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.

As a small correction that somewhat matters to this hypothetical, Microsoft had already moved away from Internet Explorer/Trident to Microsoft Edge/EdgeHTML. It was quite competitive and modern already.

So, they did not "move away from IE to catch up". They "dropped the Edge engine in favour of Blink (Chromium)". It feels very much like Microsoft just did not want to compete on the engine (run-to-stand-still) but rather just on the feature set. Who can blame them?

If you think about why Microsoft really switched, I think it is a fair question why Apple would not just do the same thing. I mean, as long as WebKit is the only engine allowed on iOS, it makes sense for them to control it. But as regulators force them to open that up, and perhaps put an end to the Google gravy-train, I think it is a fair question why Apple would spend that much money on a web engine when they do not have to.

You cannot fall behind the competition using Chromium as a base, because they are all using it too! It is the ultimate in safe corporate options.

While the Apple-Google rivalry seems to have waned compared to a decade ago, I just don’t see Apple completely capitulating their platform/browser engine like Microsoft did.

Not to mention even if Apple switched to Chromium, they’d just end up taking over that engine, even forking it later down the road:

> We can only imagine what would have happened if Chrome kept using WebKit. We probably ended up with a WebKit-monoculture. Trident is dead, and so is EdgeHTML. Presto is long gone. Only Gecko is left, and frankly speaking, I will be surprised to see it regain its former glory.

But Chrome did fork, and today, we can also see similar things happen in Chromium. I don’t expect somebody to fork Chromium, but it could happen.

We’ve seen Edge adding some privacy enhancements to Chromium pioneered by Safari. Edge shipped those, but Chrome did not. And as more browsers start using Chromium and large companies will work on improving Chromium, more of these disagreements will happen. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Just because a browser is based on Chromium, that does not mean it is identical to Chrome and that Google is in control. Even if the unthinkable happens and Apple is forced to adopt Chromium, that will only ensure that Google is not the only one having a say about Chromium and the future of the web.

And that is what is crucial here. The choice between rendering engines isn’t about code. It isn’t about the rendering engine itself and the features it supports or its bugs. Everything is about who controls the web.

https://nielsleenheer.com/articles/2022/why-safari-does-not-...

Yeah, I don’t see Apple meekly letting Google steer the future of Chromium even if they were to use it.