This is a problem brought on by AI, and does not seem fair to imply it's Ladybird's problem to solve.
Writing a browser/engine from scratch is a massively ambitious undertaking by itself. I don't expect them to also solve the tangential AI problem that every other open source project is contending with. Others can step up for that one.
neuralkoi•2d ago
Ladybird seems to have received a nice boost in momentum in the past two years. If you've ever watched one of Andreas videos on YouTube you'll find he's incredibly driven and knowledgeable in this area. I can imagine someone like him would go from being a "10x programmer" to a "100x programmer" with AI assistance. I am not entirely sure to what degree AI is being leveraged to speed up development, but I am indeed happier I might be able to ditch FF and begin using their browser soon.
sho_hn•44m ago
I'm still very interested in the project and look forward to each monthly update, and I can empathize (though not agree) with the reasoning, but something is off ever since they announced the decision to close the project to outside contributions. It's still Open Source, but only a self-selected group of maintainers gets to write and merge code, at least for the time being.
Somehow that's not the "a new independent Open Source browser" future I thought we had signed up for with our attention.
Again, I understand all the arguments for why at this particular time they feel that they cannot afford the energy expense required need to run a community. First-hand, actually, because I am involved with running a very large one myself.
But it makes me think a lot about the value proposition of the product. Re-creating Firefox/Chrome can still be a useful exercise, but from an end-user POV another exchangable web browser will not rock their world. Wouldn't the real product be healthy governance?
hagbard_c•33m ago
That is the way the BSDs are developed and they're free software. If you want to you can pull the code and modify whatever you want. Let them get the thing up and running first, then see how the project handles external contributions. If they somehow fail to see the brilliance of some external contribution a fork will soon take over from where they dug themselves in, something which has happened many times over in free software land: Firefox (took over from the Mozilla Suite), Libreoffice (took over from Openoffice), Nextcloud (took over from Owncloud), egcs (took over from gcc, later became the main gcc branch), etc.
tredre3•32m ago
It would be 100x worse for them because who wouldn't want to have a browser in their contribution portfolio when seeking a job?
pipeline_peak•28m ago
Ladybird doesn’t replace something developers are already paying for, so the incentive to make substantial, high-quality contributions is much weaker.
swed420•