I'm funding Ladybird because I can't fund Firefox

But how will the CEO get millions in compensation for running the browser into the ground while funding her side projects?

Oh sorry, she's chairwoman of the board now, completely different.

You can fund Firefox by pooling money and pay a developer or a company like Igalia to implement a feature you want. It's not trivial, but given the number of people on HN that claim they would pitch in, someone should really try that.

I would imagine that there is caution about becoming beholden to user donations to continue operations. Such a situation would give users a measure of effective voting power in the development of the browser.

Money is not the Problem with firefox https://preview.redd.it/r9q69xop8n6d1.png?auto=webp&s=59a1d3...

Donations are a way to buy influence. Just wait until they receive a generous donation from M. Soft.

Mozilla isn't incapable of funding Firefox. It's just that they get most of their funding from Google, and thus they will never be allowed to break free or dominate the browser market again. That is, unless Google gets out of the browser business, which will probably never happen.

Yeah, only if the Mozilla foundation was run by the engineers

They may be starting from behind, but a clean slate might be to their advantage. It takes a distinguished dev to jump into an old, large scale project. Firefox and Chrome definitely meets both of those factors.

There must be some sort of cultural virus attached to Firefox that it has to make money as a commercial entity. Firefox was born from Netscape, a for-profit closed-source project, and while they lost the closed-source aspect of it, the executive class at Mozilla don't want to give up the for-profit segment.

The inability to fund Firefox development is completely baffling to me.

It's hard to imagine that it's for a reason other than "Google wants it that way".

It’s not as simple as “just” using a memory safe language.

The languages that are memory safe either impose too much of a straightjacket to be productive (Rust), don’t give you a GC or a memory safe way of writing one (Swift, Rust), or give you a GC with the wrong semantics (Java, Go, etc). Yes, the browser needs to have a GC. No, there’s no way around that.

I’m not saying it can’t be done - but there are good reasons to stick with C++ to get this job done. Not an ideal situation but it’s where the world is at.

All the major operating systems these browsers are running on, are written in c and c++.

How can you have a real memory safe application when the memory itself is managed by a shit ton of code written in an unsafe language?

Do you know that memory safety is relevant for security, compared to other causes of exploits? Or are you just guessing?

A memory safe language may force you to think about memory safety, but it can also work as a straightjacket that makes it more difficult to think about other security issues.

From https://ladybird.org (not some subpage, but literally on the main page):

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.

Rust is great in theory. But idioms are still being teased out and it hasn’t been used on anything with more code than servo afaik.

C/C++ is arguably the safer choice in terms of actually completing and maintaining a project of this magnitude.

AIUI, Servo has been a failure because Rust is not very good at this problem domain. Browsers have to deal with circular references and this is easily handled in C++.

Hopefully someone who knows more will explain this better

C++ is an awesome language for this. Even Firefox isn't all Rust. Do you think it's wise to use tech controlled by your main competitor?

I believe the team has said they are currently evaluating different languages, though they have not divulged which ones. From the FAQ on the Ladybird website:

"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."

I assume it's either Rust or Jakt (the latter a language in development by the Ladybird lead dev), though I suppose Swift might be on the table.

> Rust was literally invented to solve the security and concurrency issues inherent in using C/C++ for a browser engine.

Are most browser vulnerabilities not still found in engines like V8? Rust can help with something like last year's buffer overflow in libwebp (although that's overkill when a project like https://github.com/google/wuffs exists), but I'm unclear on how it gets you a better JIT.

Not only that, but Servo is only receiving less 3000 USD/month in donation, less than their goal of 10k/month, and much less than what they deserve if consider Ladybird is receiving millions.

https://servo.org/blog/2024/06/28/input-text-emoji-devtools/

Isn’t servo Mozilla’s cancelled browser project? (Genuine question)

Second this. I'd much rather see more funding for a safer and secure browser than yet another browser that will have the same C and C++ memory corruption vulnerabilities again.

I think Ladybird and Servo are exceptionally interesting projects and am so happy they exist. Despite being my daily driver, Firefox has its problems, and they regrettably mostly stem from the Mozilla foundation. Supporting a future with an ecosystem of FOSS browsers that aren't owned by an advertising company is very exciting.

Andreas has been doing this for a long time. The difference is that now he is openly shifting focus from the OS to the browser.

Having a fully new codebase implementing the web is a great thing.

IceWeasel was a completely different thing mainly based around mozilla trademarks for logos/names that clashed with the FOSS policies of linux distros when shipping non-upstream binaries.

That's what I don't quite get. I'm really wary of a "from scratch" web browser at this point. I looked at their project and their main selling point is that they're building both the rendering engine and the JS runtime from scratch "Driven by a web standards first approach" - what exactly does that mean? Firefox has always had that approach and web standards are more complex than they've ever been. I don't understand why not using code from other browsers is supposed to be a selling point when all the major browsers have open source rendering engines and runtimes and there's independent runtimes being built like Bun that they could use.

We're talking decades of features they have to support - unless they're planning on strategically dropping support for older unused/deprecated parts of the standard? Even in 2008 Google made the decision to use Webkit for their browser because they understood what an enormous undertaking it would be to write their own rendering engine. That was 16 years ago.

Seriously, why isn't there a legitimate Mozilla fork we can fund instead? There are a lot of addons that will take decades to emulate, like Sidebery, the main reason I switched to Firefox and am staying on cool until a good fundable Firefox fork (like Vivaldi for Chromium).

even consider alternatives, as if they are being paid to defend this pro-advertising position.

There's no way they would manage to exist like a business with a multi million dollar a year CEO without all that sweet Google money. So they are totally beholden to advertising straight from the top down. It doesn't even matter who is at the top, the whole step setup guarantees it'll be one of the big business players.

Basically when they moved Firefox from a foundation to a corporation, this was pretty much inevitable. They don't even want our petty donations anymore. We can donate to the foundation's pet side projects but not too Firefox.

But Mozilla argues advertising is 100% essential.

Citation needed. I realize they get a ton of money (probably most of their funding in fact) from Google, but still have they actually made such a statement? For now at least, they support ad-blockers a lot better than Chrome (because of Manifest v2).

I think you want:

https://github.com/ungoogled-software/ungoogled-chromium

Without signing in to a Google Account, Chromium does pretty well in terms of security and privacy. However, Chromium still has some dependency on Google web services and binaries. In addition, Google designed Chromium to be easy and intuitive for users, which means they compromise on transparency and control of internal operations.

ungoogled-chromium addresses these issues in the following ways:

- Remove all remaining background requests to any web services while building and running the browser

- Remove all code specific to Google web services

- Remove all uses of pre-made binaries from the source code, and replace them with user-provided alternatives when possible.

- Disable features that inhibit control and transparency, and add or modify features that promote them (these changes will almost always require manual activation or enabling).

let the market work.

Chrome is a punch in the face by the invisible fist of the market.

Yes you can donate to Mozilla Foundation. But no guarantee any such donation will actually fund Firefox development, as opposed to some completely unrelated non-technical project of theirs.

The "What we do" page doesn't even mention Firefox...

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-do/

This is clearly explained in the article. The Foundation doesn't develop Firefox and can't transfer donations to the Corporation, which does.

Mozilla Foundation != Mozilla Corporation, so donations go where the Foundation wishes, not to Firefox development.

Given the track record of the main author of being an ass to people who aren't willing to be marginalized

That’s a quite strong accusation without any evidence.

How is Servo going these days? I didn't even know that Servo was still active, but judging on the blog (https://servo.org/blog/) it looks like a lot of recent development has been happening. Maybe it would help if Servo had an active browser implementation (beyond the downloadable shell).

Please don't jump on a hype train

Give capital to another project because C++ is "dumb" and Rust is not.

I applaud you for disclosing your biases at the top but I was so hoping the disclosure wouldn't be a spoiler for the rest.

Where is said track record of the main author being an ass to people who aren't willing to be marginalized, or anything along those lines?

Here you go :)

  Hello friend! Thank you so much for donating to support Ladybird!
  We believe the world needs a truly independent web browser.
  That's why we are funded entirely by voluntary donations, and we intend to keep
  it this way forever.
  Make sure you sign up for our newsletter below if you'd like to receive
  monthly updates on our progress!

"Thanks but no thanks"

You can run your browser in a VM if you're concerned about its security so much.

Hopefully, but you can only hope. My fear is that when people are crunching the numbers at Mozilla they'll see that Pocket (or whatever) is doing well and funnel resources to that, unable to distinguish between people who like Pocket and people who just want to help Firefox out.

Giving me a donation box to pay for Firefox means that I can be very confident that they are getting the right message from my dollars. But for some reason they are very reluctant to do that.

I wrote a extension for a janky old website I used frequently that is broken for Firefox.

It’s a simple js file, and I now have a couple dozen subscribers. A nice project.

Because ladybird is a browser, servo is a component of a browser. It could well be that Ladybird ends up using servo as a component.

If you actually go give it a try, it's working fine. Not sure what all the hate is about.