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Cloudflare has announced its sponsorship of the Ladybird browser, an independent (still-in-development) open-source initiative
Is it still independent?
Yes, and their donations are limited to 100k a year per corporation/organization, so there cant be a company who comes, donates 20million and then tries to gain control of them through money
Yes, it is still independent. Cloudflare is just one of the three Platinum sponsors. Other two are Shopify and FUTO. Proton is also a sponsor, but in Gold tier, iirc.
Shopify being a sponsor makes it highly suspect instantly.
Andreas (lead engineer) has told the story of how he got that money - they just happen to know each other and $100k is peanuts for the Shopify founders.
But you’re right to suspect anything of the sort!
I think It's on their charter that no matter how much corporate money they'll get they'll never accept any outside influence just the same. The donators are amply warned to not expect anything other than development as usual or faster.
People always imagine this as "I will pay you $100 to kick the puppy" and of course they would never.
But what actually happens is that you have a long-term donor. You rely on their help (they're paying for you to be able to hire a nice college intern who's really smart and has been fun to have on the project). They never tell you what to do so you see them as more of a friend than anything else. It's perfectly normal to get some lunch with friends and talk. You're stuck on some problems and they have some good connections that help you out. That might even be worth more than $100k, but it's not money at all so it's OK that they're helping you like this. They also talk you up, which is like free advertising except you didn't ask for it so that also doesn't count. Anyway, at some of the lunches they're telling you about what's going on with them and there's some problems they're dealing with that you could help with. They don't ask for help, of course, because they know you're independent. But being independent means it's OK for you to do what you want. Even help a friend out who didn't ask for help so they're not influencing you...
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they stated on their website this project will remain independet and that donators don´t have a say in how this is being developed
No browser with third party investors can be really independent, they always will obey more the interests of the investors as on those from the users. Anyway the guys from Ladybird have balls of steel to develope an browser engine from scratch in an market saturated of browsers of any kind and a brutal competition, this would had more sense 15 years ago, but not now. Good luck, maybe in 2029-2030 there is an good browser multi-platform with all the needed infrastructure, servers and extensions, but I'll see to believe.
How can you say it's saturated when chrome has an effective monopoly. If you look at browser engines, there's basically only 3 for desktop, with one of them targeting only Macs.
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No browser with third party investors can be really independent, they always will obey more the interests of the investors as on those from the users.
That's why they limited donations to $100k per organization. No one is allowed to make themselves indispensable to the project.
This is very encouraging:
Ladybird uses a new browser engine called LibWeb that is being created from scratch by the development team.
Browsers that rely on Chromium / Blink rely on Google. Firefox relies on Google for its funding, so any browser based on Gecko relies on Google. If they can make a browser engine that has rough feature parity with Chromium but doesn''t rely on Google that's very healthy for the web.
You do know the difference of "built by" and "partly funded by", right?
What exactly is your problem by Mozilla/Firefox being partly funded by Google?
The standard point is most around how big that 'partly' is, and how attached a project can become to that part. If a project has, for easy math, a $10M bankroll and $5M comes from, say, Goog or MS, the project can face a moment where the corporation comes and says, 'we don't like that you've implemented this feature that interferes with our control of users. We're pulling our funding unless you remove it.' (more realistically, 'we see you have allocated some dev time to this feature request we don't like. Cancel it before the public can demand it.') If that happens, you have to have a project lead with some real rectitude to say, 'okay,' and just cut their budget in half. The more diversely sourced a FOSS project's funding is, the harder it is to control, and vice versa.
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Ironically, we already had that - Microsoft's first version of Edge was using their own engine. On release, it had the highest W3C compatibility score.
Google started shitting on it (including things like serving clear HTML version of Gmail because "the browser is outdated" if it detected the Edge user agent) and massive self-delusion campaigns of "Edge is just Internet Explorer" eventually killed the thing and forced MS to switch to Chromium.
I have Ladybird installed and I check it out every now and then, but I honestly doubt that a bunch of random developers will succeed where Microsoft failed. Unless Cloudflare somehow chips in and forces Google's hand into compatibility, but I don't know if even they are big enough to do that.
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Firefox relies on Google for its funding, so any browser based on Gecko relies on Google
Google introduced Extension manifest v3 to effectively to kill/handicap AdBlock extensions.
Mozilla, though getting funding from Google to make google its default search engine, officially decided to keep supporting Manifest v2.
Adblockers are direct challenge to Alphabet’s ad revenue which is still their biggest cash cow.
That speaks a valume about how much control google has on Mozilla decision making process.
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I just wanna say that we have Webkit. After Google moved over to Blink Webkit has not stopped development.. and it even has multiple big names behind it (like Apple, but also Valve partnered with WebkitGtk maintainers, and many devices like Amazon's Kindle are heavily invested on it) so it's not gonna go away anytime soon. Specially with Safari being the second most used browser on the web, right after chrome and several times more users than Firefox.
On Linux we have some browsers making use of Webkit (like Epiphany, Gnome's default browser) that are thus independent from Google or even Mozilla. I'm not sure if there's any browser like that for Windows though.
There's also Netsurf, they also have their own rendering libraries, but development for it is super slow, I've been following them for a couple decades and they still haven't got a stable javascript engine, so it only works for the most basic of websites. The plus side is that it's very light on resources, though.
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challenge the status quo by partnering with the status quo...
You are not much challenging the status quo by partnering up with the NSA.
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Still, it’s hard to understand why Cloudflare chose to back exactly Omarchy.
Maybe the developers in Cloudflare use it? Also weird because Omarchy's default browser is Chromium I think. The webpage didn't list the default browser, so not sure about that.
Here's one theory: https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and-fascists.html
Anyway, Omarchy and Ladybird are both run by fascists. Omarchy makes this pretty obvious from the outset – on the home page the big YouTube poster image prominently features SuperGrok, which is a pathetically transparent dog-whistle to signal alliance with Elon Musk’s fascist politics. Omarchy is the pet project of David Heinemeier Hansson, aka DHH, who is well known as a rich fascist weirdo.2 One need only consult his blog to browse his weird, racist views on immigration, fat-shaming objections to diverse representation, vaguely anti-feminist/homophobic/rapey rants on consent, and, recently, tone-policing antifascists who celebrate the death of notable fascist Charlie Kirk.
Speaking of tributes to Charlie Kirk, that brings us to Andreas Kling, the project lead for Ladybird, who tweeted on the occasion of his assassination:
RIP Charlie Kirk
I hope many more debate nerds carry on his quest to engage young people with words, not fists.
– @awesomekling
I was not prepared to learn these things today.
most people outside the us have never heard any of kirk's talking points. if you only know that he is a conservative debater and use your normal (non-us) definition of "conservative", then "people should not die for their opinions" is not a controversial take. i'm not saying that's what's happened here but it's the most likely situation considering klings history.
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The argument on Kling seems pretty weak to me… is he Fascist because… he doesn’t support violence and an assassination? 🙄
By this logic for being not fascist one must support the death penalty?
I am pretty sure fascists are in favour of violence and murder (in fact the person cited was killed by a fascist)
RIP Charlie Kirk
I hope many more debate nerds carry on his quest to engage young people with words, not fists.
"carry on his quest". What was Charlie Kirks quest again? Where does he say he doesn't support violence and assassination? Are you Klings PR?
I am pretty sure fascists are in favour of violence and murder (in fact the person cited was killed by a fascist)
Just because fascists kill fascists doesn't make spreding hate less fascist. Does your definition of fascists only start when they start shooting people on sight?
People like kirk were revelling in current administration. But since they didn't "use violence", they must've been innocent in all this trend, huh?
Honestly there's a reason fascists are on the rise. People like you seem too oblivious to see the subtle narrative of spreading hate by casual undertones.
But hey, you do you. I hope you take up his quest as well.
No, Kling is not at his first "offence" - he doesn't support LGBT, so that surely makes him a fucking fascist.
Can you cite something for that? I'm not disagreeing, I'm just disappointed by the revelation and would like to get my facts straight.
Grrrreat. So one can already tick off that browser before it is even ready to test.
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Jesus, what a reach for two projects run by normal dudes.
The open source community is filled with people on the left side trying to bring down people they disagree with. You can tolerate them, or fork away and leave their "shitty project run by fascists" instead of witch hunting and name calling anyone you dissagree with
fascists guy: has an opinion
leftist guy: wants to witch hunt a guy for his opinion amd get him kicked out of his own project
like it or not, who's being fascist? you know it well.
Hey, hi, trans person here. Calling my mere existence "political" is not "just an opinion". Rejecting a PR to change "he" to "they" in some code comments is also just a stupid hill to die on. No singular they is basically baby's first edgy opinion.
Sorry which are we talking about the rejected the PR, DHH or kling?
I suspect its DHH just making sure
Edit: Found it
Kling rejected with: “This project is not an appropriate arena to advertise your personal politics.”
For SerenityOS documentation to use a singular they to not assume gender.
Edit 2: For the record, this is even more stupid than you think. The documentation was written with gendered language for a male reader only in mind.
"Hey, I fixed your bad writing"
"POLITICS?!1?!%?!"
The tweet about Kirk has some firm context with this. I'd call it pretty dang likely that kling is a fan....
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How much you want to bet Cloudflare went to them and was like 'hey either work for (sorry, "with") us or we declare you a "suspicious" traffic source and block you.'
Why is Cloudflare suddenly the enemy on Lemmy?
Well, not a straight answer but, there you go.
(yes, late, also my first post so hi)
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Just big company = bad
Nothing new on lemmy
Just ignore that they heavily contribute to opensource, have extremely generous free tiers, open incident reports and regularly share deep dives into their architecture and problems
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pack it up folks, we've been compromised
I’m not going to have interest in any new browser that’s written in security nightmare languages like C or C++.
NSA Releases Guidance on How to Protect Against Software Memory Safety Issues
Commonly used languages, such as C and C++, provide a lot of freedom and flexibility in memory management while relying heavily on the programmer to perform the needed checks on memory references. Simple mistakes can lead to exploitable memory-based vulnerabilities. Software analysis tools can detect many instances of memory management issues and operating environment options can also provide some protection, but inherent protections offered by memory safe software languages can prevent or mitigate most memory management issues. NSA recommends using a memory safe language when possible. While the use of added protections to non- memory safe languages and the use of memory safe languages do not provide absolute protection against exploitable memory issues, they do provide considerable protection. Therefore, the overarching software community across the private sector, academia, and the U.S. Government have begun initiatives to drive the culture of software development towards utilizing memory safe languages.
From their FAQ https://ladybird.org/#faq
Why build a new browser in C++ when safer and more modern languages are available?
Ladybird started as a component of the SerenityOS hobby project, which only allows C++. The choice of language was not so much a technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain.
However, now that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect.
We have evaluated a number of alternatives, and will begin incremental adoption of Swift as a successor language, once Swift version 6 is released. (More background.)
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Straight outta Onion
Giving how apple adjacent the project is I have never had much faith in it being able to truly become an alternative to firefox.
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I've seen a lot of Ladybird news recently. Let me know when I can actually try using it.
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this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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