Ladybird is a nom profit, and its system consist in limiting sponsor max donation to 100k per year, so no company can sponsor more than that and make ladybird dependent on them. On top of that, they try to balance budget to keep money for 18months of salaries at all times, so they dont feel the need to rush decisions and can have stable development

Their website says:

All sponsorships are in the form of unrestricted donations. Board seats and other forms of influence are not for sale.

So Cloudflare and other sponsors don't get a say which is comforting.

Well, it's definitely not optimal, but I doubt they have any say in the project's direction, so I'm OK with this as long as there's no proof of shady shit going on.

I'd rather they take the money (as long as Cloudflare isn't using the threat of pulling funding as leverage to affect development) than refuse it on the grounds of Cloudflare being a shit company; having alternative browser & JS engines is more important than ideological purity, imo.

Like I said, not optimal, but not a lot is nowadays…

The project needs money from somewhere.

I'm not sure I follow, are you saying cloudflare isn't privacy friendly due to their unique position and general success as a CDN, or are you alluding to them doing something actively privacy invading?

I'm just trying to understand the argument here, I don't quite follow what it is that CF has done wrong.

Extension support is basically a minimum requirement for me (especially uBO, but also some others like Bypass Paywalls Clean, FastStream, and SponsorBlock). They can add overhead to the browser, but if the browser itself is solid and as efficient as they are pushing for. Then I can handle knowing that any extra RAM or processes are my fault. I imagine that if they truly keep all the data collection and telemetry we see in other browsers. Then the overhead of extensions might just make resources only about as bad as a clean install of the others without extensions. Which would still be a win in my book. Even if they don't have extensions, it will still be fun to have around and see how it evolves over time. Might even inspire folks to try doing the hardest part of making new browsers instead of endless forks that are at the whim of the base they came from.

I'm sure they'll get extension support at some point. They also said they intend to add a built in adblocker

My guess would be to have their business less dependant on Google's whims and more reliant on actual web standards

They give a good Image to this kind of developer and enthusiasts group

Also, a possible chance of not having to depend on google, for 100k bucks, thats a really cheap ticket for them

I knew of their existence, but I should keep an eye on servo

Statistically speaking, for advertisers. That's, like, four levels removed from "dogs" and three from "bitches".

Mainly humans, but ladybird is built for dogs who like ladybugs and birds and, tech :)

I believe the project has been parked on neutrality and common respect for a while, the biggest "controversy" I know of is that the lead developer and founder said something about hiring back when he worked at apple, based on inclusivity vs talent, being a bad way of doing things, and people went crazy over that

Companies and organizations earn money by selling user data from these intrusive AIs, and ladybird is the complete opposite, so I doubt it, probably the closest thing to that will be allowing users to have their preferred AI linked on the sidebar, which is normal and non-intrusive by itself

Edit: Some companies earn even more money just by keeping investors happy with this AI bubble

Lol, this graphic is not relevant here.
HTML is the standard, ladybird isn't changing the standard, they're creating a web browser to comply with the standard.

To be fair, currently most web browsers are based either in Firefox or chromium. In the past Opera used to have its own engine, and the same applied for other browsers.

I'm fine with current efforts on ladybird and servo.

Yeah but in this situation it's like, going from 3.5 standards to 4.5.

Alpha is expected sometime 2026 (but far from perfect) A more polished now beta, in 2027 And if all goes well, the first 1.0 release in 2028

Still, probably for most people it won't be worth using until the beta releases, or even until 1.0