I agree with the sentiment, but you underestimate the level of engineering, coordination, design work, testing it is to do this.
It is admirable that they even have a half-decent browser, but to compete at the top you need soooo much money and motivation.
Let's not forget the CEO who paid herself a $6.9m salary in 2022, $5.6m in 2023.
Do you just need to advertise stuff among content creators these days with common sense going out of the window? It'll take them a decade to catch up without any engineering funding at the level that Apple/Google/Mozilla have.
I’m not a content creator and I don’t really care about Ladybird. I use Safari.
I’m just pointing out that browsers have decades of legacy cruft from mis-steps deciding what the web even should be and someone smart can carve out a path to covering 90% of use cases in 10% of the effort and code. And there are the huge organizational costs Google and others pay that a small organization doesn’t have to.
Your argument is the same as looking at a large company (say Microsoft) and saying no one can compete without trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of engineers. Ladybird has the benefit of hindsight, as well as a non-idiotic structure (I assume).
The defeatism among engineers is sad
Ask 60% of their (Chrome, Edge, Safari) userbase, and they won't even be able to tell you what their browser is called.
If you're really smart and you say "I can do it with half or a quarter of the resources with hindsight", sure I might give you the benefit of the doubt, but if you're going to claim you can do it with 0.1% of the resources in a volunteer Discord server effort, no. Not because I wouldn't be happy if that was possible, but because that's not how the world works. Linux is being able to compete with Microsoft because there are now large billion dollar companies like RedHat, Steam and others investing into the development. It takes real money and developer time.
And that's the second point, Mozilla has to make these compromises because they are one of the few companies that actually maintains an independent software project at this scale. And if any other competitor ever wants to get there, they'll need to answer these funding questions too. Even if they're ten times as clever, they'll still need tens or hundreds of millions.
It'll be a usable product, but it will be extremely extremely niche, until the dev burns out or just quit it.
I hope I'm wrong, but a browser is a XXL type project and needs proper funding (means = there should be a reason for it to exist, not altruistic as lets have an alternate because reasons ..)