Ladybird Browser Gains Cloudflare Support to Challenge the Status Quo
Cloudflare backs Ladybird, a new open-source browser, and Omarchy, a Linux setup tool, to advance innovation across the modern open web.
Cloudflare has announced its sponsorship of the Ladybird browser, an independent (still-in-development) open-source initiative
Is it still independent?
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
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...
they stated on their website this project will remain independet and that donators don´t have a say in how this is being developed
No browser with third party investors can be really independent, they always will obey more the interests of the investors as on those from the users. Anyway the guys from Ladybird have balls of steel to develope an browser engine from scratch in an market saturated of browsers of any kind and a brutal competition, this would had more sense 15 years ago, but not now. Good luck, maybe in 2029-2030 there is an good browser multi-platform with all the needed infrastructure, servers and extensions, but I'll see to believe.
No browser with third party investors can be really independent, they always will obey more the interests of the investors as on those from the users.
That's why they limited donations to $100k per organization. No one is allowed to make themselves indispensable to the project.
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?
The standard point is most around how big that 'partly' is, and how attached a project can become to that part. If a project has, for easy math, a $10M bankroll and $5M comes from, say, Goog or MS, the project can face a moment where the corporation comes and says, 'we don't like that you've implemented this feature that interferes with our control of users. We're pulling our funding unless you remove it.' (more realistically, 'we see you have allocated some dev time to this feature request we don't like. Cancel it before the public can demand it.') If that happens, you have to have a project lead with some real rectitude to say, 'okay,' and just cut their budget in half. The more diversely sourced a FOSS project's funding is, the harder it is to control, and vice versa.
"Partly funded by"?
Google contributed roughly 83% of Mozilla's income from 2020-2023, and 89% of overall income since 2005.
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.
Personally, I think if the engine was closed source, then we didn't in fact "had that". Maybe Microsoft had it, not us.
What makes things like chromium, firefox and webkit actual ecosystems is that they at least have an open source basis. Edge isn't an ecosystem, it's a black box. We don't even know whether it's true or not that it was its own thing or just they sneakily used bits and pieces of chromium from the start anyway.
User Agent checks is the easiest thing to overcome. Had edge's engine been open source we would have had spins of it resolving the issue within hours. There are many examples of "random developers" succeeding where big companies tied by business strategies (I bet they had business reasons to keep a distinctive user agent) didn't, to the point that the web runs on servers using FOSS software.
I imagine the reason that Cloudflare is doing this now is that Google just got off with no punishment from their antitrust loss.
Anybody who competes with Google now has to worry that they'll do to them what they did to Microsoft. And, with Trump's DOJ, the government will probably just ignore it if Sundar Pichai shows up with a shiny bauble for Trump. So, I'd imagine that Microsoft, Cloudflare, Amazon (AWS, Twitch), and Meta, among others, might all decide to fund an alternative browser.
Firefox relies on Google for its funding, so any browser based on Gecko relies on Google
Google introduced Extension manifest v3 to effectively to kill/handicap AdBlock extensions.
Mozilla, though getting funding from Google to make google its default search engine, officially decided to keep supporting Manifest v2.
Adblockers are direct challenge to Alphabet’s ad revenue which is still their biggest cash cow.
That speaks a valume about how much control google has on Mozilla decision making process.
That speaks a valume about how much control google has on Mozilla decision making process.
It doesn't say anything about that at all. Just because you're paying for something doesn't mean they have to do it your way. It is at most something to keep an eye on.
Google pays them for two reasons. To be the default search engine giving them substantial marketing and ad space, and to keep them floating and independent to lessen their probable status as a monopoly.
In fact, in the recent antitrust ruling, Google is precluded from even making exclusive deals with them.
Mozilla, though getting funding from Google to make google its default search engine, officially decided to keep supporting Manifest v2.
For now. Google probably isn't too concerned since they have a more than 70% market share, and nearly 90% if you count all Chromium-based browsers. Firefox has managed to do what Google wants, which is "exist" and "not meaningfully compete with Chrome". If that changes, Google might lean on them harder.
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
I love WebKit exploits because they suddenly open up several gaming consoles to homebrew, almost all of them have browsers based on WebKit too.
challenge the status quo by partnering with the status quo...
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?)
Apolitical people are really funny.
to be fair "apolitical" usually leans right-wing
Like, definitely not a full screen window. Have they changed that yet?
Challenge the status quo in a Snowpiercer fashion.
I've got a roach farm, so I'm already on board.
Was this too obscure for Lemmy?
You are not much challenging the status quo by partnering up with the NSA.
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.
Yeah, they could have just backed arch
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?
Well, not a straight answer but, there you go.
(yes, late, also my first post so hi)
pack it up folks, we've been compromised
Ah yes, of course the status quo challenges the status quo!
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?
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.
It is being rewritten using swift
I've seen a lot of Ladybird news recently. Let me know when I can actually try using it.
You can try using it.
It will crash most of the time, but it's technically already usable.
Straight outta Onion
I guess I won't be using it then. 🤷♂️
I'm hyped as long as Ladybird supports uBlock Origin; hoping it's technically feasible.
When it incorporates something like TreeStyleTab, I'll look into it, horizontal tab bars are just silly - most have widescreen displays and content is usually in narrow columns.
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.
The title is an oxymoron lol
Your an ox and a moron
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.
windows browsers are all niche when you introduce anything to the mobile market. An android / iOS ladybird browser would crush it
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.)
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…
Really hoping this project goes well and has a strong start.
ew what
You were the chosen one!
Good for them. I like to keep the free and open browser that works, free and running... So I donate a little to Firefox and Thunderbird, every so often.
I'm still waiting on a Chuck Schumer/Hakeem Jeffries episode.
I'm out of the loop, I thought cloud flair was a good company
ladybird has been infected and its our job as the believers of the church of emacs to get rid of this cancer.
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.
then I have good news for you: https://linuxiac.com/ladybird-browser-team-selects-swift-as-preferred-language/
That is good news! I wouldn’t have guessed Swift, but I can see why Swift 6—which has been GA for a year—might make sense: https://www.swift.org/blog/announcing-swift-6/
C++ interoperability
Swift 5.9 introduced bidirectional interoperability with C++ to seamlessly bring Swift to more existing projects. Swift 6 expands interoperability support to C++ move-only types, virtual methods, default arguments, and more standard library types including std::map and std::optional.
C++ types that do not have a copy constructor can now be accessed from Swift 6 as non-copyable types with ~Copyable. And for those times when it’s useful to expose a C++ type with a copy constructor as ~Copyable in Swift for better performance, a new SWIFT_NONCOPYABLE annotation can be applied to the C++ type.
Swift now also supports calls of C++ virtual methods on types annotated as SWIFT_SHARED_REFERENCE or SWIFT_IMMORTAL_REFERENCE.
When calling C++ functions or methods that have default argument values for some of their parameters, Swift now respects these default values, rather than requiring you to explicitly pass an argument.
Platform Support
Swift is designed to support development and execution on all major operating systems, and platform consistency and expansion underpins Swift’s ability to reach new programming domains. Swift 6 brings major improvements to Linux and Windows across the board, including support for more Linux distributions and Windows architectures.
From their FAQ https://ladybird.org/#faq
Why build a new browser in C++ when safer and more modern languages are available? Ladybird started as a component of the SerenityOS hobby project, which only allows C++. The choice of language was not so much a technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain. However, now that Ladybird has forked and become its own independent project, all constraints previously imposed by SerenityOS are no longer in effect. We have evaluated a number of alternatives, and will begin incremental adoption of Swift as a successor language, once Swift version 6 is released. (More background.)
Sure, but any competition to Chromium is good
For sure it is good because any other engine is direct or indirect an Google project, all development over the past decade was funded by Google. But this, to create a new indie engine in 2026 comes 15-20 years too late as to be capable to gain any minimum market share. The browser market is a brutal competition with over 70 companies victims in this battle, and I fear that Ladybird won't be an exception.
Rust has its own non-security issues, you just won't hear about it, as they're being drowed out by "OMG, this Rust developer has PRONOUNS and CATS, what happened to free speech, why not everyone is a fundamentalist christian like me?" style smear by the likes of Brian Lunduke.
