This post describes the Ladybird browser, based on the LibWeb and LibJS engines from SerenityOS.

I found that the SerenityOS project also has a web browser with a completely new set of engines. It looks reasonably capable too.

Both LibWeb and LibJS are novel engines. I have a personal history with the Qt and WebKit projects, so there’s some inspiration from them throughout, but all the code is new. Not to mention, hundreds of people have worked on the codebase since I started it, all adding their own personal influences, so it’s definitely its own thing.

Edit: Here’s a recent interview with the creator Andreas Kling talking to Eric Meyer and Brian Kardell about the browser https://www.igalia.com/chats/ladybird

Edit 2: Here’s their August 2023 update video of the browser https://youtu.be/OEsRW3UFjA0

Edit 3: Looks like the project was recently sponsored $100k USD from Shopify https://awesomekling.substack.com/p/welcoming-shopify-as-a-ladybird-sponsor

It’s quite impressive!

Note: I don’t know anything about the politics of the SerenityOS project or the people behind it.

  • self@awful.systemsMEnglish
    4·
    1 year ago

    that’s surprisingly close to perfect already, at least to my eye! and the bug with CSS not wanting to load initially is something I’ve seen safari and Firefox do too

    by the way, how was the experience of uploading this to peertube? I’ve been meaning to check them out, and I’m really surprised at how quick and smooth watching that video was on my phone

    • Steve@awful.systemsOPEnglish
      4·
      1 year ago

      It was easy but I only have a 5mb daily upload quota with peertube.io - not sure if that can be increased somehow. Otherwise it uploaded and transcoded all within a couple of minutes

      • self@awful.systemsMEnglish
        5·
        1 year ago

        huh, that’s interesting. I know bandwidth and storage costs are a big difficulty in hosting a peertube instance (and this is also a reason why an awful.systems peertube isn’t on the table, unless we somehow get frankly suspicious amounts of money for infra). I should make an account there and fiddle with it — maybe they allocate more quota to older or more popular accounts?

        • Steve@awful.systemsOPEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          I found this https://peertube.io/about/instance#description

          If you need a higher video quota than provided by default please email “[email protected]”.

          Although PeerTube.io does allow for video uploads. We often cannot support the upload size and moderation required by many video creators. A list of of other PeerTube instances is available here.

          I guess there are beefier instances for the bigger uploads. I’ll play around with it on the weekend and see what’s out there. I created my account today to upload that video.