's no practical alternative.
> Again, I understand all the arguments for why at this particular time they feel that they cannot afford the energy expense required need to run a community. First-hand, actually, because I am involved with running a very large one myself.
This is a problem brought on by AI, and does not seem fair to imply it's Ladybird's problem to solve.
Writing a browser/engine from scratch is a massively ambitious undertaking by itself. I don't expect them to also solve the tangential AI problem that every other open source project is contending with. Others can step up for that one.
> It's still Open Source, but only a self-selected group of maintainers gets to write and merge code, at least for the time being.
That is the way the BSDs are developed and they're free software. If you want to you can pull the code and modify whatever you want. Let them get the thing up and running first, then see how the project handles external contributions. If they somehow fail to see the brilliance of some external contribution a fork will soon take over from where they dug themselves in, something which has happened many times over in free software land: Firefox (took over from the Mozilla Suite), Libreoffice (took over from Openoffice), Nextcloud (took over from Owncloud), egcs (took over from gcc, later became the main gcc branch), etc.
Linux had an existing population of Unix engineers who had a strong incentive to build something that could replace the Unix systems they were paying for.
Ladybird doesn’t replace something developers are already paying for, so the incentive to make substantial, high-quality contributions is much weaker.
Really excited for alpha. When it hits I plan on using it for my daily driver to help them with usage stats and crash reports.
Are there other sites that get through ad blockers as well as Twitch?
This is such a nerdy newsletter I love it
Feels like the old "browser wars" days again. Between AI productivity, and Google losing the grace to bloat the web specs, I wouldn't be surprised if it starts to take market share away from other browsers as soon as it's stable.