> Ladybird now targets Linux and macOS. The SerenityOS target is dropped.
Why dropping the SerenityOS target??
Does this mean that SerenityOS's Ladybird will need to continually pull patches from the new Ladybird project in order to keep development?
Also: is it really a fork if the new project gets to keep the name "Ladybird"? Will SerenityOS's browser need to be renamed, or there will be two diverging Ladybird projects with the same name? (Maybe a qualifier would help, like SerenityOS Ladybird vs Open Ladybird or something?)
I think the fork has to do with the following item:
> Unlike SerenityOS, Ladybird will have a relaxed NIH policy (instead of "no 3rd party code!"), and will leverage the greater OSS ecosystem.
SerenityOS wants to be an OS from scratch, to see how to do things better from existing implementations. When ladybird wants to target that OS as well, using 3rd party libraries would make it hard to stay compatible. Which is easier to do on just MacOS and Linux.
> Does this mean that SerenityOS's Ladybird will need to continually pull patches from the new Ladybird project in order to keep development?
It will probably mean that Ladybird becomes a port. As for what happens to the LibWeb that's in SerenityOS right now, that's still undecided.
> Also: is it really a fork if the new project gets to keep the name "Ladybird"? Will SerenityOS's browser need to be renamed, or there will be two diverging Ladybird projects with the same name? (Maybe a qualifier would help, like SerenityOS Ladybird vs Open Ladybird or something?)
SerenityOS' browser will probably go back to being called "Browser", like it was before.
As mentioned by Andreas, it's because SerenityOS does not depend on third party libraries and part of the new ethos of Ladybird is to decrease "not invented here" syndrome.
because the main focus on serenityos is writing code. hence no 3rd party code policy. the fork is mostly to make the browser use 3rd party code, hence it is now no better than just porting Mozilla. i think this will fork both forever
my understanding is that serenity will focus less on the web browser in the first place. it might just go back to being a simple html viewer with rudimentary js support?
my hope is that they take this as an opportunity to come up with a purpose built "web" stack for serenity? use it as an excuse to reinvent the web and "fix" the mistakes that were made? maybe by actually Putting Scheme In The Browser rather than js?
Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity.
Ok yeah but the thing about the knife is just not true, a knifes not sharp until you de-burr it and if you just continue to grind the edge youre going to just be building a bigger burr and removing metal, eventually the knife will be ground away but thats beside the point. Good knife sharpening does only need a bit of grinding until you reach the grit you want and then de-burr but youre not going to make it dull by continuing to remove metal.
Andreas is a fantastic coder and also a great shepherd of geeks (community builder).
The split makes sense for practical reasons - I also sense he is personally perhaps more passionate about browser hacking than OS hacking (his own contributions were more to Ladybird than to the OS for about a year as he himself writes).
Smart as he is, he may have recognized that he is in a unique position to be able to contribute a cross-platform browser that competes with the big tech companies, where as SerenityOS is essentially more of a toy OS (32 bit, 1990s look and feel, not compatible with important other operating systems, no radically new OS concepts) - without wanting to dimish the contributions of its amazing developers.
IMHO, SerenityOS is more about the process of writing code from scratch than the resulting software itself. Its purpose appears to be 1. to prove it is possible despite the naysayers ("only large tech companies can build a browser", "no-one can build an OS from scratch") and 2. to enjoy the coding itself.
As other commenters have already stated, the only issue will be taking as much from Ladybird over to SerenityOS as possible.
Having watched this over years, and deleted every single comment I've written on it thus far, I'm challenging myself to be honest and forthright.
There's another way of looking at, that is confirmed by the same set of facts:
- There was an OS project run by an awesome dude with a great story that was seen as in a unique position to compete with big tech companies.
- It needed a web browser.
- A web browser project was created.
- Now, the web browser is in a unique position to compete with big tech companies.
- This means it needs to fork itself, and drop support for the OS. That is because the OS project is now a toy.
My last deleted comment mentioned my deep respect for Andreas, and that my next milestone for the browser is downloadable builds and/or moving from pre-alpha to alpha (the downloadable builds was listed as a warning it was in pre-alpha).
I don't like appearing negative or arguably unsupportive, hence all the deleted comments over the years.
But, it's very important to me to make sure there's an accurate signal of what working on your own project looks like. Including the progress rate on things that sound awesome to work on, like an OS or web browser.
I've been dreaming of doing that since I was 17, and it took me 18 years of preparation, predominantly careful observation of successes, and failures, to go out on my own successfully.
Ladybird has garnered a level of mainstream attention that SerenityOS never really managed to.
The browser has the potential to impact many more people, and the project is well funded by large investors.
It makes sense that Andreas would shift his focus to LadyBird at this point.
While Safari is busy being Safari and Firefox is busy eating glue in the corner, I'd love to see LadyBird become a real contender in the browser market.
> I'd love to see LadyBird become a real contender in the browser market
At this pace it would likely take decades just for them to be complete enough to show up on MDN or wpt.fyi
But I agree. With Microsoft ditching their independent Edge and becoming Chromium-based and Opera doing the same we're really down to 3 real engines. The best fourth option we can get are Goanna-based browsers like Pale Moon which are themselves just an early fork of firefox
A completely new and fresh often can go a long way in safeguarding the openness of the web. Even if there's not a powerful company behind it
I agree (apart from the popular hate on Firefox). Ladybird is promising and has a much bigger chance to make an impact than SerenityOS.
But it's a bit disappointing to see that it's still pretty much a one-man project. Especially to have a chance to get close to the performance of Chrome and Firefox, it will need a large investment.
The amount of engineering resources poured into just making JavaScript fast is mind-numbing. But even "just" providing a light, mostly standards-compliant browser with a sorta-good-enough performance would be great.
Edit: Just saw a video from a few days ago talking about JS performance. Apparently the target is reaching JavaScriptCore performance, without JIT enabled. Disappointing, but understandable.
Feels like an end of an Era, I used to enjoy Andreas's SerenityOS YouTube videos as he dropped down and implemented different features of the OS during a video coding session, adding code from UI, emulators, game ports, JS & Jakt programming languages, JITs all the way down to the kernel. SerenityOS was unique in that regard with the entire code-base maintained in a single source tree.
I expect interest in SerenityOS will now taper off as a result of this, especially now that SerenityOS is no longer a target for Ladybird.
It was a journey for sure. I never contributed code, but color schemes and emojis. But I always enjoy Andreas' Serenity videos, even some coding videos were good (I cannot code). These are special and will forever live in my heart.
This is one of the kindest "I'm forking xyz" posts I've ever read. The whole thing is some level of heartwarming, and unlike a lot of the other posts in the same range actually makes me consider contributing to either Ladybird or SerenityOS!
Because it's not done because of anger, or anything similar. Instead it's observed that a small project became a big one, and started the cannibalize the bigger project.
So the developer decided to take the growing project to its own space and let the other project thrive, too.
Oh, this is interesting. As a GitHub sponsor of Andreas for a while now, what does that mean for sponsors? Are we funding exclusively work on LadyBird? (Had we been, for some time already?) Does the SerenityOS project have a GitHub sponsor?
I personally had grown more interested in the browser anyway, so I'll just keep sponsoring Andreas, I suppose, unless this all is a prelude to VC investment or a big company acquisition or something...
As I wrote in the announcement, I've already been working primarily on Ladybird for ~2 years already, so you have indeed been sponsoring Ladybird development by sponsoring me.
SerenityOS doesn't have a GitHub Sponsors itself, but it does use Polar to allow anyone to directly sponsor work on specific issues. See https://polar.sh/SerenityOS
And don't worry, there won't be some VC investment or big company buyout.
This could be a good move, if it frees resources that would then be allocated for the OS itself. To me SerenityOS as a x86 OS is interesting but redundant, while to me would immediately catch attention if ported to ARM or RISC-V and other embedded platforms.
Many companies already use sluggish Android or web based solutions to build instrumentation screens and other vertical applications where one needs to show GUI primitives, and to me a native, fast alternative is badly needed. SerenityOS doesn't bring all the cruft that would be completely unnecessary in those systems, hence my idea that in some cases it could become the right tool for the job.
Sad to hear. Hacking on SerenityOS together with Andreas was some of the most fun I've ever had. Wishing him the best of luck with Ladybird, and hoping he will come back once in a while (become the TYVC? :).
I'm seriously impressed by the amount of progress this project has made (and its apparently helped with finding issues in the various specs that constitute a modern browser) so I wish him all the best in this new direction
What's the plan for Jakt, the programming language? Does it fall under the SerenityOS umbrella? Will LadyBird continue to use C++? The blog post doesn't mention it.
It has come up from time to time. From the perspective of LadyBird it is an experiment that ran its course and LadyBird will likely just be c++.
From the perspective of serenity os it is still there and mostly compatible if someone is interested to come along and push it forward to be used in the os.
Pretty sure it has been dead for a while. I personally never saw the point but I suppose the whole mantra of Serenity was developing everything from scratch.
Andreas is probably the most positive person I can think of. I'm happy to read such an article where for once "forking" isn't associated with a negative event.
Best of luck on the new Ladybird adventure, and thanks for all your positivity and contributions!
I feel like this should've been done a while ago. Community was quite split by two projects and it felt like SerenityOS was dragging Ladybird development down, both from sponsor and developer point of view.
I'm glad Andreas had committed to this, for the best to both projects.
I don't know much from Andreas other than reading a couple of his posts from here, but he's a bit of a superhero to me. Wholesomely humble guy that started what's usually deemed as a massive coding project, from scratch, just to put his head out of some shit - and the guy not only manages to make two great projects, but also identify and adult his way out of one of them for both project's good.
Ladybird looks amazing and is moving quickly. Without the linkage to SerenityOS, I even feel like looking at the source and seeing if I can get a handle on what's going on.
Looks like the idea of writing a new browser engine, or of forking Firefox, wasn't an absurdly impossible thing that would require billions of dollars. If this inspires somebody to take up that charge again, or to pick up Servo from the table, that would be wonderful too.
I hope that long term the browser gets first class Windows support (currently it's via linux running under WSL), just because broad reach is best for longevity/sustainable relevance.
If you build for a particular shape/character of OS (linux/BSD as it currently stands) then a lot of the abstraction that would be needed for a truly "cross-platform" app doesn't happen.
Absolutely. As a great example, code that was architected to use either poll/epoll/kqueue/etc and IOCP under Windows was in a great position to just adopt io_uring without much rearchitecting!
It makes sense if he wants to make a useful web browser and leverage third party technologies for it, Serenity is totally from scratch. This should mean more time being spent on better problems in the web browser through reinventing fewer wheels and probably speed up the development of a new browser engine, which seems pretty interesting to me.
Ladybird had a unique position of having been developed from scratch. That had brought a fresh set of eyes to an ancient tech called Web. Leveraging OSS would diminish that aspect, IMHO. What’s your vision Andreas? What are you trying to do with Ladybird as it’s no longer a hobby but a more serious project now?
Damn I was worried for a second there, fearing some sort of falling out with the community. But this is awesome news! Ladybird is a far more important project to focus on imho.
The web is eating everything. Maybe every app could be structured as if it's a web app or worker service to do everything people expect while being minimal?
It's interesting that the OS layer could be even thinner than SerenityOS. With 'Local first' capabilities and the expanding role of web technologies, this is not only possible but could be a good idea. The new Ladybird project will be really interesting; it could be a real alternative browser people want!
Being able to boot a good browser on multiple operating systems, such as a minimal BSD, a minimal Linux from scratch style OS, or even a stripped-down SerenityOS variation, is exciting. This could be more secure and easier to innovate with because it has a better level of abstractions to draw upon.
The bootable web OS projects like Palm webOS, the booting Gecko/Firefox OS projects, and Chrome OS could offer interesting lessons for Ladybird.
Running a browser in a VM, on metal, or on an existing host OS like BSD or Linux is very useful. This approach could be secure and powerful enough to attract users for security, speed, or powerful user-centric reasons (not corporate/adware-centric).
Kling and the community he's assembled is "at risk" of helping solve some serious use-cases for people and industries while having fun! Google's OS development with Android, Chrome OS, and Fuchsia may seem complicated compared to what a Ladybird OS could do.
Android is complicated and advanced, but in practice, it's bloated and error-prone with terrible complexity. For example, Pixel users miss calls due to bugs, and there are problems calling emergency numbers. Think about the array of Android and iOS exploits. The attack surfaces and codebases are too big!
Given its complexity, I can see Google switching to working on Ladybird or a Go/Rust variant. Maybe even Apple will consider this. LLMs are now capable of semi-automatic porting with their large context windows. I think things could change fast, and maybe we'll have secure devices in our pockets one day.
I wonder what Alan Kay and his fellow researches would have to say about this.
Can we interpret this as good news of Ladybird but bad news for Serenity? If Ladybird drops support for SerenityOS, what would be its built-in browser?
Serenity still has Ladybird as it is right now. So I assume that will become the baseline for "Browser" in SerenityOS going forward, and be developed independently. Whatever the browser in SerenityOS will end up looking like though, I doubt it will see much development. The kinds of people interested in working on browsers will just work on Ladybird.
Someone will probably once again port Ladybird to SerenityOS in the future. It won't be part of the main system, but users would be free to install it.
I tried Ladybird browser for fun, and it looks more stable than when I ran it for the last time, which is great!
It doesn't properly load the given substack (it seems to stop loading it in the middle), but it looks fine. :)
Surprisingly, loading Google Maps even work, but I can't seem to do more than move the map around. Github even works!
So far it seems better than Servo in throwing random sites at it, but I last tried Servo years ago so it's not fair. I guess I will try Servo now for the heck of it
edit: yeah Servo still seems worse, but it loads the whole substack post :)
I take this as very good news because like Andreas I am much more interested in the browser too. (I never liked the OS aesthetic they are targeting when it was current and I don't care for it now).
Though I wish they still targeted Serenity OS. I guess the expectation is for someone to fork the more general browser to Serenity at a later date. That's not a bad plan either since the incompleteness of the OS is bound to hold the browser back.
This whole thing is one of my most favorite things to happen in open source software. Andreas already succeeded in getting people to look at OS and browser development in a new way. All the best to them.
Thank you Andreas for creating both of these projects and for all your work on both of them and for all of the videos you’ve been making along the way while working on them.
> Ladybird now targets Linux and macOS. The SerenityOS target is dropped.
Aww :(
I can understand forking the browser from the OS, but I'm a bit sad about this. I hope SerenityOS can have a first-class browser in line with the OS philosophy.
To be fair though. SerentyOS given the size of its user base has a ton of ports already and since even super niche projects like NetBSD can pull off having one of the best (and certainly the most portable) ports collections out there I'd assume that SerentyOS will be able to pull off keeping a browser compatible that was originally made for this OS - if there is interest of course.
This is really surprising but also not at the same time. Developing a browser engine from scratch is a huge task. I think the writing was on the wall when some big donations were made from various companies (including Shopify) and Andreas hired a full time dev.
This will probably mark the beginning of the end for SerenityOS but I guess we'll see. Really enjoy watching the development videos from Andreas' YouTube channel.
Wow, I wonder what libraries Ladybird will start depending on? There are some web features that are backed by the same open source library in all three major browsers, and would be huge projects to reimplement in a compatible and cross-platform way. WebRTC and ANGLE come to mind.
Actually Ladybird had its own separate repo before merging with SerenityOS monorepo: https://github.com/SerenityOS/ladybird, so now it's like reverting it.
Have you considered doing a rewrite (or a partial one) now that third-party libraries can be used? To take all your learnings and new opportunities and use them to rearchitect things.
I fully respect these reasons, they are logical and well said. But hopefully interest in SerenityOS doesn't taper off due to this. Kling was great at garnering interest with his YouTube videos where he'd go deep into bug fixing and feature development.
Certainly, the browser has the most potential and even immediate necessity for the sake of the open Web, but I would still like to daily drive SerenityOS some day. Its aesthetics and holistic architecture are a dream realised.
Windows is going down the toilet fast, and Linux lacks the holistic element, so having something that combines the greatest visual design language - mid to late 90s interface guidelines - with the powerful Unix shell would be a huge boon for desktop computing. (Yes OSX has great albeit modern UX with the Unix underpinnings but isn't OSS or affordable to the masses).
People talk about Linux as if it's a monolithic OS and one team in some OS team sport. It's not. It's a kernel.
We've got lots of OSes built on top of that kernel: ChromeOS, Android, and all the distros that are largely different flavors of a GNU/GPL'ed user space, including Fedora, SteamOS etc.
This is fine. If you want a new OS with a "holistic" user space, well Linux is probably the easiest kernel to build it on, but you can't count on it being as free as the GNU user space, because it's still going to be expensive as hell to build, and whoever does it is going to want to recoup their investment many times over.
I think the chance that the GNU user space ever morphs into a "holistic" consumer operating system is basically zero due to how it's licensed, and the key is to understand that this is both fine and necessary.
If you want some other kind of more consumer friendly user space... I guess that starts with convincing some VCs they can make money off of it. They are not going to fund it out of the kindness of their hearts.
Personally I lost interest in consumer operating systems that are designed to limit freedom for the sake of profit, and became an exclusive Debian/Ubuntu/Mint user long ago. If you can be a programmer you can run these operating systems. The tradeoff is you lose the "holistic" and you gain freedom. The two are fundamentally incompatible I'd say so you have to make your choice.
Linux (kernel I mean) is good enough. There were some scheduling problems with audio, but it's mostly resolved. The problem is GNU style. We need another GUI and that doesn't mean just replacing X with/or Wayland protocol. It means replacing GTK and QT too.
> Windows is going down the toilet fast, and Linux lacks the holistic element, so having something that combines the greatest visual design language - mid to late 90s interface guidelines - with the powerful Unix shell would be a huge boon for desktop computing. (Yes OSX has great albeit modern UX with the Unix underpinnings but isn't OSS or affordable to the masses).
I guess SerenityOS is somewhat doomed now? I never saw this kind of move ending well, honestly. Even when not involved, having the original around is always a great boon to the popularity of a project.
I for one would love to see the SerenityOS GUI ported to Wayland on Windows. It's precisely what I ask for from an OS honestly.
I don't know, there's quite a few open source projects where the original author stepped down and it's thriving. Take Arch Linux for example. Before that Gentoo - and there I think the main "problem" with popularity is that self-compiling fell out of fashion.
There's also tons of software projects where this happened, just more quietly. Usually when there is no drama, nobody reports about it. So I'd assume it's usually more a problem, if there is drama, but even here I can think about projects surviving despite it. See OwnCloud/NextCloud.
Honestly, I can't think of projects where this did not end well. Given that SerentyOS is still a thing, despite Kling pulling out a while ago (in the sense of only working on the browser) it really doesn't sound like the project is on its last breath now.
Given the history of getting people into OS development - even more so than Haiku, which also did a pretty good job at that I think Kling leaves with a multitude of people stepping in.
Define ‘doomed’. As far as I can tell, SerenityOS did everything (and much more) than Andreas ever hoped it would.
It was never meant to be a ‘mass-market’ general purpose OS, but could still turn into one (or be the basis that one is built from) if the right maintainers steer it that way. But even if it doesn’t I’m glad that it existed, and that it spawned Ladybird is pretty crazy and awesome.
The audacity to call this shameful is striking to me. If you feel strongly enough that this free, open source, extremely limited resource project (working on one of the largest problem spaces..) doesn't support FreeBSD, port it yourself instead of casting shame on others for not doing it. Hopefully your comment is more lighthearted than I'm giving it credit for.
It should be fairly straightforward to get it running on any mainstream *nix system. I only called out macOS and Linux specifically because we have developers actively using those systems day-to-day. :)
Yes, that is always implied. Even Guido, the original BFDL, stepped down. Linus will probably retire at some point (I hope, considering the alternative would be death before retirement at a relatively young age). Etc.
I never got to try SerenityOS due to the developer's bizarre insistence that users compile the OS instead of just providing a precompiled ISO or IMG file. Shame because I appreciated the workhorse 9x aesthetics it had.
Why is it bizarre? It encouraged people to contribute to the project. It clearly worked out well for them. SerenityOS isn't for regular users, it's for developers.
I might sound jaded, but I'd be more excited for a Chromium fork that focuses on hackability instead of a brand new browser that'll take somewhere between years to ∞ to be even remotely useful. I get why that'd be less fun to work on though.
Isn’t there already quite many Chromium forks? They all have the same issue - the more your code diverges, more additional work it will be. And security patches start lagging.
nextaccountic|1 year ago
Why dropping the SerenityOS target??
Does this mean that SerenityOS's Ladybird will need to continually pull patches from the new Ladybird project in order to keep development?
Also: is it really a fork if the new project gets to keep the name "Ladybird"? Will SerenityOS's browser need to be renamed, or there will be two diverging Ladybird projects with the same name? (Maybe a qualifier would help, like SerenityOS Ladybird vs Open Ladybird or something?)
vincentkriek|1 year ago
> Unlike SerenityOS, Ladybird will have a relaxed NIH policy (instead of "no 3rd party code!"), and will leverage the greater OSS ecosystem.
SerenityOS wants to be an OS from scratch, to see how to do things better from existing implementations. When ladybird wants to target that OS as well, using 3rd party libraries would make it hard to stay compatible. Which is easier to do on just MacOS and Linux.
squeek502|1 year ago
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Userland/...
Ladybird was the name used for to the cross-platform version of the browser.
https://awesomekling.github.io/Ladybird-a-new-cross-platform...
trashburger|1 year ago
It will probably mean that Ladybird becomes a port. As for what happens to the LibWeb that's in SerenityOS right now, that's still undecided.
> Also: is it really a fork if the new project gets to keep the name "Ladybird"? Will SerenityOS's browser need to be renamed, or there will be two diverging Ladybird projects with the same name? (Maybe a qualifier would help, like SerenityOS Ladybird vs Open Ladybird or something?)
SerenityOS' browser will probably go back to being called "Browser", like it was before.
samanator|1 year ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40561408
1oooqooq|1 year ago
stuaxo|1 year ago
I'd say ladybird moving out is a big incentive to get a packaging system up and running.
bowsamic|1 year ago
nasso_dev|1 year ago
my hope is that they take this as an opportunity to come up with a purpose built "web" stack for serenity? use it as an excuse to reinvent the web and "fix" the mistakes that were made? maybe by actually Putting Scheme In The Browser rather than js?
vitiral|1 year ago
Tao Te Ching
MeImCounting|1 year ago
satvikpendem|1 year ago
jll29|1 year ago
The split makes sense for practical reasons - I also sense he is personally perhaps more passionate about browser hacking than OS hacking (his own contributions were more to Ladybird than to the OS for about a year as he himself writes). Smart as he is, he may have recognized that he is in a unique position to be able to contribute a cross-platform browser that competes with the big tech companies, where as SerenityOS is essentially more of a toy OS (32 bit, 1990s look and feel, not compatible with important other operating systems, no radically new OS concepts) - without wanting to dimish the contributions of its amazing developers. IMHO, SerenityOS is more about the process of writing code from scratch than the resulting software itself. Its purpose appears to be 1. to prove it is possible despite the naysayers ("only large tech companies can build a browser", "no-one can build an OS from scratch") and 2. to enjoy the coding itself.
As other commenters have already stated, the only issue will be taking as much from Ladybird over to SerenityOS as possible.
refulgentis|1 year ago
There's another way of looking at, that is confirmed by the same set of facts:
- There was an OS project run by an awesome dude with a great story that was seen as in a unique position to compete with big tech companies.
- It needed a web browser.
- A web browser project was created.
- Now, the web browser is in a unique position to compete with big tech companies.
- This means it needs to fork itself, and drop support for the OS. That is because the OS project is now a toy.
My last deleted comment mentioned my deep respect for Andreas, and that my next milestone for the browser is downloadable builds and/or moving from pre-alpha to alpha (the downloadable builds was listed as a warning it was in pre-alpha).
I don't like appearing negative or arguably unsupportive, hence all the deleted comments over the years.
But, it's very important to me to make sure there's an accurate signal of what working on your own project looks like. Including the progress rate on things that sound awesome to work on, like an OS or web browser.
I've been dreaming of doing that since I was 17, and it took me 18 years of preparation, predominantly careful observation of successes, and failures, to go out on my own successfully.
1GZ0|1 year ago
The browser has the potential to impact many more people, and the project is well funded by large investors.
It makes sense that Andreas would shift his focus to LadyBird at this point.
While Safari is busy being Safari and Firefox is busy eating glue in the corner, I'd love to see LadyBird become a real contender in the browser market.
culi|1 year ago
At this pace it would likely take decades just for them to be complete enough to show up on MDN or wpt.fyi
But I agree. With Microsoft ditching their independent Edge and becoming Chromium-based and Opera doing the same we're really down to 3 real engines. The best fourth option we can get are Goanna-based browsers like Pale Moon which are themselves just an early fork of firefox
A completely new and fresh often can go a long way in safeguarding the openness of the web. Even if there's not a powerful company behind it
nottorp|1 year ago
Hmm, why is there no mention of that in the splitting announcement?
Did said large investors trigger the drop of SerenityOS because they don't want to waste their resources on a niche hobby platform?
The_Colonel|1 year ago
But it's a bit disappointing to see that it's still pretty much a one-man project. Especially to have a chance to get close to the performance of Chrome and Firefox, it will need a large investment.
The amount of engineering resources poured into just making JavaScript fast is mind-numbing. But even "just" providing a light, mostly standards-compliant browser with a sorta-good-enough performance would be great.
Edit: Just saw a video from a few days ago talking about JS performance. Apparently the target is reaching JavaScriptCore performance, without JIT enabled. Disappointing, but understandable.
niutech|1 year ago
Definitely Ladybird, but I'd also love to see Servo and Netsurf being developed.
teekert|1 year ago
skilled|1 year ago
https://www.youtube.com/@awesomekling/videos
Where he does a monthly update on developing Ladybird. You can learn about the things he's overcome, but also the problems he's having.
Most recent updates,
Ladybird browser update (May 2024) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4YBMjlGWRc)
Ladybird browser update (Apr 2024) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBl-fa-YJFE)
Ladybird browser update (Mar 2024) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKHopzDtElY)
mythz|1 year ago
I expect interest in SerenityOS will now taper off as a result of this, especially now that SerenityOS is no longer a target for Ladybird.
dither8|1 year ago
fao_|1 year ago
bayindirh|1 year ago
So the developer decided to take the growing project to its own space and let the other project thrive, too.
It's done out of love, if nothing else.
losvedir|1 year ago
I personally had grown more interested in the browser anyway, so I'll just keep sponsoring Andreas, I suppose, unless this all is a prelude to VC investment or a big company acquisition or something...
awesomekling|1 year ago
As I wrote in the announcement, I've already been working primarily on Ladybird for ~2 years already, so you have indeed been sponsoring Ladybird development by sponsoring me.
SerenityOS doesn't have a GitHub Sponsors itself, but it does use Polar to allow anyone to directly sponsor work on specific issues. See https://polar.sh/SerenityOS
And don't worry, there won't be some VC investment or big company buyout.
squarefoot|1 year ago
tredre3|1 year ago
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Kernel/Ar...
trashburger|1 year ago
p9fus|1 year ago
frankjr|1 year ago
https://github.com/SerenityOS/jakt
robryan|1 year ago
From the perspective of serenity os it is still there and mostly compatible if someone is interested to come along and push it forward to be used in the os.
pjmlp|1 year ago
https://www.sophiajt.com/search-for-easier-safe-systems-prog...
hypeatei|1 year ago
denysvitali|1 year ago
Best of luck on the new Ladybird adventure, and thanks for all your positivity and contributions!
Touche|1 year ago
ivanjermakov|1 year ago
I'm glad Andreas had committed to this, for the best to both projects.
mgarciaisaia|1 year ago
Respect, man.
pessimizer|1 year ago
Looks like the idea of writing a new browser engine, or of forking Firefox, wasn't an absurdly impossible thing that would require billions of dollars. If this inspires somebody to take up that charge again, or to pick up Servo from the table, that would be wonderful too.
ssernikk|1 year ago
I would love to see a servo-based browser in near future!
webprofusion|1 year ago
If you build for a particular shape/character of OS (linux/BSD as it currently stands) then a lot of the abstraction that would be needed for a truly "cross-platform" app doesn't happen.
ComputerGuru|1 year ago
vrotaru|1 year ago
Not the fastest way, but it seems to work. Best wishes to Andreas.
replete|1 year ago
sedatk|1 year ago
lyu07282|1 year ago
zadler|1 year ago
luke-stanley|1 year ago
aeyes|1 year ago
With SerenjtyOS you always had the "build it yourself" approach which was probably meant to only attract technical users.
niutech|1 year ago
orlandrescu|1 year ago
coolcoder613|1 year ago
low_tech_punk|1 year ago
Dessesaf|1 year ago
Someone will probably once again port Ladybird to SerenityOS in the future. It won't be part of the main system, but users would be free to install it.
trustno2|1 year ago
It doesn't properly load the given substack (it seems to stop loading it in the middle), but it looks fine. :)
Surprisingly, loading Google Maps even work, but I can't seem to do more than move the map around. Github even works!
So far it seems better than Servo in throwing random sites at it, but I last tried Servo years ago so it's not fair. I guess I will try Servo now for the heck of it
edit: yeah Servo still seems worse, but it loads the whole substack post :)
rjh29|1 year ago
Unsurprisingly github is one of the developer's most frequently used sites when dogfooding the browser so it'll probably always work :)
lemper|1 year ago
dizhn|1 year ago
Though I wish they still targeted Serenity OS. I guess the expectation is for someone to fork the more general browser to Serenity at a later date. That's not a bad plan either since the incompleteness of the OS is bound to hold the browser back.
This whole thing is one of my most favorite things to happen in open source software. Andreas already succeeded in getting people to look at OS and browser development in a new way. All the best to them.
bowsamic|1 year ago
awesomekling|1 year ago
What happens next is up to them & the community to decide. :)
codetrotter|1 year ago
user_7832|1 year ago
Aww :(
I can understand forking the browser from the OS, but I'm a bit sad about this. I hope SerenityOS can have a first-class browser in line with the OS philosophy.
tete|1 year ago
hypeatei|1 year ago
This will probably mark the beginning of the end for SerenityOS but I guess we'll see. Really enjoy watching the development videos from Andreas' YouTube channel.
account42|1 year ago
Really sad to see so many open source communities choosing closed source, walled off and not publicly visible communication channels.
> Ladybird now targets Linux and macOS. The SerenityOS target is dropped.
Changing the browser development to a cross-platform-first model is great to see but why drop support for its roots completely?
hashtag-til|1 year ago
modeless|1 year ago
niutech|1 year ago
hawski|1 year ago
MaximilianEmel|1 year ago
HeckFeck|1 year ago
Certainly, the browser has the most potential and even immediate necessity for the sake of the open Web, but I would still like to daily drive SerenityOS some day. Its aesthetics and holistic architecture are a dream realised.
Windows is going down the toilet fast, and Linux lacks the holistic element, so having something that combines the greatest visual design language - mid to late 90s interface guidelines - with the powerful Unix shell would be a huge boon for desktop computing. (Yes OSX has great albeit modern UX with the Unix underpinnings but isn't OSS or affordable to the masses).
safety1st|1 year ago
We've got lots of OSes built on top of that kernel: ChromeOS, Android, and all the distros that are largely different flavors of a GNU/GPL'ed user space, including Fedora, SteamOS etc.
This is fine. If you want a new OS with a "holistic" user space, well Linux is probably the easiest kernel to build it on, but you can't count on it being as free as the GNU user space, because it's still going to be expensive as hell to build, and whoever does it is going to want to recoup their investment many times over.
I think the chance that the GNU user space ever morphs into a "holistic" consumer operating system is basically zero due to how it's licensed, and the key is to understand that this is both fine and necessary.
If you want some other kind of more consumer friendly user space... I guess that starts with convincing some VCs they can make money off of it. They are not going to fund it out of the kindness of their hearts.
Personally I lost interest in consumer operating systems that are designed to limit freedom for the sake of profit, and became an exclusive Debian/Ubuntu/Mint user long ago. If you can be a programmer you can run these operating systems. The tradeoff is you lose the "holistic" and you gain freedom. The two are fundamentally incompatible I'd say so you have to make your choice.
wk_end|1 year ago
https://www.haiku-os.org/
M95D|1 year ago
ThePowerOfFuet|1 year ago
You might want to look at helloSystem.
https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/
unknown|1 year ago
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prox|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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qalmakka|1 year ago
I for one would love to see the SerenityOS GUI ported to Wayland on Windows. It's precisely what I ask for from an OS honestly.
tete|1 year ago
There's also tons of software projects where this happened, just more quietly. Usually when there is no drama, nobody reports about it. So I'd assume it's usually more a problem, if there is drama, but even here I can think about projects surviving despite it. See OwnCloud/NextCloud.
Honestly, I can't think of projects where this did not end well. Given that SerentyOS is still a thing, despite Kling pulling out a while ago (in the sense of only working on the browser) it really doesn't sound like the project is on its last breath now.
Given the history of getting people into OS development - even more so than Haiku, which also did a pretty good job at that I think Kling leaves with a multitude of people stepping in.
stephen_g|1 year ago
It was never meant to be a ‘mass-market’ general purpose OS, but could still turn into one (or be the basis that one is built from) if the right maintainers steer it that way. But even if it doesn’t I’m glad that it existed, and that it spawned Ladybird is pretty crazy and awesome.
pawelmurias|1 year ago
bowsamic|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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doublerabbit|1 year ago
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suby|1 year ago
awesomekling|1 year ago
brettermeier|1 year ago
dangseesyou|1 year ago
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chrismsimpson|1 year ago
getwiththeprog|1 year ago
Beneficial Dictator For As Long As It Suits Me
:)
arp242|1 year ago
guilherme-puida|1 year ago
segasaturn|1 year ago
paddim8|1 year ago
niutech|1 year ago
skeaker|1 year ago
hurutparittya|1 year ago
nicce|1 year ago
Apocryphon|1 year ago
59nadir|1 year ago
rgreekguy|1 year ago