Imagine the (hu)man-hours it took to get to the current versions of WebKit, Firefox and Chrome. Now imagine trying not to do the same mistakes and avoiding regressions of all the code that has ever been written. I cant even begin to imagine the amount of salary this needs to be undertaken properly. Hopefully the current and future AI/LLMs will help somehow?
How does one even keep up with that? Are we already at the level of billions of dollars spent? Tens of billions? How does Proton or any other browser writing endeavor keep up with that? You need a crazy billionaire with money to burn to finance something like that.
No new projects really start from scratch. It’s how we evolve as a society.
You build upon what already exists. It could be from open source code for instance.
When I code, I often copy/paste bits of code from previous projects I’ve made to make it much quicker.
I’m sure Ladybird will do if they have a release date for 2026. 2 years is not that long. Of course, it won’t be full fledged, but having more then 2 options would just be better for the end user.
Be aware of what you are asking:
Developing a competitive non-chromium, non-gecko browser from scratch means finding and employing a couple hundred experienced developers and even then it will take years and millions of dollars.
This might be a bit too big of a thing even for Proton AG.
Yes, that’s what everybody’s saying, so I’m clearly wrong here.
I don’t understand what makes Ladybird different though. How can they have a release date of only 2 years, with only 6 engineers (ramping to 18) and also only be backed by non-profit?
From what I can see, they have 2 platinum, 4 silver and 2 bronzes, meaning a total of 250k$ USD. It doesn’t seem like that much.
It will probably suck.
If the project ever goes “mainstream” they will have to upscale by a lot even to keep up with the bug fixing.
Don’t get me wrong, I wish them the best of luck but a browser is about the most complicated app you can write and people expect it to be secure and security relevant bugs to be fixed in days if not hours.
It’s not based on anything, like the Servo project their goal is building a browser engine from scratch (that is why people are currently excited about it, its a blank canvas still mostly hypothetical, and at this stage we can all project hopes and wants onto it).
I think it’s way to early know what it’ll look like or if it’ll ever be completed or not (and if it does, whether it’ll have any focus or comparative advantage/disadvantage on either privacy or security, which as far as I know, Ladybird project has not indicated will be their focus or area of expertise, and don’t highlight on their website). Security gets mentioned once, and Privacy receives no mention.
I’m hopeful, that ladybird may bring new energy to the browser space, and hopefully maybe possibly be attractive in the future with respect to either security and or privacy, but I think the odds are somewhat low (but not zero) that they will successfully make it to market and if so make it to market in a form that is compelling to the privacy and security community.
The appeal of a hypothetical new browser + browser engine to me personally is that it could be built from the ground up with modern security and privacy concepts and as a core part of the design philosophy from the beginning and without ~20+ years of technical debt) but so far I haven’t read or heard any indication that the Ladybird project shares a similar vision, and I’m unaware if any of the 7 developers working on the project have expertise in either area). (I don’t mean to sound like a wet blanket, I am hopeful and interested in Ladybird, I think we are just in the ‘wait and see’ phase and will be for probably at least a few years).
Raw numbers are not always the best way to compare things, but just to give a sense of scale of a modern independent web browser, here is a comparison I put together a few months ago over on the Techlore Forum:
Proton seems more likely to try and acquire an existing browser and company over ever developing their own, as nice as it would be to have more mainstream options, I don’t see them being the answer.
uhh no??? proton already struggles at staying focused on what they should be working on. why on earth is having them take on the gargantuan task of developing a whole new browser engine (or what, you want them to just use chromium or gecko??) and application a remotely appropriate use of their already limited resources?
best we can do is hope ladybird takes off and works out.
