I’m not going to trade Firefox for a browser that is years away from being even remotely daily drivable. Even once/if it’s able to render pages mostly correctly, it will still take a while after that to make it fast.
Even with Mozilla’s funding, they’re behind on implementing featues. Ladybird has much less funding and their current policy is to just rely on donations.
It’s going to take years once it actually renders pages correctly to not only be fast but also secure.
And then it’s going to take at least a decade for it to build the necessary ecosystem and ancillary tooling (use. Devtools) that other major browsers have.
And very likely unless it gains significant funding it will never catch up.
At the end of the day, browsers are absolutely crazy expensive to develop. It takes a significant number of engineers not only to maintain it but to build new features and keep up with web standards.
I was satisfied with how Andreas explained the funding situation of the Ladybird browser. They are relying on sponsorships, in addition to individual user donations, and also engaging in fundraising (but not in the venture capital sense).
As Andreas (loosely) put it; they are melting the hearts of people that echo some of the same views as yourself. They are being careful with how they scale and utilize funding, and they aim to make a codebase where everybody working on it is generally proficient in the entire codebase.
Mozilla’s funding isn’t sustainable and their leadership (in my opinion) are not reliable actors anymore - merely masquerading as activists. They do not utilize their money effectively. Relying on the money of an ad-tech/search/browser/etc. monopoly that is openly engaging in mass surveillance, and more recently, selling their AI for war isn’t ethical or compatible with Mozilla’s mission.
Ladybird has 757,140 lines of code. There’s just no way that they don’t still need to develop manifold as much code as what they currently have, to support the features we expect from modern browsers. And they will need more money for that.
I’m not going to trade Firefox for a browser that is years away from being even remotely daily drivable. Even once/if it’s able to render pages mostly correctly, it will still take a while after that to make it fast.
Even with Mozilla’s funding, they’re behind on implementing featues. Ladybird has much less funding and their current policy is to just rely on donations.
It’s going to take years once it actually renders pages correctly to not only be fast but also secure.
And then it’s going to take at least a decade for it to build the necessary ecosystem and ancillary tooling (use. Devtools) that other major browsers have.
And very likely unless it gains significant funding it will never catch up.
At the end of the day, browsers are absolutely crazy expensive to develop. It takes a significant number of engineers not only to maintain it but to build new features and keep up with web standards.
I was satisfied with how Andreas explained the funding situation of the Ladybird browser. They are relying on sponsorships, in addition to individual user donations, and also engaging in fundraising (but not in the venture capital sense).
As Andreas (loosely) put it; they are melting the hearts of people that echo some of the same views as yourself. They are being careful with how they scale and utilize funding, and they aim to make a codebase where everybody working on it is generally proficient in the entire codebase.
Mozilla’s funding isn’t sustainable and their leadership (in my opinion) are not reliable actors anymore - merely masquerading as activists. They do not utilize their money effectively. Relying on the money of an ad-tech/search/browser/etc. monopoly that is openly engaging in mass surveillance, and more recently, selling their AI for war isn’t ethical or compatible with Mozilla’s mission.
The problem is that no matter how ineffective you believe Mozilla to be, it’s simply fucking expensive to develop a modern web browser.
According to openhub.net, Chromium has 35 million lines of code, Firefox 32 million, the WebKit engine has 29 million. Compare that to the Linux kernel which has 36 million lines of code.
The Servo engine has 7 million and is not usable.
Ladybird has 757,140 lines of code. There’s just no way that they don’t still need to develop manifold as much code as what they currently have, to support the features we expect from modern browsers. And they will need more money for that.
I guess we’ll see how it all pans out.