ladybird browser coming up with status quo integration so they challenge status quo.
it’s like these browser devs have no idea what people actually want in a browser.
Straight outta Onion
Ah yes, of course the status quo challenges the status quo!
Challenge the status quo in a Snowpiercer fashion.
I’ve got a roach farm, so I’m already on board.
Cloudflare and “challenging the status quo” in the same phrase ?
Well, the browser status quo. I guess they want their own Chrome.
Its sponsorship only of an open source browser, with no telemetry, advertising, crypto, etc, etc built in.
Sponsors get listed as sponsors, thats it.
For now
So when they do just fork it?
I likely won’t touch it anyway, but it is fully open source, so it can be forked easily. With the transition to Swift I suspect there would be plenty of devs who could take things forward if they wanted to.
If you look at history, Google did the opposite with Chrome, they forked an open source browser and turned it into the world’s most used.
I guess we’ll see.Thats google though, with the added ability to put it direct into an extremely common OS (Android). With ladybird, you’ve got an apparent neocon and 3 years currently planned for a GA release (2028). Its future is already pretty uncertain regardless of sponsorship.
So when they do just fork it?
say the same for chrome, and think again if you mean it seriously.
Iridium, cromite, edge, brave, thorium, vivaldi, pale moon…
And this is a drastically simpler browser that would be in swift 6.
and what can they do against the manifest v3 migration? they cannot afford to keep maintaining the code for mv2 addons. it is an important topic for efficient content blocking.
its funny you bring up edge as an alternative. brave too has opt-out telemetry and other shenanigans.
Cloudflare has announced its sponsorship of the Ladybird browser, an independent (still-in-development) open-source initiative
Is it still independent?
Yes, and their donations are limited to 100k a year per corporation/organization, so there cant be a company who comes, donates 20million and then tries to gain control of them through money
Yes, it is still independent. Cloudflare is just one of the three Platinum sponsors. Other two are Shopify and FUTO. Proton is also a sponsor, but in Gold tier, iirc.
Shopify being a sponsor makes it highly suspect instantly.
I think It’s on their charter that no matter how much corporate money they’ll get they’ll never accept any outside influence just the same. The donators are amply warned to not expect anything other than development as usual or faster.
they stated on their website this project will remain independet and that donators don´t have a say in how this is being developed
No browser with third party investors can be really independent, they always will obey more the interests of the investors as on those from the users. Anyway the guys from Ladybird have balls of steel to develope an browser engine from scratch in an market saturated of browsers of any kind and a brutal competition, this would had more sense 15 years ago, but not now. Good luck, maybe in 2029-2030 there is an good browser multi-platform with all the needed infrastructure, servers and extensions, but I’ll see to believe.
No browser with third party investors can be really independent, they always will obey more the interests of the investors as on those from the users.
That’s why they limited donations to $100k per organization. No one is allowed to make themselves indispensable to the project.
How can you say it’s saturated when chrome has an effective monopoly. If you look at browser engines, there’s basically only 3 for desktop, with one of them targeting only Macs.
As said, there are currently three engines + two forks of these (Gonanna and Qt), except some basic render engines from text only browsers (Links, Lynx and some others), but over hundred different browsers which use these engines, + almost 70 abandoned ones, because outdated engines and others which also tried to develope an own engine. This is what I mean with saturated. It’s nice to try to release a browser with a new independent engine, but if there are not enough users which also use it, it’s a death born child. For some products the market is limited. Make it eg. sense to release a new OS? There also existing only 4, Unix, Unixbased like Windows or Mac and Linux with tons of distros. It’s not only the browser engine, in over 20 years there are also growed complete infrastructure arround these engines, dedicated plug ins, extensions, etc, which don’t exist for a new indie engine, precisely because other browsers, which also tried to release a new engine, before Ladybird, are currently all death. Sad, but you need also a minimum of infrastructure for an browser and which offer also somewhat more as only a new engine. It need security and privacy measures, inbuild or with extensions/plug-ins which need an extra developement and other things more.
Still, it’s hard to understand why Cloudflare chose to back exactly Omarchy.
Maybe the developers in Cloudflare use it? Also weird because Omarchy’s default browser is Chromium I think. The webpage didn’t list the default browser, so not sure about that.
Here’s one theory: https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and-fascists.html
Anyway, Omarchy and Ladybird are both run by fascists. Omarchy makes this pretty obvious from the outset – on the home page the big YouTube poster image prominently features SuperGrok, which is a pathetically transparent dog-whistle to signal alliance with Elon Musk’s fascist politics. Omarchy is the pet project of David Heinemeier Hansson, aka DHH, who is well known as a rich fascist weirdo.2 One need only consult his blog to browse his weird, racist views on immigration, fat-shaming objections to diverse representation, vaguely anti-feminist/homophobic/rapey rants on consent, and, recently, tone-policing antifascists who celebrate the death of notable fascist Charlie Kirk.
Speaking of tributes to Charlie Kirk, that brings us to Andreas Kling, the project lead for Ladybird, who tweeted on the occasion of his assassination:
RIP Charlie Kirk
I hope many more debate nerds carry on his quest to engage young people with words, not fists.
– @awesomekling
I was not prepared to learn these things today.
most people outside the us have never heard any of kirk’s talking points. if you only know that he is a conservative debater and use your normal (non-us) definition of “conservative”, then “people should not die for their opinions” is not a controversial take. i’m not saying that’s what’s happened here but it’s the most likely situation considering klings history.
The argument on Kling seems pretty weak to me… is he Fascist because… he doesn’t support violence and an assassination? 🙄
By this logic for being not fascist one must support the death penalty?
I am pretty sure fascists are in favour of violence and murder (in fact the person cited was killed by a fascist)
RIP Charlie Kirk
I hope many more debate nerds carry on his quest to engage young people with words, not fists.
“carry on his quest”. What was Charlie Kirks quest again? Where does he say he doesn’t support violence and assassination? Are you Klings PR?
I am pretty sure fascists are in favour of violence and murder (in fact the person cited was killed by a fascist)
Just because fascists kill fascists doesn’t make spreding hate less fascist. Does your definition of fascists only start when they start shooting people on sight?
People like kirk were revelling in current administration. But since they didn’t “use violence”, they must’ve been innocent in all this trend, huh?
Honestly there’s a reason fascists are on the rise. People like you seem too oblivious to see the subtle narrative of spreading hate by casual undertones.
But hey, you do you. I hope you take up his quest as well.
No, Kling is not at his first “offence” - he doesn’t support LGBT, so that surely makes him a fucking fascist.
Can you cite something for that? I’m not disagreeing, I’m just disappointed by the revelation and would like to get my facts straight.
Grrrreat. So one can already tick off that browser before it is even ready to test.
Honestly, Firefox has been stable AF and forks are doing awesome work. Maybe those forks might even continue doing their own thing by the time this project will be ready for beta testing.
Competition is great but this one’s on already on shaky ground.
I’m rooting for Servo more than these fascist wannabes.
Jesus, what a reach for two projects run by normal dudes.
The open source community is filled with people on the left side trying to bring down people they disagree with. You can tolerate them, or fork away and leave their “shitty project run by fascists” instead of witch hunting and name calling anyone you dissagree with
fascists guy: has an opinion
leftist guy: wants to witch hunt a guy for his opinion amd get him kicked out of his own project
like it or not, who’s being fascist? you know it well.
Foss is one of the most inherently leftist institutions in our society
Hey, hi, trans person here. Calling my mere existence “political” is not “just an opinion”. Rejecting a PR to change “he” to “they” in some code comments is also just a stupid hill to die on. No singular they is basically baby’s first edgy opinion.
Sorry which are we talking about the rejected the PR, DHH or kling?
I suspect its DHH just making sure
Edit: Found it
Kling rejected with: “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”
For SerenityOS documentation to use a singular they to not assume gender.
Edit 2: For the record, this is even more stupid than you think. The documentation was written with gendered language for a male reader only in mind.
“Hey, I fixed your bad writing”
“POLITICS?!1?!%?!”
The tweet about Kirk has some firm context with this. I’d call it pretty dang likely that kling is a fan…
You yourself are tagging the fascist guy as a fascist. Not all opinions are just opinions.
Who’s the real fascist?
The one you tagged as such.I’m labeling him that to make clear the irony of the situation
the supposedly “fascist” guy: has an opinion
the totaly “moderate” leftist guy: wants him gone even from his own project from it
hope I made myself clear now 👍
the “supposedly” fascist guy:
has an opinionwants to get rid of people not like him and who did not do any wrongNo, you did, but my point still stands. Not all opinions are just an opinion.
Person A: yeh we need to accept shootings. Empathy is damaging. So much more damaging crap.
Person B: they debated, such good people, we need more like them.
Yeah. No? My point is that there’s a reason they get tagged as fascists or fascists apologists, they have fascist opinions or condone/glorify people saying them.
“Has an opinion” is an unacceptable generalisation in this case.
Let’s not forget that Drew is the one that wants to burn Stallman at the stake.
Yeah, they could have just backed arch
I’m not going to have interest in any new browser that’s written in security nightmare languages like C or C++.
NSA Releases Guidance on How to Protect Against Software Memory Safety Issues
Commonly used languages, such as C and C++, provide a lot of freedom and flexibility in memory management while relying heavily on the programmer to perform the needed checks on memory references. Simple mistakes can lead to exploitable memory-based vulnerabilities. Software analysis tools can detect many instances of memory management issues and operating environment options can also provide some protection, but inherent protections offered by memory safe software languages can prevent or mitigate most memory management issues. NSA recommends using a memory safe language when possible. While the use of added protections to non- memory safe languages and the use of memory safe languages do not provide absolute protection against exploitable memory issues, they do provide considerable protection. Therefore, the overarching software community across the private sector, academia, and the U.S. Government have begun initiatives to drive the culture of software development towards utilizing memory safe languages.
From their FAQ https://ladybird.org/#faq
Why build a new browser in C++ when safer and more modern languages are available?
Ladybird started as a component of the SerenityOS hobby project, which only allows C++. The choice of language was not so much a technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain.
However, now that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect.
We have evaluated a number of alternatives, and will begin incremental adoption of Swift as a successor language, once Swift version 6 is released. (More background.)
then I have good news for you: https://linuxiac.com/ladybird-browser-team-selects-swift-as-preferred-language/
That is good news! I wouldn’t have guessed Swift, but I can see why Swift 6—which has been GA for a year—might make sense: https://www.swift.org/blog/announcing-swift-6/
C++ interoperability
Swift 5.9 introduced bidirectional interoperability with C++ to seamlessly bring Swift to more existing projects. Swift 6 expands interoperability support to C++ move-only types, virtual methods, default arguments, and more standard library types including std::map and std::optional.
C++ types that do not have a copy constructor can now be accessed from Swift 6 as non-copyable types with ~Copyable. And for those times when it’s useful to expose a C++ type with a copy constructor as ~Copyable in Swift for better performance, a new SWIFT_NONCOPYABLE annotation can be applied to the C++ type.
Swift now also supports calls of C++ virtual methods on types annotated as SWIFT_SHARED_REFERENCE or SWIFT_IMMORTAL_REFERENCE.
When calling C++ functions or methods that have default argument values for some of their parameters, Swift now respects these default values, rather than requiring you to explicitly pass an argument.
Platform Support
Swift is designed to support development and execution on all major operating systems, and platform consistency and expansion underpins Swift’s ability to reach new programming domains. Swift 6 brings major improvements to Linux and Windows across the board, including support for more Linux distributions and Windows architectures.
Rust has its own non-security issues, you just won’t hear about it, as they’re being drowed out by “OMG, this Rust developer has PRONOUNS and CATS, what happened to free speech, why not everyone is a fundamentalist christian like me?” style smear by the likes of Brian Lunduke.
Sure, but any competition to Chromium is good
For sure it is good because any other engine is direct or indirect an Google project, all development over the past decade was funded by Google. But this, to create a new indie engine in 2026 comes 15-20 years too late as to be capable to gain any minimum market share. The browser market is a brutal competition with over 70 companies victims in this battle, and I fear that Ladybird won’t be an exception.
Fair concerns. I share the skepticism, but am still always happy to see projects like this attempting to swim against the current, late or not
