common ladybird l
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2026
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Good riddance on ai, even if people there dislike it, ai-assisted code is already a norm in a lot of places. However, the decision seems confusing to me, there's already a Rust based web engine (Servo), I'm confused about what's the distinction between them now?
Yeah seems about right for this project. I really wanted this to be a serious browser, but nothing about this dude is serious.
Also I know he backed this statement up with much better testing but these AI brainrot things people say kill me: "I ran multiple passes of adversarial review, asking different models to analyze the code for mistakes and bad patterns."
"I coded this with hundreds of handcrafted AI prompts."
"That sounds hazardous, but did you test it?"
"I had multiple AIs test it!"
Let us all hope Servo does not go down the same path.
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You’re not the first I hear saying his bad news/not serious. Afaik I didn’t hear a thing about him until ladybird. What did I missed?
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Sloppybird
Andreas Kling's ladybird? Don't wanna touch that with a 10ft pole.
https://hyperborea.org/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/
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Rest in peace to this browser.
I would of course love to see ladybird succeed, but it has seemed problematic from the start in my opinion. Servo seems much more serious.
I also like that Servo is developing an engine, not a browser as such. Seems like a good idea to keep the two separated.
Oh. Welp, if it's going to be vibe coded I'm out.
Guess I got excited about this browser for nothing.
I was enthusiastic about this project. But I am afraid these recent tangents will only reduce momentum.
Birdpoop browser you say? Never heard of of it.
@Beep@lemmus.org @technology@lemmy.world
Ah, the smell of irony by the morning! Adopting a programming language often praised by its "safety", while the entire pretension of "safety" is alchemically transmuted into a sewage and deliberately flushed up (not down) by a clanker who drinks from the cesspool with the same determination and thirst that of a Chevy Opala gurgling down entire Olympic pools worth of gasoline.
Being serious now, the foreseeable future for Web browsing is definitely depressing: Chromium needs no introduction (used to be an interesting browser until Google's mask "don't be evil" fell and straightforwardly revealed their corporate face and farce), Firefox have been "welcoming the new AI overlords" for a while, text browsers (such as Lynx) are far from feasible for a CAPTCHA(and Anubis)-driven web... now, one of the latest and fewest glimmers of hope, an alternative Web browser engine, is becoming the very monster the fight against which was promised to be the launchpad purpose ("They who fights with monsters should be careful lest they thereby become a monster"). I wouldn't be surprised if Servo were to enshittify, too. Being able to choose among the sameness is such a wonderful thing, isn't it?
I mean, I'm not the average Lemmy user who got this (understandably) deep hatred against AI, I am able to hold a nuanced view and finding quite interesting uses (especially when it comes to linguistics) for the clankers (especially the "open-weighted" ones). However, this, to shoving AI everywhere and using AI to "code for you", it's a whole different story. A software should be programmed in the way programming (as posited by Ada Lovelace) was intended to, not "vibe coded" by a fancy auto-completer who can't (yet) deal with Turing completeness, especially when it comes to a whole miniature operational system that browsers became nowadays. When coding a whole OS, AI shouldn't even be touched by a two million light-years pole, let alone by a two-feet pole.
Why leave WebKit out?
@paraphrand@lemmy.world @technology@lemmy.world
Oh, right, WebKit, I forgot mentioning it, thanks for reminding me of it!
It's the engine I likely used the least throughout my digital existence. I mean, I likely used Lynx more than I used WebKit, hence my forgetfulness.
However, if we're talking about the WebKit-based Linux browsers (such as Konqueror), IIRC, they're a bit out of spec when it comes to the "modern Web": WebKit's adoption of latest specs tends to be slower than Firefox and Chromium.
Now, if we're talking about Safari specifically, then... it's part of Apple's walled garden, one where even "Firefox from App Store" is actually a reskinned Safari (at least in iOS).
Be it Safari or Konqueror, deep inside, the WebKit engine seems to me like the "Apple's Chromium", so mentioning WebKit doesn't really improve the awful prospect for browser engines that we're facing nowadays.
However, if we’re talking about the WebKit-based Linux browsers (such as Konqueror), IIRC, they’re a bit out of spec when it comes to the “modern Web”: WebKit’s adoption of latest specs tends to be slower than Firefox and Chromium.
WebKit-GTK is up to date. 30 seconds of research in your favorite search engine and you would have found it out.
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Is it a good sign for Rust code when it's described as having "a strong 'translated from C++' vibe"? Or when the developer says too much Rust might be something they "can't merge"?
out of context?
Please coordinate with us before starting any porting work so nobody wastes their time on something we can’t merge.
If you look at the code, you’ll notice it has a strong “translated from C++” vibe. That’s because it is translated from C++. The top priority for this first pass is compatibility with our C++ pipeline. The Rust code intentionally mimics things like the C++ register allocation patterns so that the two compilers produce identical bytecode.
that seems reasonable to me
I think my statement came across as more alarmist than I meant it. E.g.
Is it a good idea to just translate something from C++ like that? It seems technically feasible but there's something "off" about the whole thing. Apparently you can translate C++ directly to Rust, but anecdotal statements claim that while Rust supports C++ conventions, you wouldn't typically build a Rust app using them.
Looking back previously, the developer originally talked about switching to Swift, then decided not to switch to Swift.
And in the past, "Ladybird devs have been very vocal about being 'anti-rust' (I guess more anti-hype, where Rust was the hype)."
It all just suggests rudderlessness from the developers right now. Must Rust be a priority? Did Swift need to be?
Why it wouldn't be? Surely not having idiomatic rust doesn't eliminate other benefits of switching to the language, like better tooling, memory safety, and perhaps more people willing to contribute. Over time the codebase can be improved but the main goal in the transition seems to not break existing functionality, which they seem to have accomplished for LibJS.
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Every minute that passes, Gemini (not the Google one!) looks more viable, which is already a shame because as I described in lemm.ee before it went down, that itself feels like "Gopher but in the format of a brutalist buttplug".
What we need is some sort of return to HTML + CSS 1.0, or a web engine that simply ditches JS, so that development can be tackled by Individuals again.
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Someone could theoretically fork ladybird and strip out the AI, but it would be a lot of work.
it's not that they are adding AI to the browser. it's that they are letting an AI develop the browser
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Not that much, there's a git log, just find when they started doing AI and fork from just before then