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As someone who's been quite heavily involved with web-platform-tests, I'd caution against any use of the test pass rate as a metric for anything.
That's not to belittle the considerable achievements of Ladybird; their progress is really impressive, and if web-platform-tests are helping their engineering efforts I consider that a win. New implementations of the web platform, including Ladybird, Servo, and Flow, are exciting to see.
However, web-platform-tests specifically decided to optimise for being a useful engineering tool rather than being a good metric. That means there's no real attempt to balance the testsuite across the platform; for example a surprising fraction of the overall test count is encoding tests because they're easy to generate, not because it's an especially hard problem in browser development.
We've also consciously wanted to ensure that contributing tests is low friction, both technically and socially, in order that people don't feel inclined to withhold useful tests. Again that's not the tradeoff you make for a good metric, but is the right one for a good engineering resource.
The Interop Project is designed with different tradeoffs in mind, and overcomes some of these problems by selecting a subsets of tests which are broadly agreed to represent a useful level of coverage of an important feature. But unfortunately the current setup is designed for engines that are already implementing enough feature to be usable as general purpose web-browsers.
The tweet mentions that this is an arbitrary metric thrust upon them by Apple, so I don’t think they would necessarily disagree with you. During the monthly updates they do also show the passing number of tests without including the encoding tests because of how much they skew things.
The problem is, there's no other good metric. We used to have Acid tests for CSS, but in absence of that, it's as good metric as any.
Some modern ACID-style tests are a nice idea actually.
Are Acid tests no longer available?
Acid 2 bakes in the assumption that you will be displaying it on a desktop/laptop monitor with 100% scaling; It depends on pixel accuracy.
This was a reasonably universal assumption in 2005, but became less and less valid over time, we now have high-dpi screens and the whole idea of pixel accuracy has fallen out of favour (it was never a good idea, but 2005) as phone browsers are expected to rescale websites for better readability/usability.
The result is that Acid 2 fails on my phone, and on my laptop it will pass/fail depending on which screen the window is on.
Acid 3 was too forwards looking and rigid. While Acid 2 was (mostly) testing accepted standards (which IE6 implemented very poorly), Acid 3 tested a bunch of draft standards. It was very strict on many things that weren't well defined and later versions of the standards took the opposite approach.
Basically, Acid 2 was very good at shaming Microsoft into fixing Internet Explorer; But in the long run the whole concept of popular cherry picked torture tests proved to be of limited usefulness (and actually counterproductive) to promoting standards compliant browsers.
They no longer reflect what the average user expects their browser to support. You can pass it and miss on several important things that are considered widespread features nowadays.
They are, but they arent great tests of what a browser is capable of. For example, Firefox does not pass Acid2 or Acid3
Ladybird will be faster than anything with an arbitrary metric thrust
mmm yes and lift
Could a hand-picked subset be selected to make that metric?
Everything you said sounds very reasonable, yet the "Browser-Specific Failures" graph on the main page of the wpt.fyi website explicitly misleads us into thinking
PS I'm a big fan of the work and appreciate what you do. I check the interop page about once a week!
As someone who's been quite heavily involved with having a brain, I'd advocate for using of the test pass rate as a metric for how many tests are passed.
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Why are you bringing this up, when it’s not been implemented as a metric here, but because Apple requires it for iOS.
This is a headline that is very easy to misread and or misunderstand. I don’t find their comment to be that out of place at all.
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Root comment is lecturing the ladybird team about not using this suite as a metric, which is totally uncalled for. That’s what I’m trying to convey.
"lecturing" is carrying a lot of needless weight here. Their comment doesn't read like that, they're just pointing out that the metric itself isn't what it seems to be.
> but because Apple requires it for iOS
Therefore it is a metric used by Apple.
In the spirit of malicious compliance, thus being a bad metric would probably be a feature in their book.
Malicious compliance?
The EU DMA says they have to allow third party browser engines access to the same resources (the JIT) that Safari has. It specifically allows them to place reasonable requirements on those third party alternatives:
> The gatekeeper shall not be prevented from taking, to the extent that they are strictly necessary and proportionate, measures to ensure that third-party software applications or software application stores do not endanger the integrity of the hardware or operating system provided by the gatekeeper, provided that such measures are duly justified by the gatekeeper.
Access to rwx memory is inherently dangerous, and it's completely reasonable to expect third parties to have proven that they are serious about producing a usable browser engine before putting such a risky product on the market for consumers to download. The law does not require them to allow any third party application to access the JIT, only a third party application that competes with Safari (a usable web browser).
Yes, but that doesn't require rendering performance or anything like that, but absence of security problems.
You can't justify a requirement for a minimum level of performance or some capability. You can justify a requirement of a guaranteed absence of security bugs, provided that that's a standard you impose on yourself throughout the system.
There are literally no other metrics.
Web Platform Tests were literally a project to align browsers on compatible implementations of a bunch of web APIs. Started by Opera and w3c and maintained by w3c https://www.bocoup.com/blog/wpt-an-overview-and-history
Then talk to apple. They are the ones who put this bar in place.
I think it’s just fantastic that the Ladybird browser is close to being usable. I was under the impression this was going to take many years before it became competitive.
While I haven't tried it myself, I've seen a few of the monthly summaries videos. Passing the tests and being fast enough for daily usage is two very different things and right now Ladybird doesn't appear to be all that speedy.
Still an amazing feat of development from the entire team.
I was going to say the same thing.
Why are the tests so disconnected from the usability? My assumption is the tests are closer to a unit test, while browsing a page is essentially an E2E test, and if anything in the pipeline goes wrong (especially given that we use complex JS everywhere) the result is essentially useless.
There's not a linear relationship between the tests and usability. There are many tests for various character encodings, but viewing a web page means you're only "using" one of them, for example.
As such, 90% test pass rate but low usability simply means that 10% of the tests cover a lot of very visible usability features that ladybird hasn't addressed yet.
Even if they passed 100% of the tests, it's still possible they'd be too slow for practical, everyday use. Speed is not tested in these, only compatability.
web platform tests are closer to unit tests than to integration tests or to smoke tests. Many of those are also very hard to write and check for correctly, since there are tens of thousands of lines of specs, and thousands of web APIs.
Three years ago I was very skeptical of Ladybird. But two things have changed. First, they have funding for 8 full time engineers, which I definitely wasn’t expecting. Second, it’s been three years. So given that, I am more optimistic.
There’s still a very long way before they can compete with Chrome, of course. And I’m not sure I ever understood the value proposition compared to forking an existing engine.
The value proposition is not having vendor lockin and having WebKit/Blink be the defacto behaviour. For example the Ladybird team have found and raised spec issues in the different specs.
Another example is around ad blockers -- if Blink is the only option, they can make it hard for ad blockers to function whereas having other engines allows different choices to be made.
>The value proposition is not having vendor lockin
there by definition is no vendor lock-in by forking an open-source engine. The worst case is the original maintainers going evil tomorrow and you being on your own, which is no worse than starting from scratch, except you saved yourself some ten million odd lines of mindless spec implementation in the case of a browser.
I’m not an expert in this field, but I don’t think I agree. The problem with a browser monopoly is that the monopolist does not have to obey specs — you can just do whatever you want, and force the specs to follow you.
If you fork that monopolist’s engine, you’re not making any immediate difference to the market. You’ll adopt all their existing behavior, whether or whether not it conforms to spec (and I would guess you would continue to pull in many of their changes down the road).
A brand new implementation is much more difficult, but if it works it’s much more meaningful in preventing a monopoly.
The issue is around maintenance/development burden. For example, when manifest V2 was dropped in favour of manifest V3 it is possible for a downstream project (Edge, etc.) to maintain V2 support. However, that gets harder the further along the projects go and the code diverges; that may mean keeping more code around (if interfaces or utility classes are changed/removed), or rewriting the support if the logic changes (such as the network stack).
It's like projects trying to keep Firefox XUL alive, or GTK+ 2 or 3.
The project has now moved from just updating the external dependency to working on that and possibly actively fighting against the tide. That is a lot harder and requires more work each time you update the dependency.
So in effect you have vendor lock-in. And if the vendor controls or affects downstream products like plugin developers (targeting manifest V3) or application developers (targeting GTK+ 3 or 4) then its even harder to maintain support for the other functionality.
That’s certainly an advantage, but I’m not sure that’s the value proposition.
It’s that Chrome and V8’s implementation has grown to match resourcing. You probably can’t maintain a fork of their engine long-term without Google level funding.
Who is backing it ? That’s a bit of money Nm can see the list, wonder what’s in it for those companies
They list sponsors on their website: https://ladybird.org/#sponsors
I do wonder if it's the case of "90% of completeness takes 90% of time; the remaining 10% takes another 90%".
Though, I suppose even if true, it would still be a pretty good timeframe.
I'll guess that the remaining 10% will take more than another 90%, and also that it will keep growing as time goes on. Web standards are becoming more complex every day.
This is one huge blindspot in the web spec process in my opinion. Any new spec is considered on the context of existing browsers and very little consideration seems to be given to the scope of the web standards as a whole.
There's also no actual way of saying "no" to a web standard. The whole process is designed around moving a spec forward through stages.
To quote Rich Harris, the author of Svelte: https://x.com/Rich_Harris/status/1841605646128460111
--- start quote ---
saying 'no' is the key to good software design, but in standards you can only 'champion' proposals — you can't champion the _lack_ of a proposal. the best you can hope for is inertia.
in my experience the only feedback that is welcome is around the details of an idea, never around whether the idea has merit in the first place, and you should expect to be reminded that implementers are the only people whose opinions actually matter.
--- end quote ---
and someone else in the same conversation:
--- start quote ---
You can't practically anti-champion standards that are small improvements to features that ought to have been abandoned, like Shadow DOM. Shadow DOM sucks, but it sucked a little less when they added CSS Module Scripts, Selection.getComposedRanges(), ElementInternals.shadowRoot…
https://x.com/dfabu/status/1841936377350652391
---
Perhaps there should be levels of conformance and important businesses and government platforms should be required to work on all browsers that support at least level X, where level X is not everything and the kitchen sink, but really only the minimal stuff. No SPA, just forms and such basic things, accessibility should be very high and mandatory etc.
They're basically trying to catch up to a moving train.
It's doable, but not easy especially when the train engine is being stuffed with high-octane fuel by Google's resources.
Yeah definitely. For the web it's more like the last 0.1% takes 99.9% of the time. And it's not like you can skip it either. Nobody is going to use a browser that is missing 0.1% of the web platform - that probably means something like 1% of websites are broke in some way and that's a terrible experience.
They are decades of work away from having a browser that would be competitive with Chrome or Firefox.
Don't hold your breath though. Looking at the September progress report[0] there are many many things to iron out. It's great progress but there are still several years of development for LB to be ready.
It really goes to show what a dedicated team can accomplish. Before Ladybird it was taken for granted that building an entirely new browser engine would take decades and people would laugh at you for even bringing it up.
Well, it is going to take decades…
It’s a valuable, ambitious project, but it is going to take a while before it can be used for anything real.
Before Ladybird every time someone brought up about making a new web engine, pretty much every top voted comment here on HN was about how that was impossible to do, often bringing up how even a giant like Microsoft had to abandon their engine.
At least now the cynical pessimistic takes changed from "impossible, not even MS with their giant teams can do it" to "it may take decades for this small team to do it".
To be fair, when they started, they intended to write a browser from the bottom up, including such things as image and video decoders, networking, etc.
They changed course.
To be fair. They have a really long way to go.
I've started using it for some websites. It's surprisingly very capable already.
Don't worry. If the web browser ever becomes fast enough to be usable, even more javascript crap will be dumped on every website to slow it back down again
The linked tweet notes that this is an important milestone in getting Ladybird considered as an alternative browser engine in iOS.
Good context for why "Apple" is in the headline
...in the EU at least, anywhere else Apple is going to say "no" regardless of how good your engine is.
How does it work for the likes of Google and Mozilla? Do they use their own engines for iOS versions in the EU and wrap WebKit for other areas?
AFAICT, Chrome and Firefox on iOS are still just WebKit wrappers. I’d love for that to change though, WebKit in iOS sucks in quite a few ways.
such as? I consider myself a power user and I've never run into anything I couldn't handle or get around. Genuinely curious.
No support for uBlock Origin and other tools that make the web sane
Chrome doesn't allow the full version of uBlock Origin on desktop, or any version of it on mobile.
How does Chrome have so much market share?
Blink supports Windows, Android and Linux better than WebKit or Gecko does, to name at least one one reason. If it weren't for uBlock I'd probably be using a Chrome fork right now.
Chrome on Android makes the web completely unusable without having access to uBlock, especially on resource constrained devices.
Chrome on Windows doesn't allow the full version of uBlock Origin that still works on the YouTube website.
It's just Google abusing its browser monopoly in the name of ad revenue.
Chrome on Android doesn't support extensions, but Blink does. One of the benefits to allowing modified browser engines.
Google has already shown that they will slowly and methodically use every lever at their disposal to nerf ad blocking, regardless of what the user base thinks.
It's the exact same playbook Microsoft is using to block users from logging onto their own computer without using an online Microsoft account.
Given that Google has already started working to limit sideloading on Android, those days seem limited.
Blink is an open source project. If Google updates Chrome and Android to refuse sideloading at all, you can still fork both projects.
Your entire argument relies on a hypothetical you can't prove and doesn't scare anyone. To Android users you sound more like Chicken Little than the Boy who Cried Wolf.
Sure. This is fine.
> Google’s Requirement For All Android Developers To Register And Be Verified Threatens To Close Down Open Source App Store F-Droid
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/10/07/googles-requirement-for-...
uBlock Origin Lite now available for Safari
Wipr and UserScripts on Safari prove to me that that's not a real issue...I understand compatibility problems are still issues, but ads/etc. are a fully solved one for Safari users.
Orion is doing it somehow on iOS in a way I still don’t really understand.
As far as I know, they just emulate the Chrome extension API right?
For me it’s a lot of layout and rendering bugs that I run into with somewhat normal CSS transforms. Anytime I build a site that has any kind of animation, there’s at least one weird rendering bug on iOS. Also that stupid playsInline prop that if you forget it makes any video in the viewport hijack the browser and go fullscreen.
Web devs make huge efforts to work around WebKit's issues. It's the new IE6.
WebKit is not lacking in things your average dev needs and it’s not that big of a deal to work around, much like it’s not that big a deal to work around things in Gecko - or presumably Ladybird whenever it becomes usable enough.
Super impressive that an independent, non-corpo project has gotten this far this quickly.
It is nuts, when you think about how much a browser does, it is a crazy feat.
Just building a good html/css renderer and a JS engine is crazy, but now you are hooked into the ecosystem and at the mercy of whatever comes next. Chrome can push back against proposals but little browsers either use chromium or are basically in a riptide trying to make sure they keep up.
> Chrome can push back against proposals
The problem isn't Chrome pushing back proposals. The problem is Chrome pushing ahead with its own proposals regardless of anyone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45371575
OTOH, are all of the browsers supposed to move in lock step? Is chrome supposed to wait for everyone else's approval before launching any kind of feature?
That is literally how a standard supposed to work: arrive at consensus and have two independent implementations before it can be claimed to be a standard. Or at the very least arrive at an API shape and hammer out obvious problems before shipping.
Otherwise you get Internet Explorer, in reverse: https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2021/08/breaking_th...
Chrome literally doesn't even bother pretending that many of their proposals are more than some scribbles in spec-adjacent format. E.g. a spec for WebHID that other browsers could implement was just dumped into the repo after Chrome shipped it.
Constructable Stylesheets had both a badly named API and a trivially triggered race condition. Shipped in Chrome in the middle of discussion because Google-developed lit "needed" it.
And so on and so forth.
But is every feature in a browser supposed to be standardized? Like, it's against the rules somehow to develop features without asking permission from Apple and Mozilla?
It's not against the rules, but it is hostile to the web. Forking the web because a company is big enough to do so may sound just dandy to you, but to the rest of us who have spent decades working on interoperability it's a big middle finger.
Allowing Apple to have a veto on which features are allowed to be added to a browser is even more hostile to the web.
Apple doesn’t have a veto. If two independent implementations are required for something to become a web standard, all Google have to do is convince anybody outside of Google to implement their specs, such as Mozilla – who Google pay billions of dollars to.
The problem with all of these new specifications is that Google can’t convince anybody to do this, no matter how much money they throw at them. That’s not an Apple veto stopping these things from becoming standards, that’s Google pushing shitty specs.
Your conclusion would be true were your premise true.
I wouldn't say stuff like Manifest V2 is "new features". A lot of what Chrome is pushing is just to support its commercial interests.
We've kinda come full circle. Web standards were made to prevent what happened when Internet Explorer ruled the world but now a corporation has near-monopoly browser share and is driving the web standards themselves
Manifest v2 was having the same privacy guarantees as Safari and it broke a lot of people’s brains. Even if we assume it’s a secret way to neuter ad blockers even though they are fine, it does not imply we have IE or anything close. I’m kinda happy people take positions like these because they keep companies honesty but it’s completely irrational.
And one of the browsers is maintained by an OS vendor that benefits from the lock-in that comes from native apps and rent seeking from their app store. I'm sure they would love to control the pace of browser innovation by just deciding not to implement certain features.
I think the word "standard" carries a certain meaning.
Right. There are a number of features Chrome has that others don't that make it viable for a kiosk. Right now it's the only one.
>It is nuts, when you think about how much a browser does, it is a crazy feat
At this point a modern browser is basically an operating system.
The government(s) need to force Google to obey web standards that are set by an industry consortium. One that also has small player participation as a requirement.
If Google is strong arming or pushing ahead their own agenda, the standards body should have plenty enough votes to veto.
And for teeth, compliance should be a requirement for Google to even be allowed to have its own browser. If they break it, no more browser for Google.
Google mostly does obey web standards that are set by an industry consortium (WHATWG, W3C, or in the case of JavaScript EMCA).
Chrome has the best compliance with standards of any of the big three (see wpt.fyi) - which is not surprising, because they also have the most engineering time dedicated to their browser, and the most people working on standards.
These bodies require buy in from multiple vendors, but generally not unanimity. That said, browsers can and do ship things which haven't been standardized (e.g. WebUSB, which is still only a draft because only Chrome wants to ship it). In a lot of cases this pretty much has to happen pre-standardization, because it is difficult to come up with a good standard from the ivory tower with no contact with actual use. Chrome is unusually good about working in public to develop specifications for such features even when other browsers aren't currently interested in shipping them.
I don't know what problem you think this proposal would solve.
> Chrome is unusually good about working in public to develop specifications for such features even when other browsers aren't currently interested in shipping them.
That is, if there's a promotion, or a company bet, or a need to establish/secure market dominance for one property or another, Chrome dumps a scribble on a napkin, barely engages in any conversation, and ships to production within a few weeks after dumping said scribbles.
Once it's out there, it couldn't care less what other browsers vendors will say. Dominant market share and an army of developers who never bothered to learn about standards processes will make sure that this is now a standard.
The government and most voters don't even know what a file is. They can't even vote in favor of their own basic needs like health care. Do you really think this band of incompetents should be empowered to strangle innovation?
There are plenty of experts in our industry willing to help the government pen regulations. I'd gladly volunteer.
Google isn't your friend.
If you're a consumer, they're limiting choice.
If you're a startup or midcap, they're in your way.
I expect startups to out-innovate once the giants get a regulatory buzz cut.
> There are plenty of experts in our industry willing to help the government pen regulations. I'd gladly volunteer.
And there's no way, in general, to differentiate you (who I'm assuming to be a good-intentioned actual-expert) from someone who is either (a) not an expert or (b) not good-intentioned (i.e. a lobbyist) - so this offer is effectively useless, and the more general point of "there are experts that can help" is invalid.
I've been thinking about this problem a lot, because it is one that needs to be solved. But it's more complicated than just saying that "experts from the community can offer to help draft regulations" because the problem of how lawmakers can trust those offering help is very difficult.
...and that's assuming that the lawmakers are operating in good faith and accurately representing their constitutents' interests, which there is scientific research[1] that indicates is not true.
[1] https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/en/publications/testin...
We have to let Google do whatever they want, lest we strangle innovation. The people we trust to literally run the country, to build, operate, and maintain nuclear weapons and submarines - they can't be trusted with things like files.
I know what you meant by "non corpo", but the Ladybird organization is literally a corporation: https://ladybird.org/assets/documents/public-records/2024-03...
A nonprofit corporation
Definitely... IF they keep this up, they will be a real contender by the end of 2027. I keep saying I'd like to see a similar push for Servo though... since it's probably the next most feature-rich engine option. It really needs a corresponding browser project to go along side it though, since FF/Mozilla isn't that interested.
It looks like Amazon has people looking at Servo integration in GTK: https://blogs.gnome.org/nacho/2025/10/01/servo-gtk/
I believe this would be Verso: https://github.com/versotile-org/verso
That repo is a mirror of the GitLab version.
https://gitlab.com/verso-browser/verso/
Seemed to have fairly frequent commits but they abruptly spotted 3 months ago.
https://gitlab.com/verso-browser/verso/-/commits/main?ref_ty...
Are they really non-corpo? I remember seeing some corpos bankrolling it?
And in that sense, is it better than Gecko with firefox, which is non-profit?
I don't remember that; maybe you can look it up?
Ladybird is still far from usable or fast enough to even start comparing it to Gecko.
It says here: https://ladybird.org/#sponsors
Shopify, CloudFlare, and others.
Okay. Seems more diversified than Mozilla at least, with its huge dependency on Google's search bar.
But how to pass tests securely, is completely different problem. This is conformance testing. But impressive regardless.
Can you elaborate? What do you mean by how to pass tests securely? It doesn't read like you mean security tests but otherwise I have no idea what you're talking about.
Conformance testing means that you meet certain specifications. It tells nothing about how you handle data which is different from the specs or random data; or in other words, the root of most security problems.
[dead]
> Super impressive that an independent, non-corpo project has gotten this far this quickly.
Well, it could be that AI actually speeds up development, who knows.
Data so far says that it doesn't https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
cloudflare is sponsoring. says it all.
What does that say?
It says that there's funding, which goes much further than hobbyists could.
I just tried building and running it. Surprisingly many websites already load fine, though Youtube doesn't and Vimeo/Reddit comment section crashed it. Still, the results are quite encouraging! It takes ~6GB of HDD to build it.
I wonder how hard the last 10% will be? If its a typical software project its going to be 90% more effort for the last 10%.
And the last 1% will be constantly changing, and never really “done” as a result.
90% is Apple’s standard. I wonder what the general public requires.
The general public probably just needs basic HTML/CSS/JS support along with gzip, zstd, and common image and video formats. Stuff like beacons, accelerometers, bluetooth, device memory, webusb, battery status, etc. (so basically all of the "platform" part of the "web platform") are either extremely niche or actively harmful.
It really depends on what the big sites they use decide to use. I can see Google using more niche web features just to push people to Chrome.
Do I need accelerometer support to watch a full screen video in landscape on YouTube? That’s probably a big deal for anyone who doesn’t use the app, for example.
Why does this need accelerometer support at all? The OS has that data and can instruct the app to change aspect ratio. Then all the website needs to do is to body.addEventHandler("resize", onresize).
Browsers have been historically the biggest and most difficult projects, so hard to say why it wouldn’t be. When they can start promising 20k bounties for segfaults, they are getting close.
They are pretty far way from that. I still think it is one of the most exciting open source projects in recent years.
As someone who has first encounter with the ladybird - why is it exciting?
And how could ladybird attract so many sponsors for such a project? Why wouldn't they fund Firefox instead if they want to achieve some diversity in browser engine field?
I'm curious, not skeptical.
It's hard to fund Firefox when Mozilla spends as much money as they do on other things than Firefox.
> Browsers have been historically the biggest and most difficult projects
That's just a tired thrope that keeps being repeated by people who don't know any better.
Given how few generally usable browsers (3 with different skins) there are and how huge they are with basically required company backing for many employees... How is that a trope?
Ladybird is doing it with 8 devs, and it's working!
I tried it on my m4, it's surprisedly usable.
What's the security story in Ladybird? Do they use sandboxes etc? I'm a bit concerned that hundreds of thousands of lines of C++ browser code written in just three years could be a minefield, but I hope I'm wrong.
Last I heard they were planning to move to Swift [1] partly because of the safety features. Apparently there are still some blockers [2] preventing that move though.
If you care about security, consider using Qubes OS, which runs everything in hardware-isolated virtual machines. My daily driver, can't recommend it enough. Ladybird can already be safely used on Qubes.
If nothing else, having an alternative engine with any amount of viability at all that isn't Blink is great news. I'll be interested to see how this progresses.
There is a big jump in the graph! I wonder what contributed to that big improvement.
Someone asked Andreas on that Twitter thread - it was the merging of the CSS Typed Object Model API spec.
This PR added ~6400 passes for some css stuff. That's not enough to warrant the spike I think, but surely helped: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/pull/6370
You can't tell if it's a big jump because the graph doesn't show the axes. Maybe it went from 89% to 90.2%. The jump may also be no more than typical previous increases not shown off the left-hand edge.
The WPT score is a flawed metric (encoding tests are overweighted), but it's one of the few objective yardsticks we have. What matters more is that Ladybird is finding spec ambiguities by implementing from scratch rather than cargo-culting Chrome's behavior. The real test isn't passing 90%—it's whether they can keep pace as the web platform adds new APIs faster than any independent team can implement them. Browser engine development has become a regulatory moat, and breaking it requires either massive funding or accepting permanent incompatibility with the "modern web." Still rooting for them. Browser monoculture is worse than metric gaming.
Implementing a web browser is running to stand still for sure. But it is clear that Ladybird is implementing the spec faster than it is evolving.
I am not saying they do not have A LOT left to do. But your comment almost makes it sound like they are falling behind and that is most certainly not the case.
The team is quite pragmatic and many perfectly modern websites work already. Again, A LOT to do. But it is looking very doable. They still expect a "usable" release sometime next year.
The WPT score is a flawed metric (encoding tests are overweighted), but it's one of the few objective yardsticks we have. What matters more is that Ladybird is finding spec ambiguities by implementing from scratch rather than cargo-culting Chrome's behavior.
The real test isn't passing 90%—it's whether they can keep pace as the web platform adds new APIs faster than any independent team can implement them. Browser engine development has become a regulatory moat, and breaking it requires either massive funding or accepting permanent incompatibility with the "modern web."
Still rooting for them. Browser monoculture is worse than metric gaming.
It's always struct me as interesting that ladybird is built with C++. I like C++, and prefer it to languages like Rust, but it's not uncommon to see new OSS projects using weird languages and the newest tools. Lots of languages offer improvements in regards to threading models, development speed, or cross-platform support which we don't get in C++.
I suppose their success is likely directly related to the fact they made reasonable, practical development choices, but still.
LadyBird grew out of the SerenityOS project which was originally written in C++ (they've since moved to Jakt). All software for Serenity had to be written natively for the OS, and C++ was the language originally supported there. Andreas had worked on browsers previously (notable Safari), and was already a seasoned C/C++/ObjC developer. While one can cite many valid reasons for using a C language for a browser (and OS), I think his experience and preferences were likely a large part of it.
The language is actually something that makes me look elsewhere. We already have enough sufficiently vulnerable browsers and other network related software. Choosing C/C++ as language may work to make something that works, and it may be in the realm of experience the people building it have. However, it does not make this browser stand out in terms of security/safety. While they may deliver tremendous work, that work is still "just" another Cee thingy. Experience tells us, that even elite C/C++ hackers will make mistakes regarding memory management. Mozilla slowly using more and more Rust in Firefox seems better from that perspective, if they are actually still trying to do so.
As stated elsewhere, the Ladybird team expects to move to Swift. There are still a couple blockers keeping them from doing so.
They have actively rejected Rust as they see it as unsuitable for a heavily OOP code base. They see OOP as a great fit for implementing the web spec.
I am far from a Rust expert. Only have tried it some time ago. I think Rust does a good job with forcing composition over inheritance, steering towards the approaches, that have been found to be superior to deep inheritance hierarchies, by its concepts of structs and traits implemented for structs, and not having classes. Of course, if one equates OOP with classes and inheritance, then Rust will not meet that definition of OOP.
I believe they are or will be transitioning to Swift: https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031
I don't think this will ever happen. They may starting using Swift or some other newfangled language like Rust for some components, but it's almost never a good idea to rewrite something in a different language, and C++ is still the gold standard for this type of project.
This is often cited, but it seems like there has been very little movement toward swift since this tweet.
They were/are waiting for better cross-platform support. When they decided on Swift, using it on Linux had just recently become workable but it still didn't have feature-parity with apple land.
To me that all sounds like wishful thinking on their part. But I have a lot of faith in Andreas and the team, so I'm willing to take their opinion over my knee-jerk reaction shrugs.
It's the same language most of the code in Chrome and Firefox is written in.
It's also not clear what you're looking for in terms of cross-platform support. Some languages provide better standard library support for UI elements, but that's the part a browser will be implementing for itself regardless.
Sure but those browsers started long time ago and are implementing some of newer stack in Rust.
What JS engine does it run on?
Wow, how does it compare to V8 ? They spent many years optimising it.
It's not as fast or as feature-complete. That's OK for now, though.
It doesn't.
LibJS from Ladybird has more spec-compliance than V8 (Chrome) and JavaScriptCore (Safari) in many categories.
doesn't this just mean the spec is overwritten? (and covering things that are not in use by the dominant engines)
It's useless to get a higher score on compliance than the leading engines because ... no one else can use them.
The specs and the test suite are both moving targets. There are regularly new proposals to the specs, and new tests that cover them as they progress towards acceptance. The main engines implement these proposals behind feature flags, and only enable them once the proposal has been fully accepted.
Ladybird does not hide implementations behind feature flags (yet) because there's no need when you don't have users. So its score on test262.fyi includes all proposals it has implemented thus far.
The other engines on that site have an "experimental options" variant to include these proposals, which is a bit more of an honest comparison. As of right now, that shows: Spidermonkey (Firefox) at 98.3%, V8 (Chrome) at 97.9%, LibJS (Ladybird) at 96.9%, and JavaScriptCore (Safari) at 93.2%.
Here's a link with those options selected: https://test262.fyi/#|v8_exp,jsc_exp,sm_exp,libjs
It is all original code.
That's really impressive
Me as engineer: it's wild a big corporation dictates a quality bar and limit API access for 3rd party software.
Me as customer: oh man I'm sure glad stuff is reviewed to some quality bar and the OS limits API access.
Me as a consumer:
- browsers having to go through Apple means slower updates (including for bugs or security), not needed on Mac or any other platform
- Apple forces every alternative-engine browser to use a pretty broken framework that Safari does not use, not needed on Mac or any other platform
- Apple's restrictions on alternative engines in the EU are a vast list of malicious compliance[0], making those engines a theoretical academic exercise, so they're definitely still fucking you as a consumer.
[0]: https://open-web-advocacy.org/blog/apples-browser-engine-ban...
Me as a consumer:
- Companies forking over more margin and control to Apple mean they have to make up for it in other ways.
- Apple and Google wielding so much control removes overall choice and competition from the market.
- I sure hope Apple and Google only ever have my interests at heart because they have all the keys to the kingdom and could really screw me over.
- I wish I could do XYZ with my phone. Too bad...
- I wish there were more diverse phone SKUs. It used to be wildly competitive and we used to have all kinds of innovation because it wasn't so winner-take-all. Where's my eink low power open source phone with gpio and thermal sensors, etc.
- My car and phone feel like frenemies.
- There's still no good alternative OS for phones. Probably because it'd be impossible to make money and compete against titans.
- The company that removed manifest V2 is now forcing app signing? I wonder if they'll limit web browsing options and ad blocking soon.
- Why do I have to de-Google my phone with every update? They have tyranny of defaults (that lay people can't adjust) and just reset the defaults back to themselves every time you upgrade. Or give you scare walls and alerts asking to be default again. Lay people are probably stuck with this.
- "Google News" legitimately has half page ads and popups and that's the default experience. It is physically impossible to even read the news.
Those views are "you as a developer." Very few actual end users think about or care about any of these things.
Very few actual care about Apple controlling the apps you install as well. And even fewer understand what “OS API access” mean.
Just because consumers are unaware that a problem exist doesn't mean they wouldn't care if they knew.
The consumer can't articulate policy.
Consumers in a general sense don't know much of how the world works - safe radiation exposure, food safety, drug dosing thermodynamics, household electrical wiring, airborne particulate, airline maintenance...
This is why we have a government regulatory regime to protect them. The government has to strong arm companies out of bad behavior, because consumers do not understand.
Some people who have Apple and Google stock will voice opinion against regulation. Or people who really love their devices and don't understand the harms.
But the fact is that this Titanic command of markets damages the robustness of the economy. Google and Apple are doing massive harm.
Capitalism should be hard. It should be a treadmill. You shouldn't be able to coast.
We like the market. We like evolutionary pressure. Giants this large, however, are an ecological hack that get to escape the same algorithm we subject every other company to. They created an artificial and illegal means to prevent themselves from facing competition. They're an invasive species picking on ecosystems that literally cannot fight back.
It's a good thing that new companies can (or could) threaten old companies. It's a renewing forest fire, a de-ossification. It rewards innovation capital rather than institutions.
Apple and Google have found a way to forever avoid this by wedging themselves in as "owners of mobile computing". These two companies own it. Period. You don't. Consumers don't. No other company can even enter into the arena. You play by their rules.
Antitrust enforcement has never been more needed. We've had two decades of devices we really only rent and don't own. Devices that strangle consumer control over how we spend our time and money.
If America doesn't do it, foreign countries seeking sovereignty should.
You're right. They may be a "consumer" but they're wearing their develop hat. Consumers don't care about update cycles.
As a consumer I definitely want my browsers to always be up to date and be able to address 0day bugs as soon as the browser vendors are aware. Any potential delays on fixing security issues make me nervous.
Me as customer: having trouble using the likes of GitHub and Threads using the "OS sanctioned browser"
That's on nobody except Microsoft and Meta for testing against Chromium only.
It was a bug in WebKit that WebKit had to fix (and as you know, Safari takes a long time getting those fixes into consumer's hands).
Both those sites existed - either in practice or in concept - for well over a decade now. If the giant mega corporation behind those products is blaming WebKit, maybe they should instead devote some engineering resources to just work around the bug.
Testing in non-Chrome browsers should identify anything like this before stuff ships. It is legitimately not hard to do.
> takes a long time
If it even does.
Person in tech me is in conflict with customer me as to who is to blame. Maybe system imposed browser/agent defaults were a mistake after all.
So it's okay for a website builder to test in only one browser defaulting to an imposed browser/agent restriction?
The point is they are not even compliment to their "own" spec. They are part of whatwg. But if you ever write web page. You will know it's always the safari that differs from the spec. Firefox in the other end never have such issue.
Write a page on chrome, works 90% on Firefox. But will likely works 10% on safari. Supports safari literally means support another browser (by workaround all its bugs).
> The point is they are not even compliment to their "own" spec. They are part of whatwg.
I think web devs have too much faith in the "standard"; the WHATWG specifies anything supported by two implementations, and with Google controlling Mozilla that already feels somewhat unfair...
> Write a page on chrome, works 90% on Firefox. But will likely works 10% on safari.
Disregarding the issue that you're writing pages that only 90% work on anything but Chrome... do you have any examples of Safari misbehaving?
The ios safari lies you about (or simply bugged out) video play event, display video element on play event will show a blank screen to user. This never happen in any other browser(including those china vendor browsers) except safari. To make this worse, you can't make a unloaded video element on safari to have transparent background so user will definitely see a black square unless you add a delay to mitigate the problem.(Most players already do it, but it's still a pain if you need to make one from scratch)
Those are some exaggerated beyond belief numbers you just made up. Some of us also work in web development and know better.
It's not even exaggerated, the ticket count about safari on my board is almost higher than sum of every other browser in total. I 100% just want this browser die if apple ever allow other browser on ios.
I mean that could be "two Safari tickets" for all we know, and you could be ignorantly chasing Chrome's ChromeOS un-standards or bleeding edge RFCs thinking a reference implementation or a mere memo should work everywhere. Personally, I almost never see Safari-specific bugs be reported and can't find one in my company's JIRA system in the last year. Are you sure you're not self-inflicting this pain?
Your desire for Safari to vanish is also historically short sighted. Ladybird has near-zero usage, Firefox is practically dead and is fully bought and paid for by Google, everything else is just a Chrome or Chromium fork. Safari is realistically the only thing holding back an outright Chrome monopoly with meaningful usage.
The safari literally broke border-radius of image whenever a opacity transition is triggered. It's the simplest effect you will see everyday. Or broke layer of position: fixed element when containing container is scrolled. They aren't even new features and exists since like 10 year ago? And it's still broken that requires specific workaround. Or on ios 26(the one just released). Every page that added to ios home screen is no longer able to play video at all if you close it and open it the second time. The list can go on infinitely if I ever want to dig up. When is the crap even usable? There isn't a way to not hit bugs at all unless your page is extremely barebone and require little interaction.
Besides these, the service worker debugger never work on my iphone device since like two major version ago.(It did not show up in the safari menu) There is no way to use it as a developer even I want to (let alone the devtool crashes and disconnects frequently)
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Me as engineer: does apple even pass the bar by their own? I hit shit tons of safari only bug that is 100% non web-compliment. Some are so stupid that as a normal person writing web pages must have ran into it already.
You couldn't figure out by yourself not to use a dysfunctional browser?
also me as an engineer:
I hope it’s the correct 90%!
It’s not wild, it is anti-competitive and entirely about maintaining control in unfair ways
So was there any app with an alternative browser engine already approved by Apple?
IRC I think the roadblock isn't that they need to be approved, but that they can only distribute in the EU.
Is distribution the only problem? If Mozilla or Google were to make their code freely available on some git forge like GitHub and I cloned the repo and built it myself, would I be able to run it for seven days or something in the US?
> If Mozilla or Google were to make their code freely available on some git forge like GitHub
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Unless it can be distributed it's not worth Mozilla or Google's time to bother developing support.
nope, one can't get the entitlement -- even just for 7 days dev mode -- just like that.
Dev mode packages are self-signed, aren't they?
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Now that 90% of the work is done, it is only 90% of the work that remains :)
Thank you for the belly-laugh. It's Goodhart's Law in graph form.
"Oh, is this metric important? Let me get right on that."
No shade intended towards the Ladybird team. You were given the terms and you're behaving rationally in response to them. More power to you. It's just a fantastic demonstration of what it looks like to very suddenly be developing against a very specific metric.
I think that this metric correlates well with the browser being usable on real websites
Also, I don't think that the Ladybird folks are just doing the bare minimum to only increase their score on WPT. They're implementing each feature in such a way that basic browsing seems to work better and that their WPT score improves.
The wpt score is not that well balanced. Look at https://staging.wpt.fyi/results/?product=servo&product=ladyb... : out of about 2 million tests, more than half are for the "encoding" category. Good encoding support is needed for sure, but likely not at that level of prevalence.
It seems my communication did not adequately convey the fact that I have no problem with the Ladybird team doing this. It makes perfect sense and is the right thing to do.
However, a jump like that means precisely and exactly what I said it means; very suddenly, that metric became much more important to the team. It is written straight into the graph.
A large number of encoding-related tests that were probably relatively easy to fix in bulk is certainly a plausible explanation.
A lot of people are imputing to me assumptions that they are bringing to my post, such as assuming that such improvements must be fake or bad or somehow otherwise cheating. Nope. Moreover, if you are thinking that, don't take it up with me, go take it up with the graph directly. It's not my graph. I'm just amused at the spectacular demonstration of Goodhart's Law.
Are the commentators who think I'm being critical of the Ladybird project going to defend their implicit proposition that the browser got twice as good in whatever period that graph is in, a week or a month or whatever? Of course that's not the case.
> However, a jump like that means precisely and exactly what I said it means; very suddenly, that metric became much more important to the team. It is written straight into the graph.
Not really, though. The latest jump was from implementing some CSS Typed OM features, which has been in-progress work for a while now. The 6k increase in the test score was a bit of a happy surprise. It's also not that much of a jump when you zoom out and see it's "just" a continuation of a steady increase in score over a long period.
fwiw, I'm not imputing you any assumptions. I'm just pointing out that using wpt score as a criteria is not necessarily a good proxy for browser readiness. So I'm not sure why Apple uses that, other than... there's no other objective measure? Of course it's fair game for browser engines to improve their score!
Dude at this point just raise your knickers up and criticize the thing. You’ve got the most valuable observation about this topic on your side. The graph is jarring and for someone only recently made familiar with Goodhart’s Law this is a great example of it in practice. You must be further well-informed enough to defend any issues you actually have with the project outright instead of this small war of attrition playing out waaay down here.
Too much useful insight is withheld or misappropriated these days.
While it is kinda unfortunate to have one unbalanced test suite as the major external progress indicator, there are.. like no other good options that don't involve someone manually going through like the top 1000 sites or something and checking whether they look good. That leaves having no progress indication whatsoever, which is also pretty bad.
And, in any case, implementing more of the standards is just simply good, and would need to be done at some point anyway.
Have you tried using Ladybird recently? Admittedly I haven't but I've seen the rapid progress they've made over the last year. They might just be targeting this arbitrary metric but I'm inclined to believe that they've made real progress towards building a usable browser.
I mean, sure, but can you point to any work that you think they should be doing that they're not doing because they're chasing this benchmark instead of doing whatever it is you think they should be doing?
How's the ladybird gtk stuff coming along?
Oh yes cus Apple really care about the web.
You love to see it
OT, but I really like the name Ladybird for a silly reason - it's the name of Hank Hill's dog. Whenever I hear it I think of her and smile. That's right, the thought of a cartoon dog makes me happy. I told you it was silly.
Well and knowing Hank, the dog is surely named after Lady Bird Johnson.
You seem to totally be overlooking who Hank was paying homage to with that name. Thanks to Ladybird, spring time in Texas provides a colorful palette of wildflowers, especially the bluebonnet, to travelers along the highways.
I heard the story of Lady Bird Johnson and the bluebonnets on a sunny spring day, on a passenger seat of a pickup truck driving through the Hill Country, among endless fields and hills covered in wildflowers. We were probably listening to Merle Haggard or Willie Nelson, one of them outlaw country boys. That's how I know America the Beautiful does exist, though it may be hard to believe from the darkness that covers the land today.
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stupid bot replies are not welcome.
I'm impressed, how did you determine it was a botcomment?
In the UK a ladybird is what Americans call a ladybug.
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Lots of things may be scams, but it's hard to see how a reasonable level of quality control is.
There's no quality control in AppStore, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44732995.
Just because there are some quality control failures (even if there are many) doesn't mean there should be no quality control at all.
If even well-known offenders remain there, it just means, there's no guarantee of quality at all.
Again, just because there's no guarantee of quality doesn't mean there still can't be improvement in quality.
Some measures are better than no measures. The world isn't black and white.
Just compare it with Debian repositories. Where's the malware in there?
What does that have to do with anything?
do they apply it to their own engine?
Do they not?
What quality control? Are we talking about the same App Store where copyright infringement is blatantly on display? What a joke. I guess it doesn’t matter if its customers are equally as clueless.
Where does quality control to spec compliance come into play on copyright issues? Is part of the spec compliance to be free of copyright infringement? /s
Of course this is the infuriating type of response I'd expect to receive
A reminder that Apple's "quality control" approved this:
https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-imper...
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It doesn’t have anything other than a pre-alpha release and it’s got a clear warning that it’s only for use by developers. That will keep adoption far away from people special casing the browser. Further, it’s open source so incomplete public development is the only way to go for this type of project.
One would think, but ironically Apple's own browser fails the most out of the big three. I've also seen examples of web-developers who already have to do special cases for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari due to their own unique quirks and differences. Web development is hell. https://wpt.fyi/results/
It is an open source project in development, that requires you build it from source to use.
Are you suggesting they reach 100% code completion and test coverage before making it available to anyone?
No browser passes 100% of WPT, the leader is chrome which has about 1000 failing tests
You are a bit off, Chrome is failing over 50.000 tests.
It's still early in development. You are free to build it and run it, but there have been no actual releases to end users. It's very much alpha quality, if even that. It's still slow and full of bugs. However, the code quality is generally very good and there's great potential for this browser to eventually go somewhere.
I don't think Andreas is suggesting that it will be offered on iOS any time soon so much as he is pointing out that they achieved this arbitrary milestone.
Not when there are over 2 million tests (many of which are composed of multiple sub-tests), and there are more being added all the time.
Following the specification perfectly is not possible, even for major players, https://whatwg.org/faq#living-standard
If you have a spec and a test suite, shouldn't you really be passing all the tests before shipping this stuff to a user?
Have you seen the state of the tech industry?
"Ship it, then fix it" is considered normal now, for some reason.
If you take a browser for example, you shouldn't be using any current browser. This is the best example of why this isn't always the way to go
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I wish them well, but browsers are very much pay-to-play. Google had to pay their way to their current dominant position.
Depends on what you mean by "pay-to-play".
Google's business model was to take FLOSS software, ostensibly make it work without them being involved, but make it obvious that if you wanted things to be as simple as possible, you needed to use their version of it. Can you use Chromium as your daily driver? Sure, but it's not as simple as just using Chrome. Android is even more like this. And of course, the simplest way to use this software also just happens to give Google a ton of your data, which enabled them as an ad-serving company.
They wouldn't have given the browser away for free if they weren't making at least the cost of the browser development back in the take from ad revenues.
I guess you could argue that the moves to buy services like YouTube and other big pillars of the web and have that reflected in Chrome development cost money.
I meant paying for distribution via the usual channels (toolbar vector, s/w bundling, etc) and paying for their browser as a default with system integrators.
They also had a good browser (before it became spyware), but there is no conceivable way to get a billion people to care about javascript performance and memory usage.
Pay? You mean putting the "you are using X, why not try chrome" adtext everywhere for every search result?
And paying money to software vendors to bundle Chrome with "Set Chrome as default browser" ticked by default. This is exactly the same thing all the malware browsers and toolbars did in the time period too.
More like having a team of between 1000 and 1500 full time software engineers working on it over a period of more than a decade.
Even if you had 1000 developers who worked for free, you can't get a billion people to care about software quality beyond a certain point.
There is zero difference between firefox and chrome for a layman.
Yes, but also paying for distribution and paying for it to be the default browser.
That plus making the best browser on the market for 15yrs
A browser spying on users for marketing purposes is a disqualifier for me.
Don't forget, Firefox didn't succeed because Firefox was good, it succeeded because IE was bad. People don't like having to choose between Google Chrome and Google Firefox.
I'm not sure about it - there were other contestants: Opera, Netscape, even the big Mozilla Suite.
Those other browsers are footnotes in the browser wars era of 2000s IE6 territory.
Yes, even Opera - it never hit the heights that Firefox did outside of niche markets, even though they were great about a lot of other things.
Ad blockers were another huge draw, in my experience.
Not anymore..
Ad-blockers are not just for YouTube. Moreover, addons can still be a draw for Firefox. For example, the built-in Multi-Container addon, and the ones that build on it, are very useful privacy and web testing tools.
My prediction is that they're going to slowly ban them from their properties, and also from websites where their ads are hosted. They will slowly pressurize Mozilla and anyone else they're funding.
Along the same lines, the State of Utopia will be building a free web browser for everyone, once AI is strong enough to do so. Please feel free to vote on feature ideas here: https://pollunit.com/polls/ahysed74t8gaktvqno100g
> teleports the founder and his wife to the same location so they can be together in person holding hands - they're already in the same same city and want to meet immediately, so they are 99.98% of the way there! They're both working 10 hours a day to bridge the remaining 0.02%. Following this proof of concept, other people will also be allowed to date, however at the moment all dating is prohibited until the founder and his wife meet successfully.
Uhh.... I.... ok.
I didn't originally include this text in the browser feature vote, but I showed my wife the feature vote and she insisted that I need to include this part until it's solved. I can't wait for this to be done.
I didn't see any feature suggestions from you, please feel free to suggest a browser feature for AI to build once it is powerful enough to do so, you can do so at the bottom of the page. It only takes a few seconds. Thank you.
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code