Bringing SerenityOS to real hardware, one driver at a time

I love the serenityos concept (and ladybird browser) so I'm glad to see this progress!

Me as well.

Sadly, they have parted ways at this point. Not only has Ladybird broken off into an independent project but it does not consider SerenityOS a target platform anymore.

Ladybird is slowly shedding a lot of the “home grown” Serenity layers and replacing them with more mainstream alternatives.

As I am primarily a Linux user, I am excited to see Ladybird become a real alternative on Linux. However, as a fan of SerenityOS as well, I am sad to see all the energy and innovation that was going into Ladybird get stripped out of SerenityOS.

Ladybird has a very large political aim: to become the only browser that isn't funded by Google or based on Google's browser engine. The reason it left behind SerenityOS is because it has moved from a hobbyist aim to a very serious political aim.

You should say only major browser that fits those categories because examples of the latter exist- Orion uses WebKit and Zen uses Gecko- and I imagine the former is even more common.

WebKit and gecko are funded by google

WebKit is funded by Apple, not Google anymore as far as I know

Google pays Apple ~$20B to be default search engine in Safari/Webkit though

I think it’s pretty different when it’s going to a trillion-dollar company than when it’s the main source of money for a foundation.

Andreas, creator of Ladybird and ex Apple employee who worked on WebKit, claims that WebKit dev is completely paid for by that deal

So? It’s not as if Apple wouldn’t have plenty of other ways to fund WebKit development otherwise.

Sure but would they? Currently they get it totally for free. If they had to finance the development themselves then it would get real hard to justify real quick. $20bn is a lot of money even for Apple

It's not about whether or not Apple have the resources to make their own browser engine, it's about whether it makes sense from a business point of view to make their own browser engine. Currently it does, because Google pay them huge amounts of money to do so. But what business case would there be to pay that $20bn themselves if Google did not fund them? Would it be worth that just to avoid Chromium?

This is insipid. Why would Apple adopt a fork of WebKit when they’ve been using WebKit just fine for so long? Why would Apple of all companies defer to something in Google’s realm besides search? Do you have a single technical justification for Apple to overturn decades of WebKit use that’s baked into its frameworks and its control over iOS to use Blink?

People argued exactly the same way about Microsoft. Then they switched to Chromium...

IE was too long in the tooth, Microsoft was behind by several trends at that point, mobile being one of them. Don’t think the situation with Safari and WebKit is comparable.

Safari is now the browser that is lagging the most behind. And it has not gotten better recently either. Apple even got into "AI", so I would not put it beyond them to kill a browser team.