We’ve got some possibly sad, possibly great news. Today, Andreas Kling, the amazing developer who started SerenityOS as a way to regain a sense or normalcy after completing his drug rehab program, has announced he’s stepping down as the ‘big dictator for life’ of the SerenityOS project, handing leadership over the maintainer group. The other half of the coin, however, is that Kling will officially fork Ladybird, the cross-platform web browser that originated as part of SerenityOS, turning it into a proper, separate project.
Personally, for the past two years, I’ve been almost entirely focused on Ladybird, a new web browser that started as a simple HTML viewer for SerenityOS. When Ladybird became a cross-platform project in 2022, I switched all my attention to the Linux version, as testing on Linux was much easier and didn’t require booting into SerenityOS.
Time flew by, and now I can’t remember the last time I worked on something in SerenityOS that wasn’t related to Ladybird.
↫ Andreas Kling
If you know a little bit about Kling’s career, it’s not entirely surprising that his heart lies with working on a browser engine. He originally worked at Nokia, and then at Apple in San Francisco on WebKit, and there’s most likely some code that he’s written in the browser you’re using right now (except, perhaps, for us Firefox users). As such, it makes sense that once Ladybird grew into something more than just a simple HTML viewer, he’d be focusing on it a lot.
As part of the fork, Ladybird will focus entirely on Linux and macOS, and drop SerenityOS as a target. This may seem weird at first, but this is an entirely amicable and planned step, as this allows Ladybird to adopt, use, and integrate third party code, something SerenityOS does not allow. In addition, many of these open source projects Ladybird couldn’t really use anyway because they simply didn’t exist for SerenityOS in the first place. This decision creates a lot of breathing room and flexibility for both projects.
Ladybird was getting a lot of attention from outside of SerenityOS circles, from large donations to code contributions. I’m not entirely surprised by this step, and I really hope it’s going to be the beginning of something great. We really need new and competitive browser engines to push the web forward, and alongside Servo, it now seems Ladybird has also picked up the baton.
What this will mean for SerenityOS remains to be seen. As Kling said, he hasn’t really been involved with SerenityOS outside of Ladybird work for two years now, so it seems the rest of the contributors were already doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I hope this doesn’t mean the project will peter out, since it has a certain flair few other operating systems have.
An OS is a big ask, I don’t blame him, so many competing demands.
As an aside, if you had a passion for a project, something you thought would be worthwhile and beneficial, wouldn’t you want it available in the majority space?
There’s still not going to be any Windows version, so it doesn’t appear he wants it in the majority space. Therefore I can’t see this browser making much of an impact.
It would be interesting to see a fork for Haiku. The one major gripe that near everyone has it Haiku’s lack of a decent browser
While I would be interested in Ladybird for Haiku, Haiku already has a fairly decent browser in Falkon.
Good decision. Ladybird is a project that can be really useful – a new competing browser engine. SerenityOS doesn’t really have a usecase (we have so many hobbyist operating systems) besides looking pretty.
I really don’t get why a new engine is a good thing. One more browser for which to test compatibility of websites? I think is best if everybody used v8 engine. The day google decides to make it open source, the rest will just fork it and continue on their own.
kwanbis,
Those of us who lived through the IE monopoly will have more first hand experience about this, but it comes down to diversity. It’s important for both security’s sake but also freedoms. When alternatives start becoming less viable, it creates a cyclic loop where concentration of power gets stronger to the point of a monopoly, which is rarely in the consumer’s interest (even regardless of whether said consumers actually recognize it).
Agreed, but leearly of using a C++ browser that hasn’t been banged on by security experts. Servo seems more lilkely to be secure from any very common and very easy to make security coding flaws. Still vunrable to logic flaws of course.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Yeah, there’s a lot of factors and this is one of them.
I really wish the best for Ladybird browser, but at the same time we’re loosing the diversity battle and I don’t have much confidence in alternatives being able to hold back the browser monopoly. FF has gotten marginalized to the point where big companies don’t support it any more. Over the weekend I was looking up tools on home depot’s website, which is something I’ve done fairly often, but now their product pages aren’t rendering in FF. Disabling extensions didn’t help and I didn’t investigate further, the average user is just going to ditch FF. Coincidentally a manufacture’s website had FF breakages as well. We’ve been warning about this for years and now it’s happening at an accelerating pace: a chrome/chromium based browser is becoming mandatory for a growing number of websites.
This probably suites google and their users fine, but it may be an existential crisis for alternatives.
I lived through the IE monopoly. But this is totally different. MS owned, controlled, and did not open source the engine. Here Google open sources the engine, so like I said, worst case, you fork and go from there. I understand (but I am not an expert) that the V8 engine is much simpler to understand/implement than firefox’s one.
kwanbis,
What you are proposing is very bad for diversity and it completely ignores how bad monoculture became under IE and this is starting to happen again. We cannot fork chrome, only chromium. Even then with source it doesn’t mean that users & devs aren’t harmed by the monopoly. Killing off alternatives gives Google a great deal of control over the future of the internet. W3C and HTML standards cease to have a purpose, google’s monopoly tech becomes the defacto standard that everyone targets. Chromium being open source does not mitigate the threat of monopoly abuse.
Say MS had open sourced IE, does that meaningfully mitigate the harms of their web monopoly? I say no it doesn’t. You’d have more superficial forks of course, but they’d all have to follow microsoft and amplify microsoft’s power over internet standards at the expense of real alternatives. Both Google and Microsoft are looking out for themselves, they’re not representing user interests. It doesn’t matter that it was microsoft back then and google today. Handing them the power to control the internet without facing any outside competition is dangerous.
I’d like to use another example of this.
Chrome : Chromium :: Android : AOSP
The fact that AOSP exists and is open source does not preclude the market turning into a duopoly.. The fact that AOSP is open source and that clones exist does not imply healthy alternatives and diversity. Most don’t stray far from google and they do not make up for the lack of mobile diversity. Consumers are not even close to having healthy unencumbered choices and unfortunately your proposal does the same with the web.
It keeps the browser ecosystem honest. Without at least a couple browser engines being worked on… one can dominate the market and just do whatever they want (see AMP). LadyBird at a minimum has resulted in the WC3 specs being made less vague in many instances…
Your bias is showing.
First of all, the Blink browser engine, the V8 JavaScript engine and the Chromium browser (which uses the previous two) are all open source already and always have been. Chrome which is based on Chromium is not open source and never was and probably never will. However, just because those projects are open source and anyone is free to fork them does not mean Google does not have overwhelming control over the project. Google pays the devs working on it and the devs will do what Google says. If Google says kill Manifest v2 in order to cripple ad-blockers the devs will do that.
Secondly, a standard is only a standard if there are multiple independent implementations of it. If there is only one implementation, the standard is meaningless and he who controls the implementation controls everything.
Lack of browser diversity is only good for web devs who no longer have to bother testing for compatibility and for the entity in control. For everyone else, diversity is preferable for competition, user choice and the health of the software ecosystem,
Go and check the chromium browser. Is 99% Chrome. I still don’t understand the advantage. Lets say all companies decide to contribute to the engine, and Firefox has Firefox with V8 like MS has Edge. If Google decides to go crazy on something, you just fork it and continue from there on whatever way you think best.
But at this point, browsers are already like 90% cruft, 9% anti-cruft + sandboxing measures and 1% actual layouting, rendering, net+cache stack and JS runtime. HTML and CSS are already dying, almost nobody use them directly, URLs are dying, people think the address bar is just an interface to Google, JS is getting replaced with WebAsm… The next browser is IMHO a WASM runtime exposing the window context as a WebGL surface, so that some neo-React could just download appropriate layout engine, plus other Web APIs as an OS abstraction. And with Blink or maybe Servo compiled to WASM as a renderer for “legacy web”.
>Over the weekend I was looking up tools on home depot’s website, which is something I’ve done fairly often, but now their product pages aren’t rendering in FF. Disabling extensions didn’t help and I didn’t investigate further, the average user is just going to ditch FF.
An average user will just assume the most likely thing which is that there is a problem with that website, they are not going to go and install some other browser on the off-chance that it is a browser issue.
Minuous,
Well, to your point though, firefox does not come prebundled with any mainstream device that I know of. The users who don’t switch browsers are extremely unlikely to be using FF. Those of us who do use FF are extremely likely to have experience with switching.
Even to the extent that a FF user doesn’t immediately realize it works in another browser, they’ll soon get confirmation of it when they talk to anyone else or call tech support. I reported a compatibility issue to the IRS, which I don’t have the luxury of boycotting. Care to guess what they said? They wanted me to get a hold of a windows computer and use a mainstream browser. This kind of attitude is pervasive and it places the onus on alternative users to join the monopoly rather than having them support alternatives. Even in my roles as a web developer I’ve been instructed not to bother supporting alternatives, just target the dominant one. We can all argue why this is bad, but at the end of the day I fear we’re loosing the war simply by becoming irrelevant.
Diversity is good for security, at least in some cases, but if the dependencies are common then it’s not genuine diversity.
However, diversity is not the same as fragmentation, and the browser market is fragmented not diverse. We all saw this coming, we let the loudest voices win the debate, the majority of us did nothing about it. Pretty much anyone who isn’t a rudimentary platform user runs more than one browser, some might claim they don’t, but they will all have a backup they use to cross check problematic sites because there is always a hidden doubt.