The website makes it sound like all of the code being bespoke and "based on standards" is some kind of huge advantage but all I see is a Herculean undertaking with too few engineers and too many standards.
W3C lists 1138 separate standards currently, so if each of their three engineers implements one discrete standard every day, with no breaks/weekends/holidays, then having an alpha available that adheres to all 2024 web standards should be possible by 2026?
This is obviously also without testing but these guys are serious, senior engineers, so their code will be perfect on the first try, right?
Love the passion though, can't wait to see how this project plays out.
W3C lists 1138 separate standards currently, so if each of their three engineers implements one discrete standard every day, with no breaks/weekends/holidays, then having an alpha available that adheres to all 2024 web standards should be possible by 2026?
Yes, that is exactly the plan: "We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version"
a Herculean undertaking with too few engineers and too many standards
Yeah, as a layperson this is my take. If mozilla is struggling to stay in the game then I just don't really see how an unfinanced indie team has a shot.
It might seem that way but it's a fairly arrogant assertion. They're a sophisticated organisation with a lot of well experienced people guiding them. As an outsider it's easy to criticise their seemingly endless series of bad decisions, but I'm still confident that internally all of these decisions seemed like a good idea at the time.
Besides which, this would be a good reason to fork their codebase rather than starting from scratch.
Exactly. They have been working on Ladybird Browser for few years already, before it was announced as standalone product (It was a part of SerenityOS).
Sure, but an individual website may use only a few of those standards. Ladybird devs will pick a website they like to use - Reddit, Twitter, Twinings tea, etc. and improve adherence to X or Y standards to make that one website look better. In turn, thousands of websites suddenly work perfectly, and many others work better than before.
Ladybird is largely conformant to the majority of HTML standards now. It's about the edge cases (and where standards aren't followed by websites) and performance. This isn't a new project.
Andreas Kling, the founder and lead dev, has a massive love for Twinings tea and spent a few Dev logs working on improving their website with the end goal being ordering his tea from them :)
Software nowadays is a lot more complex. You'd get nowhere using assembly. Are you also gonna call me lazy if I say making a smartphone from scratch is complicated?
"But the Nokia 1234 only had 4kb of memory" Is what you will probably say.
You'd get nowhere using assembly because people wanted to keep improving technology.
The Nokia was actually build and freakin' rock solid. Then came smartphones because people wanted to improve. It sure wasn't easy and they didn't go Geez, a phone from scratch? Why bother?