Looks like the website of a startup that wants my email so they can "get back to me with a quote".

Such soulless corpo design is not befitting of a project this nice.

I had a similar first impression. The previous logo and branding were pretty strong imo even if the SerenityOS and ladybird website was/is a bit scrappy. Very cute little ladybird, and the natural patterns of a ladybug gave a clear visual motif to build from.

People talk about 'polish' in design as a signifier of quality but my mind always goes to conching, the process by which cacao nibs are ground down over days to produce silky chocolate. You need to conch the nibs to grind them past the point that the chocolate has a gritty texture in order to get the nice smooth chocolate we all love, but what the process also does is grind down the sharper notes of the flavour. The further you go the more the deeper and richer notes are lost. So too a design language and brand can be conched to smooth it out for broader consumption, but you can go too far and lose the flavour.

I sorry to say this, but the new visual style is completely charmless. The most important thing a non-profit oss project needs is a charming visual style. A ladybird for instance is an extremely charming little bug, and it was such a strong choice. This new style is a huge step back compared to it.

there is no bug called ladybird, you mean ladybug..

The old website of this project is worth checking: https://web.archive.org/web/20240630172605/https://ladybird....

Discussed previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845951

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40845954

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that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect.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 are actively evaluating a number of alternatives and will be adding a mature successor language to the project in the near future. This process is already quite far along, and prototypes exist in multiple languages.

So half a million lines of tech debt?

I think that's too pessimistic. The code is there and it can be used to push the project forward. If some part of it is not good enough, then an alternative implementation can be created (potentially in a different language)

A classic: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

> "The idea that new code is better than old is patently absurd. Old code has been used. It has been tested. Lots of bugs have been found, and they’ve been fixed. There’s nothing wrong with it. It doesn’t acquire bugs just by sitting around on your hard drive."

> "Each of these bugs took weeks of real-world usage before they were found. The programmer might have spent a couple of days reproducing the bug in the lab and fixing it. If it’s like a lot of bugs, the fix might be one line of code, or it might even be a couple of characters, but a lot of work and time went into those two characters."

> "When you throw away code and start from scratch, you are throwing away all that knowledge. All those collected bug fixes. Years of programming work."

It's an older piece, but like good old code, it still holds up. Newer tools and technology have improved the creating of new code, but they've also made improving old code easier in equal measure.

The only exception is if you have 500k LOC in a language whose runtime is going to be deprecated on all platforms overnight.

I'm referring to the uh, retrospectively unfortunate decision I made in 2007 to start building large scale business app frontends in AS3.

I guess I should be thankful for the work, having to rewrite everything in TS from scratch a decade later. (At least the backends didn't have to be torn down).

There's a parallel universe where someone convinced you to rewrite it in something else from the start and you spent years on the rewrite instead and it never went anywhere. Could you have done that emergency rewrite without 10 years of becoming an expert in the problem you were solving? The alternative universe has you spending time becoming an expert in a new language instead and maybe not getting anywhere with the rewrite.

I wonder how many businesses suffered the same?

I remember Flash as a complete, straight-to-business platform that allowed me to just focus on getting stuff done.

It was a sound decision back then.

It's a good point in general, but in this case it's not clear if the cost of re-writing the existing codebase is less than the cost of staying with a memory-unsafe language.

We know from past experience that it takes an extreme amount of time and effort to harden a browser written in C++ against malicious web content. The Ladybird codebase is not particularly "old" in any sense of the word. Judging by Github's stats most of the code is less than 4 years old and it is still a long ways from being ready for general use. I think it's safe to say Ladybird still has a vast amount of work to be done fixing vulnerabilities that arise from lack of memory safety.

I find it quite plausible that the cost of re-writing the existing code in Rust is less than the cost of fixing all of the current and future bugs in the C++ codebase that Rust would catch at compile time.

Would another language have avoided this?

Nothing but Rust is safe from being attacked by the Rust zealots. It's been extremely annoying these last few years.

Nice to see. The only thing that would meaningfully set it apart from the others would be to have a core that isn’t a big ball of C++. That would potentially allow it to be developed and maintained with less resource than the other browsers, and that would be the only way this ever reaches any kind of impact.

If I'm not wrong Firefox is already Rust. The language was even created inside Mozilla.

It is. They realized that writing a modern browser (i.e. one that for example uses multiple cores efficiently by doing layout/rendering/etc in parallel) is almost impossible in C++. To the point where creating a whole new language just to solve the problem would be a smaller undertaking. Which says something about the scope of this problem. And I really do think they are right.

Why is it almost impossible? I'm a little out of practice with C++ but I thought the modern C++ features were considered pretty solid in regards to memory safety and the like?

c++ isn't memory safe and will probably never be. that being said, it's not more or less possible to create an efficient browser engine for multicore systems with c++ than any other language. programming language is not the thing that makes the task difficult.

As I said, I'm pretty out of practice, but doesn't stuff like unique_ptr give you a lot of memory-safe features out of the box?

Eh that is a huge stretch. Besides Firefox is still significantly less performant than Chromium.

Performance is overrated and irrevelant. It's simple force - not a skill. I can't do in more performat Firefox, neither it doesn't matter how performant Chromium, things that was possible in Firefox with old extensions. Not having such abilities, the only thing left to Google to talk about was.. performace - and crippling powers of Firefox. Rust is a new skill, not more of force.

Performance is overrated? What? I'm sorry but not all people are rich enough to own multiple threadrippers.

Performance is a skill, probably one of the most important skills.

Rust is a darn language, not a skill. You can have performant code in rust and in c++ and damnit even in brainfuck if you care enough.

But the reality is that there is more performance oriented code written in C++ than in rust, and that matters.

You can make a handmade car as well but it is difficult

Another skill, inconvinient, forbidden and forgotten ( * * * that I wish Ladybird will have * * * ): plugins - so I have A Browser For All Documents that can play every video format regardless of web video codec support or licencing etc. (with vlc, mplayer, whatever).

Neither Javascript shall be needed to see anything on the Web - if not being essential for tracking and ads - but it's you who have to pay for it with that threadrippers (and no access to source data) ? Yes, it happend people are rich enough to belive that.

Making things simple and possible is the most important skill.

They realized that writing a modern browser (i.e. one that for example uses multiple cores efficiently by doing layout/rendering/etc in parallel) is almost impossible in C++

And yet Chrome does it just fine, and Ladybird can render some websites properly that Servo cannot, curious.

Also the web standards themselves are written in an object oriented style. Using a non oo language like rust is therefore an uphill battle where you end up fighing against the language. The web standards just lend themselves naturally to be implemented in an oo language like c++.

?! Rust is roughly equally as OO as C++ is. Which is not surprising given its aim to replace C++.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ch17-00-oop.html

Rust does not make it simple or easy to reference objects from objects. You will be fighting the borrow checker if you try. This is what I mean.

The web standards have lots of references between everything. This type of object oriented programming means having lots and lots of cycles in your object graph. This makes Rust very veeeery unhappy. The Servo people are trying, and they have been trying for a looong time...

I don't understand, isn't this what Arc is for? An "automatically garbage" collected pointer? Or is it not well behaved for this use case (i.e. blowing the stack on free)

I kind of hope it stays with C++. C++ has been around for decades and is the gold standard for large performance applications, if they used python like many open source projects I worry it would be too slow, and rust feels like a fad

Hello friends, Ladybird founder here!

Here's a short video from Chris Wanstrath announcing our non-profit yesterday, and kicking things off with a $1M donation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9edTqPMX_k

Happy to answer questions :)

What is the biggest challenge you expect for ladybird to be successful and do you consider this project still a "hobby" now?

Thanks again for your hard work!

We have a number of big challenges in the immediate future, but I think the biggest one of all will be the long tail of compatibility and correctness issues that inevitably awaits us after everything falls into place.

This is definitely more than a hobby at this point. I already manage 3 employees, with 3 more joining in the next month!

How does Ladybird avoid Mozilla's fate? How can it be a long term sustainable project?

Ask for money from the start?

It depends on what you mean by “Mozilla’s fate”. In general, we are setting a much narrower goal than Mozilla and hope that focusing on only browsers will allow us to keep things simple and more sustainable financially. :)

Mozilla is dependent on advertising money from Google, is that only because they ventured in other directions? I'm not intimate with their finances, but it seems just building a browser is a large enough - expensive - R&D effort.

Are you planning on charging your users?

We will never charge our users, or attempt to monetize them in any way. Our nonprofit will run on unrestricted donations only.

I wish you luck, more competition in the browser space is sorely needed. But please, please spend more time thinking about your finances. The surface of planet "Startups That Will Figure Out A Business Model Later" is like 99.9% graveyard. You're going to be asking people to depend on your software for an extremely important part of their lives. If you don't have a path to sustainability, you're going to do a lot of harm when you close up shop.

Between the lack of a business plan and your responses about licensing, I'm afraid I feel you're coming at this from a naive point of view. This is a seriously important line of software you're entering, please do take some time to take it seriously.

Will watch your progress and again, I genuinely love to see your project. Good luck.

A non-profit foundation taking donations is a "business" plan and IMO the only one that has a chance of building a true user agent in the long run. That doesn't mean that it is guaranteed to succeed but I don't think there is a better funding option thatwon't come with conflicting incentives.

No, "people give us money" is not a business plan. When you're starting a business (yes, non-profits are businesses) and employing people, you need to be thinking about marketing, user acquisition & conversion, pricing structures, corporate sponsorships, and so on. I know it's not as much fun as programming, but neither is eating out of your neighbor's trash because you can't pay your bills.

You personally I believe without reservation about this, but the thing about creating a legal person is that it’s separate from you. Its control can—and in the long run, will—change hands. So please, please write this down somewhere, ideally somewhere binding on its future (can donations have conditions?).

Unless you are planning to live off the interest from your donations, how will this be possible?

With a simple two-part strategy:

1. We keep the team small enough that there's always at least 1.5 years of runway in the bank.

2. We continue fundraising actively.

I'd add that fundraising has worked well for the Wikimedia Foundation. They're taking in around $175M/year via donations. That isn't the nearly $500M/year that Mozilla gets from Google, but it's still a ton of money.

I don't know if people will donate for their browser like they donate for Wikipedia, but if it's able to bring joy to people, it could be pretty sustainable. Even Mozilla takes in $10M/year in contributions.

I'm not sure Mozilla is a good case for a lean software project.

If they didn't give their CEO $7M per year, spent money acquiring businesses like Pocket, gave up their braindead attempts at monetizing user data while simultaneously running bizarre tone-deaf "free internet" studies, and just focused on the browser and improving the development experience (is there a worse open source project than Moz??), they might fare better.

Don't throw money away into non-browser related projects while constantly pissing off your loyal userbase.

Look, I am as annoyed as you are with the constant barrage of "rewritten in Rust" projects, but if Mozilla did not try various other projects that are not browser, there would be no Rust.

If I recall correctly, Rust was born with building a browser engine in mind, or at least it was one of its earliest motivations. So Rust would have been a thing even if Mozilla had focused on their core product.

Rust wasn't a Mozilla project per se, it was something a person who happened to be working for Mozilla was messing around with and it got internal traction.

But I'm actually ok with a lot of the non-firefox projects that they have like the VPN.

What I do have an issue with is the foundation, throwing money away at various projects that have very little to do with making firefox better. From "trusworthy AI" research grants to giving 387k to the Mckensie Mack group or 375k to the New Venture Fund (I get Mozilla are lefties but what does this have to do with Firefox?) plus some other organizations that I can't even tell if they aren't just money laundering fronts as they don't appear to actually do anything.

That and the C-Suite being complete parasites. The CEO of Mozilla corp makes almost as much in a year as the Mozilla foundation makes from donations.

Remove the parasites and the senseless spending of the foundation and you could develop Firefox with the ~20% of revenue that doesn't come from Google.

Also the Mozilla originated Fluent project for localization is another example of a stand out approach. It would be interesting to see how localization fits with the Ladybird browser project as a whole. Making use of a custom implementation of Fluent might actually be a good way of moving forward.

Do people actually use Fluent? When I showed it to some professional translators, the reaction was along the lines of: “Hmm, interesting, but does it fit into my existing [roughly speaking XLIFF] tooling? No? Then no.” More generally, a technical translator’s flow is turning a table of strings into a table of strings with minimal distractions and the occasonal look at the reference; I’m not sure Fluent—however nice it looks—facilitates that.

Mostly not, but the formats and limited available tooling is designed to dovetail with existing offerings. Adoption is extremely low despite fairly easy implementation of most features.

Instead of rebuild 'everything' in Rust, we just can use AI to optimize C/C++.

We don't need another programming language.

Wow you actually managed to make me hate the inane "why not rewrite it in rust" commenters a tiny bit less.

I've heard Andreas Kling say that they will not accept donations that have strings attached. This means they can never sell search engine placement to Google for instance. This is what ties Mozilla to Google.

That's right. The Ladybird Browser Initiative will only accept unrestricted donations. We're missing out on a fair bit of money this way, but we believe it's the right path for us.

Would you accept "issue" sponsorship to prioritize work you were going to do anyways - for instance, improving performance for a specific usecase etc?

Its easy to avoid the fate of Mozilla, don't get involved and distracted by lots of side projects.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Past-projects

Mozilla's fate? You mean building a browser that works?

Indeed, I doubt very much that Ladybird will get there.

I use Firefox every day, but they have lost so much market share that they have become pretty insignificant. They seem to have an oversized and poor management with fat paychecks.

Don't know about oversized, it felt partly more that eg. Baker was mostly interested in Mozilla as a platform for activism, not in making a good tool for users. The new interim CEO seems to have breathed life into actual browser development.

The new interim CEO has been there for such a short time that she can't possibly have breathed life in anything (she managed to get sued by the former CPO for health based discrimination though, so there's that).

What's the pitch for those who currently use firefox?

Something about only being a browser company? Mozilla is many things, but purely browser focused is not it.

I would say the browser it’s not even in their mind at this point. High level people inside Mozilla not only implied but said it directly.

Maybe they’ll add tab groups.

Finally get out from under Google's thumb. As soon as Ladybird is half as good as Firefox, then this is reason enough for me to switch. I've lost faith in Mozilla's leadership, and I believe the root cause is the Google money that they rely on.

If Ladybird is "forked" from SerenityOS now, does that mean the mainline won't run on Serenity any longer?

What’s the biggest technical challenge you envision in the future? It’s the amount of “standards” you need to implement and maintain? What’s the JavaScript engine situation?

What's the trouble with the Android port?

Congratulations on the kick-off! Now that Ladybird is no longer a part of SerenityOS, will you consider a switch to a licence which not only grants, but also protects user freedoms (e.g. the GPL, MPL, EUPL)?

Also, any thoughts on having official communication channels on some open, freedom-respecting platforms, rather than Discord only?

Indeed. This is something I could see myself contributing to (or attempting to, anyway), but as soon as I saw Discord+Github, I lost all interest.

Github I can understand to some extent, it's a convenient temporary staying place until they can afford, community-wise, to move to something truly open, but Discord? In this day and age?

Agreed, Discord is a terrible platform and I wish people stopped using it. I expect in the next five years or so it'll undergo a very rapid enshitification and people will start using other things after that, but by then we'll have a decade of lost content.

but Discord? In this day and age?

What’s your recommended alternative?

Matrix is a wonderful alternative

Better but a the real alternative is what we had before: publicly visible forums, mailing lists with an archive, etc. I'm not going to sign up for your discussion group without being able to get a feel for the community first.

Indeed. There can never be just one platform for project communication, because there are different kinds of communication - mostly sorted between synchronous and asynchronous.

So, IRC, Matrix (these can even be interconnected) for synchronous, mailing lists or forums for asynchronous.

And of course issue tracker, where some topical communication can happen as well, but that could completely be covered by mailing lists.

There's no reason to ever have anything non-open in your FOSS project's infrastructure.

"There's no reason to ever have anything non-open in your FOSS project's infrastructure."

Except, that it is easier to set up? What you describe sounds reasonable. But someone needs to set all that up and host it and needs to be trusted etc.

So I guess if many people get involved and do set this up, they would convince the rest of the team to join them. But right now it is just a demand for more work for them.

Would you volunteer in setting up a forum for ladybird and host it and can you convince Kling and co. that you will be around to host it for the next years to come?

Because that is a project in itself and as much as I despise discord, I understand why they just went with it.

If I had a serious interest in the project (more than, say, maybe sending a patch here and there to fix my pet peeve), I would definitely volunteer for something like that if there was a demand. That's something I quite enjoy, and am reasonably good at, I think.

And as for me being there for years to come, who can say that for sure? I would absolutely try to. For that matter, will Discord still be here next year?

IRC. And for slow discussions with long messages, you can use NNTP.

(However, GitHub is accessible by git in case you only want to download the repository, regardless of what else they do; however, having multiple mirrors on other services as well can be helpful)

While I’d love to agree: many people these days simply don’t want to use IRC.

but Discord? In this day and age?

Discord IS the platform of this day and age, what the hell are you talking about? You might not like Discord for whatever reasons, but trying to make it sound outdated or legacy is very weird sounding.

Discord is not E2EE.

It is a non-starter.

That doesn’t seem like a nonstarter if the goal is to have public conversations. While I certainly agree that E2EE could be very valuable to some of discord’s use cases, I expect there are a lot of valid use cases for public discussions in open source projects where E2EE would not be an improvement at all.

Thanks F3nd0! There are currently no plans to switch to a less permissive license.

And we're perfectly happy using proprietary services like GitHub and Discord as long as they make our work easier and more enjoyable. We recently evaluated a number of alternatives, and found that they all introduced more friction than we were comfortable with.

Although the task of building a browser is itself challenging, we're a pragmatic project :)

There are currently no plans to switch to a less permissive license.

Hey, just a reality check: in the event that you actually do become wildly successful, this means that others (Google, Microsoft, etc.) will be able to fork the browser and then develop it faster than you - thus leaving you behind and taking away your users! Would highly recommend leaving yourself some mechanism to prevent that, unless you're really okay with the project defeating itself through its own success.

KHTML was the basis for Chrome and Safari. A valid concern

Chrome in itself is not the problem. Competition is good. Firefox is better now thanks to Chrome.

Neither is Safari. Safari is actually part of the solution. Safari has saved Firefox and other browsers by being the only option on iOS for a long time and a better choice for many (because of battery usage) on Mac OS. Without Safari I am afraid we would all be locked into Chrome now.

The problem is that Google, like Microsoft before them,

1. used their dominant position in one market to force their way into dominating another market,

2. used various underhanded tactics to make users think Chrome were better while in reality it was just given better treatment by their backend servers and also the Googles frontend devs[1]

3. and that unlike Microsoft they still haven't got a multi billion fine for it and haven't been forced to advertise alternative browsers for months.

[1]: see various bugs[2] in everything from the core of the Angular framework to Google Calendar to YouTube

[2]: yes, I am generous enough to consider them bugs. I am fairly certain though that bugs that doesn't affect Chrome aren't exactly considered top priority.

Safari has saved Firefox and other browsers by being the only option on iOS for a long time

Amazing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_(advertisement)

Hehe.

But more seriously: it is actually the truth.

Kind of in in the same way that people are thankful for Churchill: not because he was a fantastic man in every way (he wasn't) but because he saved us from something even worse.

I thought the other browsers on IOS were just skins of webkit / safari ?

Safari is actually part of the solution ...

Google, like microsoft, <1-3>

If you're going to complain about 1-3 for google and ms, I don't think you can praise safari in the same breath.

Apple's abused their position with the iPhone to make safari relevant, and unlike Chrome and IE, users can't just install another browser.

Apple's behavior is the only reason I can't run my own addons I've written for firefox on iOS (they run _fine_ on android of course), why I can't run uBlock origin on iOS, and so on.

Apple's behavior on iOS is far more egregious than anything microsoft or google has ever done.

I never once had to run IE or Chrome unwillingly since I could always install netscape, or mosaic, or firefox.

I'm forced to run Safari, unable to decently block ads, unable to use the adons I've written, unable to fork and patch my browser to fix bugs, and I've generally had my software freedoms infringed... and if I don't run safari, then I can't talk to my family group chat (no androids allowed, sms breaks the imessage group features too much) or talk to my grandma who only knows how to use facetime.

I wish so much I could use a phone with firefox, but I can't justify having a spare iPhone just to talk to my family, so I'm kinda forced to suffer through safari, held hostage by apple's monopolistic iMessage behavior.

The only thing that comes close to Apple's behavior is Google's campaign to force Chromebooks upon children in classrooms, requiring them to use Chrome, but at least Google isn't holding their grandmother's hostage... and managed work/school devices already are kinda expected to have substantially less freedom than personal devices, so it feels much less egregious.

Maybe I missed something but your arguments seem be about how Apple’s locking down of iOS/iPadOS and Safari are harmful to user freedom. That’s a very different argument from the one the person you’re replying to was making. They were saying that the popularity of Apple’s mobile devices coupled with their only running Safari holds back a Chrome monopoly in the browser space. If people don’t support Safari they lose out on a large portion of users.

Orion Browser includes experimental Firefox extension support on iOS https://kagi.com/orion/

WebKit is still an open project as is Blink. Why would this be concerning?

Was KHTML not GPL?

How is MIT any worse at preventing this, when GPL didn't?

Yes, we are aware of how permissive licenses work.

If someone forks our code and does a better job with it than we do, fair game. :)

Note they won't have to do a better job in the long run, just a good enough job in the short run to leave you behind. But yeah, as long as you're keeping this in mind :) best of luck!

Just so you know, chromium exists now as an open source project because KDE developers used GPL.

Would you mind elaborating? How did KDE's use of GPL prevent Chromium from being closed-source? What about Google Chrome?

WebKit, the rendering engine that originally powered Chromium began its life as a fork of KHTML a GPL-licensed rendering engine produced by the KDE project for their Konqueror browser.

It didn’t: that’s the joke.

Its a good thing the GPL stopped google from taking it and running with it!

But if they embrace, extend and extinguish, in a way that harms your users' freedom, that would not IMO be a good outcome.

Those users can always use the original browser. They haven't lost anything.

Imagine Ladybird is developed and is successful. Lots of people use it to read websites.

But then Badcorp takes the code and builds their own varient with extensions. Badcorp is big and has lots of market share. Lots of people use Badcorps's browser, and because lots of people are using it, lots of web developers code for it, including coding for its extensions.

Soon, lots of websites -- including Badcorp's own websites, and they have lots of popular ones -- use the extensions in the Badcorp browser.

Then people still using Ladybird can't use it for most websites. They have lost something.

Reality check:

1. All the BSDs have been out there for decades without anyone running with it.

2. Google and Microsoft - while being a shadow of their former selves technically - are probably still very capable of reimplementing whatever they want.

3. If Ladybird gets so wildly popular, lets celebrate wildly!

You wouldn't count OSX as someone running with BSD?

I run Mac OS.

I am aware that it builds on BSD.

Yet BSD is very alive and nobody who wants BSD is lost to Mac.

At least I personally have never heard anyone deliberating over a free BSD vs Mac.

Edit: and of course upvote. Apple ran with it. But they didn't run away with it. We still have it. Actually we have some patches thanks to them. As I mentioned in my other reply: Open source is not a zero sum game.

Actually we have some patches thanks to them.

In a relative sense, I would argue that Apple has pilfered an order of magnitude higher value from the community than they have given back. The only example of Apple's net-positive contributions seem to be CUPS and LLVM, both of which were cross-platform before Apple took control. Compared with how much networking and userland code they've taken it feels like a trillion-dollar pittance. Even Microsoft chips in more.

Don’t forget the PS5! At it’s heart it’s just a computer running FreeBSD.

Cisco's OS is a fork of BSD.

Which one? They have dozens of “OSes” across their various products.

Cisco IOS is absolutely not based on BSD - it is a proprietary kernel, and such that it even has a “userland”, a proprietary userland.

IOS XE is based on Linux.

Most of the voice stuff is Linux.

Perhaps you are thinking of Juniper’s JunOS, which is based on FreeBSD?

ASyncOS is a fork of FreeBSD.

It is used in Cisco's email and web security appliance, which is also their hosted offering. This appliance was previously known as IronPort, before being acquired by Cisco.

"Better" is a subjective term. I would probably stay on OG Ladybird if it meant MS/Google-ified LB starts screenshotting/OCRing/Uploading/LLMing all the data, even if it were to become faster and more slick.

Slow computing it's sometimes called [0]

I sometimes experience some friction (really acceptable though) on Firefox, it has never lured me to Edge of Chrome. Some people have standards you know ;)

[0] https://www.slowcomputingbook.com/

Hey, just a reality check:

It's rather condescending of you to assume that the developers of Ladybird aren't fully aware of the consequences that their choice of license entails.

That certainly wasn't the intention. Was there really a need to turn this into a personal swipe? This is a common outcome many smart and talented developers have historically come to regret. You can find their stories all over the web, including right here on HN. I didn't want to see the same thing happen here, is all.

There are very simple game theoretic-esque arguments that many fans of BSD/MIT dogmatically refuse to acknowledge, I've never gotten a straight answer from them, zero actual data when asked for any against my argument and just try to weasel out of the debate somehow.

I don’t maintain any particularly important software, but I would be extremely happy to know that code I wrote is used in major products everyone uses; so, I prefer to use licenses that minimize the burdens on users.

Also, I don’t think intellectual property is real and so I don’t think I can make demands on the users of my code: it seems to me that there’s an implicit contradiction in the GPL between the FSF’s anti-IP stances and their attempt to control how their software is used using IP constructs.

(...) switch to a less permissive license.

License "permissiveness" is a relative concept. From the point of view of the users of your software, the GPL is more permissive than MIT, since they have permission to see the source code. If you release software under MIT or BSD licenses, you allow middlemen to strip this right to users of your software.

Don’t spread FUD please. Middlemen can’t change Ladybird’s license or prevent anyone from seeing its source code.

I know that’s not what you meant, but it is what you said.

That is a complete nonsensical claim & willful attempt at spreading misinformation:

Permissive licenses doesn't grants you less freedom than GPL, infact it grants you more because the user also has the freedom to modify source code without being enforced to make it public.

Companies copying the codebase to their propietary ones won't automatically strip right of users, licenses don't work like that, the original codebase will still be fine. Whether said companies will contribute back is irrelevant.

You can copy GPL code, modify it and use it personally and nobody is going to care unless you’re making tons of money. The entities pushing for MIT style licensing are massive and for profit.

The entities pushing for MIT style licensing are massive and for profit.

I license all my stuff with permissive licenses because (in my opinion) they are more free than the GPL and such licenses. I don't have any massive for-profit company pushing me to do so. Mr. Kling is also not a massive for-profit company, he's just a guy making the software he wants to make. Your argument is in very bad faith.

you allow middlemen to strip this right to users of your software.

That's not true.

Somebody can take the source code and build something closed on top of it, but the original code will be already free, and you will always have the right to see it.

For example, PlayStation OS is based on FreeBSD (AFAIK). They took it, adapted it and added a lot of stuff. Did you lose the right to see the source code of FreeBSD ? No. Can you see the source code of PlayStation OS ? No, but you never had that right, so you have not been stripped of anything.

GP is clearly talking about this is the same context that the GPL does. This is a decades-long running debate and it isn't as simple as you and the sibling commenters are trying to make it.

Of course it doesn't change the original project. But when people take the codebase and build a new product on it, what GP says is absolutely the case. The devs can withhold all code and rights to it from the next user. This is most commonly an issue when it comes to libraries rather than end products, but not always.

It doesn't also have to mean that the original project dies or disappears, it can just rob from their growth potential. Examples are quite easy to find. There's been a big hullaballoo over cloud providers taking open source projects and competing with them by offering managed versions of the service that are well-integrated into their ecosystems. Economically this is also a problem because the cloud provider can then undercut the price of the managed service compared to the official one since they aren't bearing the burden of building/maintaining the codebase.

I'm by no means against "permissive" licensing (MIT, etc), I think they have their time and place just like GPL, etc, but I am against dismissing valid concerns with shallow replies.

This is a welcome initiative speaking from a personal and professional perspective, and as CEO of an independent search engine; we are all too well aware of the power of money and defaults.

This immediately comes to mind as akin to the Signal vis-a-vis WhatsApp etc. Here there is an obvious reason to use Signal and a well-understood proposition. What might it be for Ladybird? And how will you differentiate?

To be honest, we are so far behind everyone else today that we're 100% focused on catching up technically, and not thinking much about differentiation. :)

That said, I do think we'll find ways to differentiate given our uncommon situation with no ties to the advertising industry. This gives us the ability to experiment with privacy measures more aggressive than others may be comfortable with for fear of losing funding, for example.

Hey Andreas! Why you don’t just fork the code of Firefox or Chromium's and start from that point, building a Browser company like some others?

Hey kosolam! There are already many forks and ports of existing browsers. Do we really need another one? :)

By building a new engine, we can increase ecosystem diversity and put all these open standards to the test. We regularly find, report, and sometimes even fix bugs in the various web standards - stuff we find just by being the first to try and implement everything from scratch in a long time!

We also believe it’s good for the world to have more engines that aren’t directly or indirectly funded primarily by the advertising industry.

Relying on open standards is risky. It seems to me the de facto standard is whatever Chrome or Blink does.

That's the unique value proposition of Ladybird. It uses the open standards as the jumping point, investigates and de facto documents the divergence of modern browsers from them. It is a precious and important work.

How is knowing where the published standards diverge from de facto standards precious and important work? You say that's where the value is, but the subset of people and organizations who would pay for that (if it's valuable, people will pay, right?) has to be pretty small.

we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain. ...We are actively evaluating a number of alternatives and will be adding a mature successor language to the project in the near future. This process is already quite far along, and prototypes exist in multiple languages.

What languages have prototypes and where can I learn more?

We have not been debating this publicly as it has a 100% chance of devolving into a bikeshed discussion :)

Whatever language you end up choosing, I hope it will be a memory safe one. Browsers' main purpose is to interact with the outside world, and they even have to run third party code (JS) all the time, so minimizing attack surface would go a long way I think

Yes, our next language will be a memory safe one.

How does ladybird compare to Servo?

https://servo.org/

Servo is just the engine at this point. Ladybird has the whole thing.

I can't speak for Servo, but my understanding is that they have very different goals than we do.

Servo wants to build an embeddable engine for controlled sets of HTML/CSS/JS content, with a focus on modularity and parallelism.

Ladybird wants to build a usable browser for the open web, warts and all, with a focus on compatibility and correctness.

I'm a big fan of Servo and I hope they become a huge success! Competition and new ideas in browser engines will benefit all of us! :)

Servo wants to build an embeddable engine

That’s what they pivoted to after being expelled from Mozilla, but that wasn’t the original goal, was it? It’s the safer(?) one they turned to when the job security evaporated.

(Not sure if that changes anything, just feel obligated to point out the retcon here.)

It would be very cool if Servo were picked up as the engine for a new browser.

You can download Servo right now and use it as a browser: https://servo.org/download/

It is just extremely rough. It is in a far less-usable state than Ladybird even is and very prone to crashing.

that wasn’t the original goal

They always aimed for a better embeddable story than Gecko. That and more parallelism in layout and processing.

It’s the safer(?) one they turned to when the job security evaporated.

Not safer, more like saner multithreading story. Safe rust isn't so much for security as it is safety in a parallel context.

Re better embeddability, sure. As best as I can tell the Firefox devs have been feeling some amount of dismay due to the fact that everyone embeds Chromium/Blink, despite the whole Mozilla/XUL thing having been built more as an application platform rather than as a foundation for one specific web browser. And that’s entirely understandable, as is attempting to do better on the second go-round. But now it seems that Servo is explicitly targeting embedding and -adjacent use cases only, and that’s a post-Mozilla thing.

Re “safe”, I meant that targeting the embedding usecase is safer in a social and project-planning way, as in smaller probability of other people calling them nuts and greater probability of getting something usable in a finite amount of time. Which is fair enough.

The talk about correctness gets me thinking.

If there is a difference between how specs define something, and how browsers behave (and website expect them to behave), will you choose technical correctness or websites actually functioning?

Technically this has been the big problem of HTML5 vs XHTML, and "technical correctness" lost to actual usability.

Nowadays the spec mostly is "whatever Chrome does".

Firefox has often been forced to just conform to Chrome behaviour, despite differing specs, or because the spec was rejected/not agreed upon.

We're back to good ol' days of "Internet Explorer is the spec". It's just made by Google.

We're back to good ol' days of "Internet Explorer is the spec". It's just made by Google.

and the code (at least a large part of it in the form of Chromium) is Open Source. I don't think it's as bleak as people make it out to be.

I have two questions, if you don't mind.

1. Legacy hardware support. Is it a goal for Ladybird to build for 32-bit and big-endian CPUs out of the repository?

2. Electron. Do you have any plans to work on an Electron alternative based on Ladybird further down the line? No free Electron alternative other than Sciter seems to use the same browser engine on all platforms. There may be value in one that implements the latest web standards.

1. We are not focusing on legacy hardware support. Given our release date is far in the future, we are mainly targeting the kind of devices most people will have a few years from now.

2. No concrete plans, but it's not outside the realm of possibilities.

Big endian isn't "legacy", modern POWER is perfectly good. (It's niche, granted)

I remember watching one of the early videos of you starting working on the browser, and you said something along the lines of wanting a browser that was sort of a dumb renderer - one that didn't attempt to be a whole Operating System.

Does Ladybird still follow that ideal?

What's your point of view about quirks as you can find in other browsers and how do you plan to handle websites that rely on unintended browser behavior ?

These days, all major browsers are taking interoperability very seriously. There’s even efforts like the annual “Interop 202x” where people vote on which interop bugs browsers should focus on fixing.

We benefit greatly from this of course, and we will do what we can to contribute when we’re mature enough!

That said, there will always be websites relying on bugs, and for that we will need a way to selectively emulate alternate behaviors in some cases. We are looking at a few different solutions for this but it’s not a huge priority right now as there are far lower hanging fruit in front of us.

Seeing someone ignore the naysayers and attempt the so-called impossible task of developing a new independent browser is awesome to see. It brings a glimmer of hope that the internet is not doomed to be ruled by advertising companies with only a stagnant controlled opposition browser as the alternative.

That said, Ladybird is obviously far from becoming the daily driver for the average webizen. What do you think is going to be the first milestone where Ladybird is going to be able to be a real alternative (even if limited to certain use cases) and in what timeframe do you think this can be accomplished?

Also, do you already have any plans or ideas for how to improve the web browsing experience beyond what existing browsers provide or is your focus entirely on the engine catching up for now?

What do you think is going to be the first milestone where Ladybird is going to be able to be a real alternative (even if limited to certain use cases) and in what timeframe do you think this can be accomplished?

At the moment, we are focusing primarily on our own use cases as developers, since those are the easiest to test and qualify. So websites like GitHub, web specifications, MDN, etc. are likely going to be very high fidelity before other parts of the web catch up ;)

Also, do you already have any plans or ideas for how to improve the web browsing experience beyond what existing browsers provide or is your focus entirely on the engine catching up for now?

We are definitely focused on the engine catching up right now. There is an incredible amount of work to do, and we're doing the best we can :)

Seeing someone ignore the naysayers and attempt the so-called impossible task of developing a new independent browser is awesome to see

Well the impossibility isn't so much in making a browser but making a browser that manages to get a chunk of web audience.

That means presence on mobile, feature and performance parity with Chrome, surprasing Chrome on some level (e.g. Safari having better vendor lock-in).

Safari is better than Chrome in many ways, arguably most.

A fact that appears to be lost on the majority of users that have a say in what browser they use: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/desktop/worl...

The problem is that when Chrome came out it was heavily marketed/targeted towards developers. Developers took it up and then built websites in & for Chrome. The end result is many websites work better in Chrome than Firefox or Safari. It's a vicious cycle of continuing dependency.

I'm doing my part to break the cycle by supporting the underdog by using Safari as my daily driver & developing primarily for Safari & Firefox.

It's a vicious cycle of continuing dependency.

Or a viscous cycle of continued development. There are definitely things that Chrome does that nobody else should copy, but there's also a lot of stuff like WebGPU and WebRTC that should be standard. Firefox doesn't drag their feet in the same way Apple does, and they certainly don't resist standardization by trying to limit what a user can do on their device.

I have no real love for Google. ChromeOS sucks, Android is only tolerable when you de-Google it, and YouTube is perpetually regressing to a shittier state. But Chromium the browser is great, and it's the only browser I install on my Mac or Linux box when I get set up at work. I want to love Firefox like I used to, but Mozilla as a business is just about as functionally inept as Google or Apple at this point. I'm done trying to be a browser ideologue, I'm embracing post-browser realism here.

The data doesn’t show they drag their feet though. If anything FF is behind.

I genuinely enjoy Safari as a user more than Chrome. As a developer the dev tools suck. But as a user - the UI is far more minimal and nice. Every single action feels 2-3x faster, from opening and closing, tab opening or movement, etc. Battery lasts significantly longer. And I never really run into anything that doesn’t work, ever. Plus never worry about the latest hidden checkbox I have to find to not have my data soaked up. Hide my email is also dope.

The more responsive and thoughtful UI and battery/performance alone would have sold me. But the privacy and modern features it’s gotten over the last years make it better imo.

Just want to give a perspective as I feel people should update priors from 2021 “Safari is the new IE”

Sure, it does have some benefits. Like lower energy consumption, I hear good things about JavaScriptCore (Safari's JS engine), that said, so many of the features are missing, and one part is it encroaching on the iOS apps territory.

so many of the features are missing, and one part is it encroaching on the iOS apps territory.

Be careful when listing those features. Many of those "encroaching" are Chrome-only non-standards

And some of them, like WebGPU, are Khronos IP that Apple has no reason to object to except on an ideological and profit-maximizing basis. I wonder why Apple would deliberately avoid an API that might obsolete the requirement for games to use the App Store? Do you have any ideas?

like WebGPU, are Khronos IP that Apple has no reason to object to except on

You do know that Apple is basically the original author of WebGPU, right (together with Mozilla)?

I wonder why Apple would deliberately avoid an API that might obsolete the requirement for games to use the App Store

And your fantasy of Apple deliberately avoiding it is based on what exactly?

https://webkit.org/blog/9528/webgpu-and-wsl-in-safari/

https://webkit.org/blog/14879/webgpu-now-available-for-testi...

Will it block ads are have the ability to run extensions to do so? I can't use modern web without an ad blocker

I don't have much to add here, just wanted to say that I think this is a tremendous gift to the Internet that we loved. It would suffice to say that after many hard reality checks I don't really feel like there are any browser vendors that feel like good stewards of the open web, and it seemed like a new browser that actually managed to break out would be infeasible... until Ladybird showed up. And now, I'm typing this reply in Ladybird.

Of course, it has a long way to go before it is going to be a good daily driver, but I truly believe this is the beginning of something great. I've been consistently surprised by what works, and the rate of improvement is staggering at times.

My question: Has anyone given any thoughts regarding the stance to take with DRM features, e.g. Widevine/Encrypted Media Extensions? It seems like since our previous stewards of the open web didn't care enough, now making a browser with substantial marketshare without this may be hard. Seems like a hard problem, I really do wonder where Ladybird will stand if it continues on its current lightning fast trajectory.

I think it should be possible to have some sort of open extension to allow side band canvas rendering to allow for such extensions as optionally provided by the OS. Possibly with an API for custom engines in WASM.

I don't think it should have to be in the browser. I would like the option to watch the content. I know the while process of DRM is stupid and will be side stepped somewhere.

Personally, I think life would be better if browsers just didn't play the game at all. If the web was not controlled by corporations, DRM as part of the platform 100% would have simply never happened.

From my point of view, putting DRM into web browsers is actively bad for a couple of reasons beyond the usual arguments against DRM. The greatest asset the web platform has is that it's a unified, open platform that anyone can participate in; Of course, DRM harms users too, but specifically DRM harms the web as a platform. You can't simply have a "full" web browser that can browse the entirety of the web (as ordinary users understand it) without licensing Widevine. To date, only large corporate web browsers have ever gotten this privilege[1]; community web browsers are shit out of luck, almost certainly forever. Not only that, but Widevine will only officially support a small subset of the operating systems that are out there, ensuring that you can't get a "full" web browsing experience on, for example, any BSD (at least not without manual work and violating several license agreements on the way.) Even if Ladybird bucks the trend and manages to get a Widevine license somehow, it will only be possible to make this work on Windows, Linux and macOS. Yes, I understand this covers the vast majority of users, but if you can't see how this is extraordinarily antithetical to the open web I don't really know what else to say. The web didn't even begin on any of those platforms!

Of course, I seriously can't blame Ladybird if they want to go this route. After all, in the position that Ladybird is in, pragmatism is a stance that is hard to beat. Ladybird currently doesn't have the muscle to flex to try to influence the future of the web platform in such a way, especially not against the will of the mega-corp overlords that currently control the web platform.

If I had to guess, I'd guess the lack of an answer to my question is because taking the pragmatic stance on this particular issue will prove controversial, though I hope if that is the case that people continue to direct their ire towards W3C and Mozilla who pretty much immediately folded when the issue came up in the first place. In the moment when Flash and Silverlight died, there was a small sliver of hope that DRM on the web would die with it, but instead we wove DRM directly into the fabric of the web, and Mozilla, no doubt afraid to watch their marketshare dwindle even further, (which it has continued to do anyways, mind you,) played a huge part in that.

Issues like this are why there is guaranteed to be vile toxicity when something like WEI comes up. We know that there is no entity out there holding the line to protect the web platform; once one of these technologies like WEI makes it into Chrome, the era of the open web will have essentially ended. If you believe that the open web is important, then any technology that's vaguely WEI shaped is enemy #1, and when there is no other option, people will choose violence, again and again. DRM on the web isn't really quite as dire of a situation, but it isn't particularly great either.

(One might wonder what the point of keeping DRM out of the browser is, forcing users to use separate software, making their overall experience worse... but that's kind of the thing: Why in the fuck should these vendors and this DRM'd content, that is antithetical to the open web, get to benefit from the web platform built and used mostly by people who stand to gain nothing from it? If you want the benefit of the web platform and all it offers, you should be forced to lose the DRM. Otherwise, have fun deploying your own native software.)

[1]: https://developers.google.com/widevine/drm/overview

Personally, I think life would be better if browsers just didn't play the game at all.

A web browser is a user agent. Why is the browser deciding anything one way or another? Let the user decide by providing options one way or another. If the user wants DRM access, let them; why is it the browser's business?

Again, the two important words: User agent.

The freedom to decide and choose is what helped Firefox take out IE6 and led to most subsequent browsers featuring some form or another of extensibility (which incidentally is now regressing because web browsers are increasingly developer and publisher agents).

Firstly, I object to DRM being added to the web platform in the first place. It is antithetical to the platform. This goes above the definition of what a user agent is and goes into what the web even is in the first place.

Secondly, users don't really get a choice. Users are fucked because browsers implement features like DRM and websites hard-depend on them. So the user is no longer choosing whether or not to enable DRM, but whether or not they can watch Netflix on their laptop. User agents should not put users in predicaments like this where they are forced to make choices against their own interests. This is one of those situations where nuance is necessary.

If Netflix doesn't work in the browser users aren't going to lean back in their chairs and think fondly of the freedom fighter jchw that protected them from working against their own interests, they are going to open Edge and watch Netflix.

No matter how much you opine the outcome is not going to change, the end users have spoken in what they want in their user agent.

Yes... that's pretty much exactly what I said. Users will indeed just do what they need to do to watch Netflix, whether or not DRM is good for them or the web platform.

Secondly, users don't really get a choice. Users are fucked because browsers implement features like DRM and websites hard-depend on them. So the user is no longer choosing whether or not to enable DRM, but whether or not they can watch Netflix on their laptop. User agents should not put users in predicaments like this where they are forced to make choices against their own interests. This is one of those situations where nuance is necessary.

That's why it shouldn't be a part of the web platform in the first place. Because we shouldn't force users to make choices against their own interests.

Here are some other examples of where we shouldn't force users to make choices against their own interests:

- Users should not have to give up their rights to be able to access legally-mandated warranty services or replacement parts.

- Users should not be forced to accept being tracked.

- Users should not be forced to forfeit their right to be a part of a class action lawsuit to use a product or service.

Try as you might, you're never going to convince anyone that the free market will just magically make all of the incentives align and make "the right choice", these are things that ultimately have to be solved with policy. The closest thing to "policy" on the web is standards, and W3C put EME in the standards despite widespread outcry, and that's why we're at where we're at.

Now the thing is, we have DRM in browsers, but we still don't have Web Environment Integrity, a complete and utter bastardization of the open web that would've made it cryptographically impossible for an open source browser to really meaningfully exist (since compiling it yourself would likely make it impossible for you to e.g. do banking or watch Twitch streams, since it would then fail attestation.) The reason we don't have WEI is because it was widely rejected by the community. Not because users made a choice.

It's nice to think that you can just leave it to the users to pick and they'll always do the right thing, but at the end of the day most people don't have time to care about DRM or WEI. Most people are not technical and just simply don't have the capacity in their day to be concerned about things like that. That's why it's literally the job of people who do have that capacity to fight for the user's best interests and try to avoid users being put into positions where they are basically guaranteed to be fucked.

And frankly, we're not winning the fight.

(This is no different from anything else. The vast majority of people can't be expected to fight for e.g. free speech rights either; it's always going to be a minority of people who hold the line.)

There should be a great diversity in user agents because there is great diversity in personal tastes.

One person's user agent might be another person's "software I would never use".

As a text-only web user I am continually amazed, thirty years in, that web developers and now their CDN service providers are _still_ making incorrect assumptions about what user agent I am using. They are wrong every single time. There is almost zero focus on rate limits but hyperfocus on user agent string or other headers. For most sites I send no user-agent header and this works fine. But when sites want certain headers this tells me the purpose is not "protecting" servers from being overloaded, it is "protecting" servers from web users who will not involuntarily provide commercially useful data/information so that access to them as ad targets can be sold for profit.

Choice of user agent should make no difference. The JSON I'm getting is the same regardless of what device or software I am using. I decide what I want to do with the JSON after I retrieve it.

Imagining how things could be different, there could be "commercial" user agents that people use for accessing their bank acconts online and for other commercial transactions. There could also be "non-commercial" user agents that people use to read HN. Unfortunately, the way things are now people are using commercial browsers for non-commercial web use and exposing themselves 24/7 to unecessary tracking and advertising.

Personally, I only use a commercial user agent infrequently. I'm not doing many commercial tranasctions over the web. Most times, I am using non-commercial user agents. I see no ads and can focus on the text.

There are easily less than 1,000 people using the internet in the way that you do. The internet is not immune from cost-benefit.

I don't even know what DRM brings to the browsers apart from breaking external monitors and blacking out screenshots

All the content behind it is still available day 0 on trackers

Because the same parties interested in DRM in browsers (and everywhere else) are slowly working on making torrenting more difficult.

They were working on that years ago. After several decades with no success I think they've mostly given up and just profit from it now.

What? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40693451

In what way do they directly profit from piracy?

You should be forced

I think you answered this yourself.

Hey please be sure to design and at least mock out a way to host/run a collection of local LLM models in a generic manner. You could give the models access to context/content/history and to bubble up functionality within the browser. I can see tons of potential for something trusted and local which I'm comfortable giving full access to browsing history and not owned by big tech.

This could be key differentiator over other browsers.

I agree, though this does not seem like something that should be built until the browser is at least usable, which currently they're projecting an alpha release in 2026. By then things might be totally different, so don't architect yourself into a corner with it, but I also wouldn't invest much or any time into it right now. Focus on building good APIs/extension points though, and those will be immensely useful whether for local LLMs, extensions, or anything.

Are you working full time on this now? How many people are working on it and about how much time per week are they able to do? Is this expected to hold steady or do expect changes over the coming weeks, months, or years?

Not trying to pry into your personal lives, just wondering because there's a lot of meaningful information behind the answers to those questions.

is there still space on your crew? i’d love to join, should i just start committing?

We’re always open to new developers! Find a website that doesn’t work right, then try to figure out why, and see if you can fix it :)

The best for a beginner is usually to start with some simple page you made yourself, since you know how it’s supposed to work, and can debug more easily.

And come join us on Discord, there are new people getting into the codebase all the time :)

Hi Andreas,

First, thanks for this project and making your self accessible!

Will "plug-in" or "add-on" support be a first-party concept in Ladybird?

I ask that because in years past a few other browsers (Konqueror, Falkon, Dillo, etc) made it pretty far but lacking add-ons, useful capability such as 'NoScript' or 'uBlock' or even a tab manager made them non-starters.

NoScript for Dillo makes no sense as it doesn't support JS anyway. uBlock... yeah, a little, but most annoyances will be blocked by the lack of JS support anyway.

Plus there are plugins for dillo... https://dillo-browser.github.io/#plugins

Exactly. I need 1Password and a vim mode plugin for me to be productive on the web.

Same, bitwarden is essential, as are ublock origin and privacy guard.

I second Bitwarden, ublock origin and privacy guard.

Also: how will you handle bookmarks? IMHO only Chrome does a good job with bookmarks — please copy them instead of reinventing the wheel.

What does Chrome do better than FF with bookmarks?

The interface to move them around, create and move folders etc.

If I had to use bookmarks on FF, I would simply not use them at all.

I would hope that plug-ins and add-ons can be written in C (although any extensions written in C should be only allowed if installed manually by the end user (e.g. by adding it to some configuration file); it should never install them automatically from a "app store" or similar). That is a feature I would use.

If by "C" you're asking for C compiled to WASM, then fine. But otherwise I would hope that WASN'T ever possible.

The endless security nightmare that was ActiveX and NPAPI should serve as more than enough reason why that shouldn't be a thing again.

"Installed manually not from app store" is even worse because then you're encouraging people to download random binaries from random websites and that's even worse