Finally, another web engine is being developed to compete with Chromium and Firefox (Gecko), and they’re also working on a browser that will use it.
The devs have some problematic views, mainly transphobic and misogynistic.
Is this because they used “he” instead of “they” in the build instructions? … They changed that and acknowledged the mistake. Surely that’s enough. It’s the fucking build instructions. I think we can probably find it in our hearts to forgive them.
[edit] Just in case people think I’m joking. I’m not. As far as I’m aware, the critical incident that that has resulted in people calling Ladybird devs anti-trans is that they wrote ‘he’ instead of ‘they’ in the build instructions. That’s what caused the original outrage. And as far as I’m aware, there have been no other incidents. But please, if there is something of substance that I’m not aware of, post about it here.
To be clear, nobody was outraged by the devs using gendered language. The outrage was because they rejected multiple PRs to correct it under the guise of it being “political”.
Such accusations should really be followed by a source.
This was resolved and the PR was merged
No, it wasn’t. You might say that the issue was sidestepped, because it says “it”, rather than “they”, now.
I guess it was an overreaction by mastodon, though. Even if I understand the initial criticism.
‘It’ is gender neutral so it was resolved
You claimed the PR was merged.
A PR fixing all those issues was merged.
They used “they” when referring to a person, and “it” when referring to a process (the author used “he” when referring to a process calling another process, when he should have used “it.”)
Where do you guys get the energy to keep up these smear campaigns?
It’s nice and all but usage of Swift is kind of not great.
Why is Swift bad?
Also, I noticed the project has taken donations from mostly non-foss companies. Let’s hope they stand by their principles
Welp, I haven’t seen anyone learn Swift other than for Apple stuff these days. So I wonder how many can actually contribute to the code. It’s also made by Apple, so yeah. It would have been more performant and secure (both of which are pretty important in a browser) if it was written in a more low level language. For example Rust.
Shopify (i.e. Shittify) being their top donor already has me looking sideways at this project. They’ll invest in anything they think they can get an edge with and if something starts to happen they’ll fuck it up and wallstreet-ify it as fast as possible if they can.
Their (Shopify’s) guru founder Tobi made a huge NFT play that went absolutely nowhere while I still worked there. They spent a lot of time and money on it, right before they laid several thousand people off.
Oh great. Now I’m losing hope in this project even more.
I mean I hope Ladybird devs do a great build and go their own way without being corrupted by their donors and all that, don’t get me wrong. But whenever I see that dumb shopping bag logo I get the no feelings.
You can also read up on how the vast majority of Mozilla’s funding has been coming from Google for a very long time, and draw your own conclusions from that fact.
I agree that it’s not ideal, but hey, it’s open source, and the Louis Rossmann cult is the only other top-tier donor, so I’m sure they’ll be fine.
While I agree shopify has a kind of “mierda touch”, I still see it as if it goes sideways with them someone will just fork the code.
Do you have a source for that? I’m trying to look for donors but don’t really find anything.
Starts about midway down their page at ladybird.org
Hot take: Since it’s a BSD licensed browser at some point in the future, there’s going to be a company that funds it brings it to mainstream with their flavor, and then will over throw chromium in time. Replace an ‘evil’ with another ‘evil’.
All hail the cuck license, ensuring we end up back at the same place every single time.
Good intentions and all that
Isn’t that the road to hell? Paved with good intentions
I like this project and just hope it was gplv3 or some similar copyleft license
Ladybird is licences under BSD-clause 2. Which allows privatization of the code.
IMO a web browser should be GPLv3, specially to not allow DRM bullshit in the browser.
AGPL, to prevent streaming (while not sharing the code).
Yeah AGPLv3 is the best if it’s going to be hosted as a service. Which a lot of web services do. Good point.
…to be fair browsers don’t really make sense for streaming, but you could call it “future proofing”.
Yeah not a good licence at all for an independent browser. Idk if Servo MPL is a good license either. Do you know of any web browser that is GPL?
Definitely not what you want, but Gnome web (Epiphany) is GPLv3 according to flathub.
Its better than a BSD style license which is what I was mainly critiquing
Sounds fun, but I wish there were more people who’d invest in making Firefox’s Gecko more easy to use (stretch goal: revive Proton, which is Electron but Firefox) instead of pushing a ton of effort into inventing a new thing.
That said, this is coming from SerenityOS (specifically, the founder and basically the entire community concentrating on building its browser instead of hacking the OS, resulting in a split), so I understand that it might be a lot harder to port large codebases to a new OS instead of than starting a new one.
Edit: It’s Positron, not Proton
