Ladybird Browser and Drama
Ladybird was recently announced. It's a new browser engine being built from scratch with no planned revenue from defaults or ad. It's new enough the have not even released binaries yet but people have been sharing screenshots of it working on simple sites.
So far a lot of promise and development is being shown and this is very good news. Chrome is Chrome. Enough said. Mozilla is making in-ideal decisions. An unhampered FOSS option option is very great.
How we're building a browser when it's supposed to be impossible is a post by Andres Kling (the lead developer of the project) that's a great breakdown of their goals and strategy. Certainly worth a read.
That is all on that specific topic. If you just want to hear about the new engine close off now. No value is truly going to be found by reading my commentary on internet drama.
Internet Drama Ladybird was announced and everyone cheered. Then came the drama. First came the policy on contributing.
You know the deal. Left wing fringe need left wing tool. Right wing fringe need right wing tool. Anything not explicitly left/right is woke or fascist respectively. I quite like this policy, there is no need a browser engine to tell you what appropriate tax code is or how many genders there are.
There have been some arguments that everything is political and FOSS software is especially political. The statement might not be wrong in a vacuum but a FOSS browser engine is very far removed from left v right politics so those should be irrelevant when it comes to browser development.
A stance on access to source code? Please. A stance on Google's business practices in the browser space? Sure. A stance on abortion? Please no.
With such a policy some people on mastodon started trying to dig up dirt on him. The worst they could find was a commit to change to gender neutral language that was closed in 2021.
Followed by this response a couple days ago
Women do exist too so it probably would have been a good change. The reply was also a little prickly though he acknowledged that.
My thoughts are if this is the worst you can find on him then he's a pretty good guy to lead a FOSS team. But come to your own conclusions.
As luck would have it when I did research to find what people are saying about the controversy it looks like only a small number of people are powering the freak outs and harassment. A few dozen people federated with my Fedi server complained or hurled insults.
Lol he was literally called a Nazi for the no politics comment or commit rejection.
A few others spammed the git repo. Otherwise every video I've seen has just been celebrating it and every blog I've seen has only been celebrating it or condemning the unearned hate. Most people are just excited to see a good project come to being.
😀
#ladybird #foss #firefox #mozilla #chromium #google
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