this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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[–] [email protected] 34 points 5 months ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 97 points 5 months ago (7 children)

Because there are only like 3 browser engines: Chrome’s Blink, Firefox’s Gecko and Apple‘s WebKit. And while they are all open source, KHTML, the last independent browser engine got discontinued last year and hasn’t been actively developed since 2016.

There’s need in the space for an unaffiliated engine. Google’s share is far too high for a healthy market (roughly 75%), WebKit never got big outside of Safari (although there are a few like Gnome Web, there’s no up to date WebKit based browser on Windows) and Gecko has its own problems (like lack of HEVC support).

So, in my book, this is exciting news. Sure it‘ll take a while to mature and it is up against software giants but it‘s something because Mozilla doesn’t seem to have a working strategy to fight against Google‘s monopoly and Apple doesn’t have to.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Also Gecko's development is led by people thinking that it being usable outside of Firefox\Thunderbird is a bad thing. There was a time when Gnome's browser was based on Gecko, not WebKit. And in general it's influenced by bad practices.

SerenityOS is an amazing project, of course. To do so much work for something completely disconnected from the wider FOSS ecosystem, and with such results.

So it's cool that they've decided to split off the browser as its own project.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (5 children)

That's always struck me as odd, but I'm also very much an outsider looking in. A "gecko electron" does sound intriguing though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Servo is going to fill that void

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I meant alternative browsers, like vimb or surf, but on Gecko and not WebKit.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

Mozilla doesn’t seem to have a working strategy

Guess they couldn't replicate the "own everything that people use to get stuff on the internet and make secret breaking changes to constantly mess up other browsers" strategy.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Could they not add HEVC support? Or is there some technical limitation that meant starting from zero was a good idea?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

HEVC is almost entirely down the the licensing. This section of the wikipedia page details it pretty well.

The tl;dr is that the LA group wanted to hike the fees significantly, and that combined with a fear of locking in led to the mozilla group not to support HEVC.

And it's annoying at times. Some of my security cameras are HEVC only at full resolution, which means I cannot view them in Firefox.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (3 children)

They could, probably. My guess is, that it’s either a limitation of resources, the issue of licensing fees or Google‘s significant financial influence on Mozilla forcing them to make a worse browser than they potentially could. Similar to how Firefox does not support HDR (although, to my knowledge, there’s no licensing involved there).

The biggest problem most people have with Mozilla is said influence by Google, making them not truly independent.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Google probably is putting pressure on Mozilla, but if the options are licensed HECV or open royalty-free AV1, the choice is pretty clear for a FOSS project.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Yes but: HEVC is the standard for UHD content for now, until AV1 gets much broader adoption. And judging from how long HEVC took to be as broadly available as h.264, it’ll still take a while for AV1 to be viable for most applications.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The good news is no streaming service even supports UHD in browers (except Netflix on Edge?) because of DRM. So I don’t see the value.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (2 children)

My Jellyfin server does and on Firefox it needs to transcode to h.264

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I do, generally. But there have been situations where I couldn’t. And most of my friends that are using my server don’t. Dunno why.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Mozilla had the same problem with h.264 until Cisco allowed them to use openh264 and ate any associated licensing costs. Just from a cursory glance, HEVC licensing seems much more of a clusterfuck.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I'm curious as to whether there's not merit in taking the imperfect codebase and improving it.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

If 50% of firefox users donated 2 dollars per year mozilla could work for people instead of Google or at least people AND google

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

The problem is, most user don’t want to pay. And every time mozilla tries to monetise differently they get community backlash…

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Webkit and blink have the same base

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

Yea, but Webkit was forked from KHTML 23 years ago and Blink was forked from WebKit 11 years ago. In the mean time they all definitely evolved to become their own thing, even though in the beginning they were the same.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

webkit and blink are based of KHTML

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Technically blink is based WebKit but yes. However, they were forked 23 and 11 years ago respectively, so it’s safe to assume they evolved into their own thing. But they probably do still share code, yes.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

WDYM "independent" ?

Isn't mozilla / gecko more or less independent?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago (1 children)

They get most of their money from google for the "default search engine deal" make of that what you want. For me personally it doesn't sound fully independent.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Seems a little idealistic.

If ladybird actually achieves any sort of userbase they would take the same deal in an instant.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Based on the community being quite succsessful so far despite being made by volunteers, I don't think they will.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 months ago

Making a web browser that’s fully compatible with modern standards is not easy nor cheap (and worse it’s a moving target because the standards keep evolving). I’m rooting for these folks but eventually money will be an issue.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

No webkit browser on Android either. If there was gnome web for Android id switch in a heartbeat

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Does anyone know why there are barely any WebKit based browsers? WebKit is open source and at least Safari works really well. Is it hard to work with? Do people just hate Apple that much? Is there some limitation?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Also, WebKit was based on KHTML, which was open source and platform independent itself.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 5 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

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.

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.

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

I agree mostly, but forks don't need to keep the upstream. They can go their own way.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 5 months ago (3 children)

There is currently no implementation of web standards that is under a more permissive license than LGPL or MPL. I think that is a gap worth filling and if I recall that is what Ladybird is doing.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

i'd argue its better for software to max foss license like AGPL, not bsd that can be taken out by companies

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I guess Chromium isn't fully BSD. This could be the reason. Although I'd think reimplementing the non-BSD bits in Chromium would be less work than reimplementing all the bits, including the BSD ones.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Chromium and WebKit both still have bits from KHTML in them which is LGPL

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Why is that a gap worth filling? There is no benefit to users as long as its free of a EULA they don't have to care either way. For those wanting to produce open source software based on same they already have all the rights they could need. The only party clamoring for permissively licensed software are companies intending to close off the source and sell other people's work.

I understand why they would want to do that I don't understand why anyone would feel the need to work for free for something someone else closes off.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I can't understand how people can continue relying on chrome and derivatives like electron, CEF etc. and not see it as a problem.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It's easy to understand when you think most comments are similar to yours and don't provide any insight as to why this might be a problem.

Maybe you could update your post and share your knowledge and experience with others, so that there are less people in the world who don't see the problem.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

When trying to render a relatively simple page consisting few thousands of text lines in a table, any current browser will cause mouse cursor to lag for some time, then you'll discover it consumes at least 2 GB ~ 4 GB of RAM. YouTube lags like I have 2 cores instead of 16. Any electron app is either clunky or too clunky, also either hungry or too hungry.

I'm sorry but I don't have time to look up other cases.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Any intuition on why we'd expect opening the same page on a newly implemented browser engine that implements all equivalent standards and functions will consume less resources?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

That's not an expectation. The experience is that this became a reality thanks to google, and that it will only get worse in the future. More competition within browsers is the expectation. Better chance for better frameworks to emerge. Eventually it may cause google code to shift into a better overall state too.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Ladybird was born from SerenityOS, which is a hobbyist unix-like (or POSIX compliant?) OS that simply aimed to do things "from the ground up". It just happened that they needed to make a browser, and the response was to make one from scratch.

From there it seemed to have brought a lot of attention organically to the point where it can stand on its own, but originally it was never intended to be a "third browser engine" from its inception.

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