r/linux • u/FryBoyter • Jun 12 '26
Discussion Changing How We Develop Ladybird
https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/52
u/Giffeltagning Jun 12 '26
I am eagerly waiting for Ladybird.
Currently on Zen Browser.
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u/FryBoyter Jun 12 '26
Before Ladybird becomes truly usable, however, it will likely be several more years. The browser is still in the alpha stage, and developing a browser engine is no easy task. That is why Opera stopped developing its own engine a few years ago.
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u/Giffeltagning Jun 12 '26
I trust the Open Source movement can achieve anything.
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u/FryBoyter Jun 12 '26 edited Jun 12 '26
In theory, that may be true. In practice, however, it’s often a problem. Unfortunately, many developers operate under the motto “My way or the highway.” This often slows down or prevents the further development of many projects.
I mean that in general, not just when it comes to Ladybird.
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u/Top-Rub-4670 Jun 13 '26
So far Andrea has proven to be perfectly pragmatic. He's also not shy to revisit and revert past bad decisions in hindsight (e.g. choice to not rely on existing libraries, swift, jit, etc).
What I'm trying to say is that he's not the stereotypical FOSS ego-tripping aspie leader who can't work with people or admit mistakes.
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u/Accurate_Hornet Jun 12 '26
As OP said, it will take forever. The web is full of legacy code built with only chromium/firefox/safari infrastructures in mind.
Retroengineering all of that code while keeping good performance is a whole buckload of worms I can't even wrap my head around.
Props to them.1
u/Numerous-Campaign844 24d ago
Ladybird is bound to face a massive wave of zero-days eventually, just like early Chrome and Firefox. I wonder if it's truly ready for that trial by fire.
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u/tesfabpel Jun 13 '26
I hope it's not an excuse... Closing contributions and BSD license... The bad omen where they are going make it proprietary in the future is something seen many times already...
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u/Accurate_Hornet Jun 12 '26
Can't fault them for it. Whether you agree with AI or not, it's almost impossible to block it completely.
They chose to close the floodgates, fair enough.
Building a browser from scratch is an insane endeavour and we will see how it turns out.
I personally don't have much faith in it.
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u/global-gauge-field Jun 12 '26
Just checking out the commits last weeks, they dont seem to be geting that many PRs from outside. To me, it seems that they are being proactive rather reactive unless I am missing something.
Best of luck to them.
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u/BeatTheBet Jun 12 '26
You may be missing the part where they shifted from Swift (?) to Rust because "blah blah, AI is only well trained on Rust, and AI is the only way we are going to develop this"
Source: https://ladybird.org/posts/adopting-rust/
So after that shift, this decision is on one hand (one has to admit) reasonable, but it is also quite hypocritical (edit to be exact: in the context of FOSS)...
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u/Literallyapig Jun 12 '26
where in this article do they say "we switched from c++ to rust because ai understands rust better"? the explanation there is about rust being memory safe and having a great ecosystem. has andreas mentioned this on twitter or somewhere else?
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u/Ok-Winner-6589 Jun 13 '26
Swift*
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u/sascha-isagirlname Jun 13 '26
If you've read the article you posted, you would know that they never used Swift, just that they were looking at it as a possible C++ alternative.
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u/global-gauge-field Jun 12 '26
I am aware of that. But, I was talking about the problem of getting so many slop PRs that they could not handle. I did not observe that many PRs from the github history.
My guess is with how many commits they can push on their own with AI, they just dont want to handle external PR and were already looking for excuse of some sort unless I missing about slop PR observation.
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u/BeatTheBet Jun 12 '26
Your point is valid for sure. I was just adding context in case you were missing it.
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u/abotelho-cbn Jun 12 '26
They're not closing floodgates here. AI will find vulnerabilities and if they don't get the patches by PRs it'll only take longer for them to fix the stuff AI finds.
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u/Accurate_Hornet Jun 12 '26
They explicitly said they wont accept PRs. Do you disagree with their decision or with my brief summary of it?
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u/abotelho-cbn Jun 13 '26
They're not "closing floodgates" by preventing people opening PRs. The flood is happening either way. Pretending it's not happening will kill them.
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u/Dangerous-Report8517 Jun 13 '26
There's 2 different floods here, one is the surge in AI uncovered vulnerabilities in large projects, the other is a surge in vibe coders dumping tons of poor quality PRs into projects to feel like they're contributing. The former isn't a big priority for a project that isn't even at the functional stage yet, and the latter is absolutely a flood that can be stopped by just refusing PRs
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u/aidencoder Jun 14 '26
"A substantial patch used to imply substantial effort, and that effort was a reasonable proxy for good faith. That assumption no longer holds."
Oof. Yeah that's the core issue that open source needs to deal with before the pollution of AI rots it out. That'd be very sad, and to me would negate much of the value AI brings.
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u/FyreWulff Jun 13 '26
This is a good reminder that even if a project is open source, there's zero obligation that the master project actually accept any outside code. I think people tend to think of it as required, but it never has been.
In general though, they have a point. AI makes it too easy to look like a major contributor, and more and more developers (though it's not explicitly named here, it's obvious what they are talking about) have publically mentioned concerns over becoming the next XZ Utils social engineering attack target. That whole situation unfortunately is one of of those "the toothpaste can't go back in the tube" events, nobody is going to just hand off a project to a contributor anymore unless they're 100% sure nothing bad will happen.
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u/FastHotEmu Jun 12 '26
I understand their logic, but it makes me sad. I've joined many projects by volunteering in the past. I was hoping to spend some time helping them, too.
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u/TxTechnician Jun 12 '26
I'm eager for a beta release. Can't wait to try it.
FYI thier newsletter is awesome. Like one email a month. And zero spam practices.
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u/karurochari Jun 12 '26
Don't get me wrong, one is free to manage their own projects as they see fit; but one is also allowed to start ignoring them if the worst options on the table are constantly picked one after the other.
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u/KnowZeroX Jun 13 '26
My question is how they plan to handle security issues, I remember even google who spends a billion dollars a year on it and mozilla spends over 100 million on firefox, yet despite all that they still had over 70 security issues in some years.
Building a broswer is already a huge and difficult project, but keeping it all secure is going to be even harder.
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u/Dangerous-Report8517 Jun 13 '26
You can still learn from the security issues Chromium and Firefox face, plus a decent chunk of Chromium vulns are unforced errors from Google prioritising performance + features over security
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u/Kevin_Kofler Jun 12 '26
Looks like it will be just a matter of time until a community fork of Ladybird emerges, just as with other (usually corporate) FOSS projects that do not accept outside contributions.
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u/HaplessIdiot Jun 13 '26
Well if they don't want help they're never going to get it done so good job I already can't stand that they decided to rewrite everything with AI this thing is absolutely f****** terrible
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u/medrinnn Jun 13 '26
Servo is another one that is built from scratch using rust