I’m not going to have interest in any new browser that’s written in security nightmare languages like C or C++.
NSA Releases Guidance on How to Protect Against Software Memory Safety Issues
Commonly used languages, such as C and C++, provide a lot of freedom and flexibility in memory management while relying heavily on the programmer to perform the needed checks on memory references. Simple mistakes can lead to exploitable memory-based vulnerabilities. Software analysis tools can detect many instances of memory management issues and operating environment options can also provide some protection, but inherent protections offered by memory safe software languages can prevent or mitigate most memory management issues. NSA recommends using a memory safe language when possible. While the use of added protections to non- memory safe languages and the use of memory safe languages do not provide absolute protection against exploitable memory issues, they do provide considerable protection. Therefore, the overarching software community across the private sector, academia, and the U.S. Government have begun initiatives to drive the culture of software development towards utilizing memory safe languages.
ladybird browser coming up with status quo integration so they challenge status quo.
it’s like these browser devs have no idea what people actually want in a browser.
There’s nothing about integrating anything (I assume you mean Cloudflare turnstile?). It’s Cloudflare giving money to projects they like. Apparently Ladybird also has a 100k per donor limit, so that’s the max Cloudflare can give (annually?)
that’s like taking money from google just so they aren’t considered monopolies in the browser segment.
doesn’t “challenge” no status quo.
Remind me, which browser is Cloudlfare making?
did i ever make that claim or imply it anywhere?
You compared the Cloudflare situation to “taking money from Google” and added that due to Ladybird taking money from Cloudflare, they’re “not challenging the status quo”.
Ladybird being a browser has absolutely no bearing on webhosting and the only status quo it can challenge is in the browser market. Which implies that you think Cloudflare has something to do with the browser market.
i compared it to firefox, saying sucking up to oligarchies for money gets you tied up with them and prevents you from challenging them.
no use in challenging “the browser market” when you are getting funded by the very same actors keeping it the way it is.
Again: what does Cloudflare have to do with the browser market…?
Cloudflare and “challenging the status quo” in the same phrase ?
Well, the browser status quo. I guess they want their own Chrome.
Its sponsorship only of an open source browser, with no telemetry, advertising, crypto, etc, etc built in.
Sponsors get listed as sponsors, thats it.
For now
So when they do just fork it?
I likely won’t touch it anyway, but it is fully open source, so it can be forked easily. With the transition to Swift I suspect there would be plenty of devs who could take things forward if they wanted to.
So when they do just fork it?
say the same for chrome, and think again if you mean it seriously.
Iridium, cromite, edge, brave, thorium, vivaldi, pale moon…
And this is a drastically simpler browser that would be in swift 6.
and what can they do against the manifest v3 migration? they cannot afford to keep maintaining the code for mv2 addons. it is an important topic for efficient content blocking.
its funny you bring up edge as an alternative. brave too has opt-out telemetry and other shenanigans.
Cloudflare has announced its sponsorship of the Ladybird browser, an independent (still-in-development) open-source initiative
Is it still independent?
Yes, it is still independent. Cloudflare is just one of the three Platinum sponsors. Other two are Shopify and FUTO. Proton is also a sponsor, but in Gold tier, iirc.
Shopify being a sponsor makes it highly suspect instantly.
Andreas (lead engineer) has told the story of how he got that money - they just happen to know each other and $100k is peanuts for the Shopify founders.
But you’re right to suspect anything of the sort!
I think It’s on their charter that no matter how much corporate money they’ll get they’ll never accept any outside influence just the same. The donators are amply warned to not expect anything other than development as usual or faster.
People always imagine this as “I will pay you $100 to kick the puppy” and of course they would never.
But what actually happens is that you have a long-term donor. You rely on their help (they’re paying for you to be able to hire a nice college intern who’s really smart and has been fun to have on the project). They never tell you what to do so you see them as more of a friend than anything else. It’s perfectly normal to get some lunch with friends and talk. You’re stuck on some problems and they have some good connections that help you out. That might even be worth more than $100k, but it’s not money at all so it’s OK that they’re helping you like this. They also talk you up, which is like free advertising except you didn’t ask for it so that also doesn’t count. Anyway, at some of the lunches they’re telling you about what’s going on with them and there’s some problems they’re dealing with that you could help with. They don’t ask for help, of course, because they know you’re independent. But being independent means it’s OK for you to do what you want. Even help a friend out who didn’t ask for help so they’re not influencing you…
Yes, and their donations are limited to 100k a year per corporation/organization, so there cant be a company who comes, donates 20million and then tries to gain control of them through money
Yes, and their donations are limited to 100k a year per corporation/organization
Interesting that they did that.
Really hoping this project goes well and has a strong start.
As the top comment on the Hacker News thread notes,
Cloudflare clearly wants to move us to a future where only approved browsers are allowed to access the web… an independent open source web browser is obviously against that ethos.
I’m suspicious on that basis alone.
This is very encouraging:
Ladybird uses a new browser engine called LibWeb that is being created from scratch by the development team.
Browsers that rely on Chromium / Blink rely on Google. Firefox relies on Google for its funding, so any browser based on Gecko relies on Google. If they can make a browser engine that has rough feature parity with Chromium but doesn’'t rely on Google that’s very healthy for the web.
You do know the difference of “built by” and “partly funded by”, right?
What exactly is your problem by Mozilla/Firefox being partly funded by Google?
“Partly funded by”?
Google contributed roughly 83% of Mozilla’s income from 2020-2023, and 89% of overall income since 2005.
I just wanna say that we have Webkit. After Google moved over to Blink Webkit has not stopped development… and it even has multiple big names behind it (like Apple, but also Valve partnered with WebkitGtk maintainers, and many devices like Amazon’s Kindle are heavily invested on it) so it’s not gonna go away anytime soon. Specially with Safari being the second most used browser on the web, right after chrome and several times more users than Firefox.
On Linux we have some browsers making use of Webkit (like Epiphany, Gnome’s default browser) that are thus independent from Google or even Mozilla. I’m not sure if there’s any browser like that for Windows though.
There’s also Netsurf, they also have their own rendering libraries, but development for it is super slow, I’ve been following them for a couple decades and they still haven’t got a stable javascript engine, so it only works for the most basic of websites. The plus side is that it’s very light on resources, though.
There’s also Palemoon with its goanna engine, which forked off Firefox when Mozilla retired XUL and has diverged since
Ironically, we already had that - Microsoft’s first version of Edge was using their own engine. On release, it had the highest W3C compatibility score.
Google started shitting on it (including things like serving clear HTML version of Gmail because “the browser is outdated” if it detected the Edge user agent) and massive self-delusion campaigns of “Edge is just Internet Explorer” eventually killed the thing and forced MS to switch to Chromium.
I have Ladybird installed and I check it out every now and then, but I honestly doubt that a bunch of random developers will succeed where Microsoft failed. Unless Cloudflare somehow chips in and forces Google’s hand into compatibility, but I don’t know if even they are big enough to do that.
doubt that a bunch of random developers will succeed where Microsoft
Ladybird doesn’t have to be profitable and the org cannot be bought.
Not what I meant.
Microsoft - in theory - had the finances to push their browser to peoples homes. Be it by baking it in to Windows, by ad campaigns, etc., etc. And they still lost to Google’s control over the Web.
Ladybird, by comparison, is an obscure no-name product, being made by a controversial figure, with (relatively to MS) zero ability to market itself to the wider audience. All Google has to do is make their products completely inoperable under Ladybird and, other than some extremely committed power-users who want to “de-google” their lives, nobody will use it.
You are right, but as you noticed, we don’t argue the same thing.
eventually killed the thing and forced MS to switch to Chromium.
Ladybird is not threatened to be killed by whatever anybody but the developers do.
Ladybird is not threatened to be killed by whatever anybody but the developers do.
It absolutely is. If Google forces incompatibility on it (like it did with Edge) ordinary users won’t switch. Because the majority of ordinary users are still deep in the ecosystem.
All it takes is for Google to block high quality streaming on YouTube and the browser will never go outside of 2-3% market share.
That’s not bad.
What’s not bad? Ladybird sitting at floor-leves of market share?
If we want to threaten the status quo in any way, it absolutely is. Firefox has 2.26% and - in terms of defining standards or forcing changes upon Chromium - it’s 100% irrelevant.
How much you want to bet Cloudflare went to them and was like ‘hey either work for (sorry, “with”) us or we declare you a “suspicious” traffic source and block you.’
Why is Cloudflare suddenly the enemy on Lemmy?
Suddenly? They’ve always sucked
How did the literal best DDOS protection on the planet and the provider of a very safe and secure DNS suck?
By being a monopoly and having a unique chokehold on the internet. Even if we don’t get into their ties with various governments that they inevitably have to have, the fact that they alone can cripple the internet is concerning
By being a monopoly
How so? There are dozens of website hosts and DDOS protection services around.
having a unique chokehold on the internet
Have they ever utilised it in any extent?
Even if we don’t get into their ties with various governments that they inevitably have to have
That sounds suspiciously close to “I have zero proof but I think they’re doing X”. Can you elaborate on those government ties?
the fact that they alone can cripple the internet is concerning
Imagine a hosting company that’s 100% open-source, 100% vegan, 100% green, 100% pro-consumer. Their service is so good that the vast majority of the Internet starts using them.
Do you start hating them at the point where they reach, lets say, 50% market share, just because they managed to grow that large?
I guess what I’m asking is: do you have any concrete cause for the Cloudflare hate, or is it just a “they’re big therefore they must be bad, because big == bad”?
Liberalism really does a cook a lot of peoples brains dont it?
This dude has previously defended Microsoft, you can ignore their opinions. They defend companies for free.
Just big company = bad
Nothing new on lemmy
Just ignore that they heavily contribute to opensource, have extremely generous free tiers, open incident reports and regularly share deep dives into their architecture and problems
It’s such a weird mix of people with very strong opinions on topics they’re extremely ignorant about here, on Lemmy. I was first shocked to see it on the Technology community.
I thought that, since Lemmy (and fediverse in general) is relatively difficult to get into, it’d attract more tech-savvy people, but now. Here, in this thread, we have a dude saying that “Cloudflare always sucked”. Any Windows-related discussion always devolves into crying about data being siphoned (and nobody has bothered to read the telemetry documentation, of course)…
Just getting a weird cognitive dissonance whenever I’m browsing here.
It always was?
Why?
By the fiftieth “your browser is outdated, please upgrade to an up to date browser” on an up to date version of Firefox, but with privacy extensions and on a VPN, yeah forgive me if I harbour some resentment. Not even a captcha challenge half the time, just “you’re not worthy of seeing this website, peasant.” And don’t even think about disabling JS, that gets you blacklisted all the same. And if you’re using Tor, forget about it.
They also block you from loading standalone images, so you can’t download images from search results or even open an image from an article in a new tab. Should I be grateful that they’re saving the website megabytes of server traffic while making it impossible to save stuff offline or use the browser’s zoom tools to get information out of a high resolution image? Also, you’re literally the world’s largest CDN. You’re saying you can’t spare enough of your basically unlimited computational power to let me download a static image you’re probably already cached in every data centre?
Also, they’re literally a man in the middle as a service. And not just in the ISP sense, they control the TLS certificates and can see literally everything you’re sending to or receiving from the website. Including passwords. Including credit cards. Literally defeats the purpose of TLS. And even if the website itself doesn’t use their traffic passthrough service, they infect even more websites with their CDN service, AKA basically one of those old school tracking pixels but holding libraries needed by the site hostage so you can’t block them without breaking the site.
Also also, just because they say their DNS service is “private” doesn’t make it private. Companies have been lying about their privacy policy since privacy policies started being mandated with zero consequences. As Amy from Futurama said, “Fool me seven times, shame on you. Fool me eight or more times, shame on me.”
Well, not a straight answer but, there you go.
(yes, late, also my first post so hi)
Still, it’s hard to understand why Cloudflare chose to back exactly Omarchy.
Maybe the developers in Cloudflare use it? Also weird because Omarchy’s default browser is Chromium I think. The webpage didn’t list the default browser, so not sure about that.
Here’s one theory: https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and-fascists.html
Anyway, Omarchy and Ladybird are both run by fascists. Omarchy makes this pretty obvious from the outset – on the home page the big YouTube poster image prominently features SuperGrok, which is a pathetically transparent dog-whistle to signal alliance with Elon Musk’s fascist politics. Omarchy is the pet project of David Heinemeier Hansson, aka DHH, who is well known as a rich fascist weirdo.2 One need only consult his blog to browse his weird, racist views on immigration, fat-shaming objections to diverse representation, vaguely anti-feminist/homophobic/rapey rants on consent, and, recently, tone-policing antifascists who celebrate the death of notable fascist Charlie Kirk.
Speaking of tributes to Charlie Kirk, that brings us to Andreas Kling, the project lead for Ladybird, who tweeted on the occasion of his assassination:
RIP Charlie Kirk
I hope many more debate nerds carry on his quest to engage young people with words, not fists.
– @awesomekling
I was not prepared to learn these things today.
Grrrreat. So one can already tick off that browser before it is even ready to test.
Honestly, Firefox has been stable AF and forks are doing awesome work. Maybe those forks might even continue doing their own thing by the time this project will be ready for beta testing.
Competition is great but this one’s on already on shaky ground.
I’m rooting for Servo more than these fascist wannabes.
The argument on Kling seems pretty weak to me… is he Fascist because… he doesn’t support violence and an assassination? 🙄
By this logic for being not fascist one must support the death penalty?
I am pretty sure fascists are in favour of violence and murder (in fact the person cited was killed by a fascist)
RIP Charlie Kirk
I hope many more debate nerds carry on his quest to engage young people with words, not fists.
“carry on his quest”. What was Charlie Kirks quest again? Where does he say he doesn’t support violence and assassination? Are you Klings PR?
I am pretty sure fascists are in favour of violence and murder (in fact the person cited was killed by a fascist)
Just because fascists kill fascists doesn’t make spreding hate less fascist. Does your definition of fascists only start when they start shooting people on sight?
People like kirk were revelling in current administration. But since they didn’t “use violence”, they must’ve been innocent in all this trend, huh?
Honestly there’s a reason fascists are on the rise. People like you seem too oblivious to see the subtle narrative of spreading hate by casual undertones.
But hey, you do you. I hope you take up his quest as well.
Without a Windows release it will remain a niche browser even if by chance it becomes the most used on macOS, GNU+Linux and other Unix-like OSes.
As far as I know, there still aren’t any non-WebKit engines for iOS, even though the possibility is theoretically there as of 17.4… (It may need to be EU-only? I’m not clear on that part.)
Giving how apple adjacent the project is I have never had much faith in it being able to truly become an alternative to firefox.
Apple adjacent?
It is being rewritten using swift
You go to the website and the images promoting the browser are using apple. The project is being developed only for macOS and linux. They decided to change the programming language to swift.
To many signs that the devs are appleheads and I get the feeling that the main target is apple, linux second and windows completely out of the box (states by devs themselves). Myself personally, not a fan on apple, I don’t have that kind of money to buy hardware and I don’t see any advantages on doing so.
Considering that the two projects funded by Cloudflare are headed by known bigots (Andreas Kling and DHH), it makes me distrust Cloudflare even further.
Can you elaborate on why they are bigots? Im interested.
Both developers have been actively hostile to DEI initiatives, and at least on the case of DHH, also coddling with ultranationalism viewpoints.
On Kling: hyperborea.org/reviews/softwar…
On DHH: tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-c…
ladybird has been infected and its our job as the believers of the church of emacs to get rid of this cancer.
