535
Announcing the Ladybird Browser Initiative
(ladybird.org)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
535 points (93.8% liked)
Technology
59161 readers
2183 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I do not understand the urge to start from scratch instead of forking an existing, mature codebase. This is typically a rookie instinct, but they aren't rookie so there's perhaps an alternative motive of some sort.
Because software monocultures are bad. The vast majority of browsers are Chromium based. Since Google de-facto decides what gets in Chromium, sooner or later the downstream forks are forced to adopt their changes. Manifest V3 is a great example of this. You can only backport for so long, especially when upstream is being adversarial to your changes. We need an unaffiliated engine that corrects the mistakes we made with KHTML/Webkit.
Why are open source software monocultures bad? The vast majority of non-Windows OSes are Linux based. Teams who don't like certain decisions of the mainline Linux team maintain their forks with the needed changes.
And we could get a functional one today by forking Chromium and never accepting a single upstream patch thereafter. I find it really hard to believe that starting a browser engine from scratch would require less labor. This is why I'm looking for an alternative motive. Someone mentioned licensing.
Perhaps some folks just want to do more work to write a new browser engine. After all Linus did just that, instead of forking the BSD kernel.
I agree mostly, but forks don't need to keep the upstream. They can go their own way.