alt Hacker NewsI am watching this project with interest.
It's impressive that they're doing such titanic work. However, I'm highly skeptical that they can create a real rival to established browsers. I'm sorry for telling this, but Web standards are simply too complex and huge. Ladybird to Chrome / Firefox is almost like Wine / ReactOS to Windows, that last 3-5% of gap actually differentiates a normal browser from a browser that is a pain for web developers. And it's the most stubborn part to be fixed. Also, keep in mind that it hasn't much market, at least IE had a significant market that forced the developers to support it (with all the hate).
https://waspdev.com/articles/2025-04-07/will-there-be-a-new-...
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The history of Chrome and Safari traces back to KTML, the renderer for Konqueror, a niche browser on Linux with so little market share there weren't real conversations about it ever seriously competing with Firefox or IE.
Then something unexpected happened: Apple adopted KHTML for Safari's WebKit. WebKit was then adopted as the render for Chrome
Could a niche browser still become mainstream /today/? I think so.
Just a small personal touch -- my coworker is constantly pushing me to use Chrome because it "just works", but I'm stubborn as hell. Used Firefox from early 2000s. Oh how I will love to twist his nerve even more once I will switch to Ladybird. Saying this because there has been more harder days to counter these pushes. And to be honest I think we are overthinking about how much this last 3-5 % actually matter for huge crowds.
I understand that your argument still stands in big picture, but in this big world there is plenty of room for Firefox and Ladybird and there is more than enough room to grow. Firefox mostly is being held back with their organization. I'm not convinced that it is technical problem.
But then again, I'm still believing that there will be a year of desktop Linux coming. Maybe even sooner than we expect.
It is a nightmare scenario: you have a long tail of thousands of websites that are broken, a large complex codebase and you need hours of time per bug for a human to investigate and fix it. Some trickier bugs could take days to diagnose. It's not sustainable for a small team. Luckily, I think this is one of the cases where AI can be leveraged appropriately, and give them a fighting chance of catching up.
Outside of the adoption of new standards, most of the work that goes into the big 3 browsers is more around edge cases and compat due to historical development reasons.
Ladybird can afford to be a beloved hobby browser that simply hasn't solved all the edge cases but works well 97% of the time
Not even Firefox can keep up chasing down the chromium universe.
As of a week ago their pre-alpha version was capable of running my extremely heavy JS+ SVG + worker thread + SSE app, a bit slowly I admit but correctly in all major exercises I tried. So, I'm optimistic. They're doing great.
Separately I wonder if the compatibility job is easier now that you can just give the HTML5 spec to Fable and Bob's your uncle.