Making A Browser Is Harder Than You Think (Ft Andreas Kling)
So today we’re having Andreas Kling, who’s been working on the Ladybird browser, a fully open-source browser. I’d like to thank our sponsors Grace Swan AI and Infinite Red. More details about them later on and links in the description. I hope you enjoy today’s amazing podcast.
All right, well hey, today I’m your host, the Primagen, and today we have another episode of The Top Shelf. With us, we have Andreas Kling and also my co-host TJ, who loves Neovim so much he’s never even heard or opened a browser in his lifetime. Andreas Kling, for those that are unfamiliar—sorry TJ, you don’t even get a chance to talk right now—has somehow built a successful operating system and even has started to build another web browser, which is very shocking to me. First off, how does it feel to build an impossible project, another OS followed by another impossible project, a browser?
Pretty good, I think. It’s been a journey, that’s for sure. But there’s this endless source of fuel, which is people telling you that it’s impossible. It’s just satisfying to one by one go through those people and try to convince them. It’s a bit like how comedians sort of focus on one person in the audience and try to make them laugh. I feel kind of the same about Hacker News; I try to get that one Hacker News guy to believe. I feel good about it.
I thought you were going to say something about how comedians pick out one guy and just make fun of him for an hour. Is that how that works? That sounds terrible.
That’s pretty much how all roast comedians operate.
All right, so hold on just to get this straight: the motivation is kind of like Michael Jordan. Michael Jordan would actually, before every game, pick out somebody on the other team and start messing with them, finding a reason to be angry with them or to show them up. Are you saying that you have a bit of a Michael Jordan in you, where the haters motivate you?
Well, it’s certainly not what kicked things off, but over the years I have taken a liking to letting that spur me on, I think. But the whole thing started—and I don’t know how deeply we want to get into this—but it started back in 2018 when I had been to a drug rehab program and had learned how not to do drugs all day. I discovered that if you don’t do that, the day is very long, and I needed to fill it with something. So I just started programming and got a bunch of initially disjoint pieces and realized at some point I could smash them together and it would be an operating system, and that was the birth of Serenity OS.
Let me pause you one second; for whatever reason, you’re coming through really choppy, so I’m going to refresh the source, which means I lose the audio for a second. Sorry about that.
All right, yeah, no, that’s my bad; I was too ambitious with the resolution.
Right, so yeah, it started as sort of just a hobby project to fill my time when I couldn’t do drugs anymore and ended up just snowballing from that. Initially, it was just me building an operating system because I thought that would be a fun thing to do in C++.
Was that partially inspired by drug use?
No, it was really from working at Apple for so many years before that. I worked on Safari and WebKit, and it’s written in this distinctive dialect of C++ that I liked very much. I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be neat if the whole operating system would be written in this style? It would all be in one repository, all the code would be written on top of the same libraries, same abstractions, same templates, and container classes. How fun would that be to hack on? Okay, let’s do that.
And then I did that. It was just by myself for six months, and then I posted it on Reddit, and a bunch of people thought it was neat and started contributing on GitHub. Fast forward, now over a thousand people have contributed to it, and we’ve spun out all kinds of applications and libraries. There’s photo editing, sound editing, programming languages, and also a browser, which is what I focus on these days because at some point we just sort of spun off the browser from the operating system. Trying to do both of those turns out there’s a practical limit for how much you can really do within one project, and I think we found it.
At least it seemed really uncomfortable doing both of those things in one repository. And yeah, that’s what became Ladybird, which is what I work on these days. Serenity OS still exists out there; there’s a huge community working on it, but I’ve sort of moved on to build browsers instead because that is what I do.
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So tell us a little bit more about what you’re building, like the Serenity OS HTML viewer. Right? That’s kind of like where you’re at, right? Was it primarily sort of difficulties having that live in the same project with Serenity OS, or was it more like an excitement of, oh, I think we really have the chance to ship like a from-scratch browser?
It was a combo of both, where the motivation to spin it off was initially that I just wanted to put rich text on screen. I wanted to have messages where a part of it was bold. That was it. Ambitious, yeah, right? Rich text got a browser—that’s pretty good. That was the scope originally. So I wanted rich text, and I thought, well, what better format for rich text than HTML? I mean, everybody knows it works on browsers.
Yeah, it makes perfect sense, right? It just makes sense. So that’s where it started. And then I guess, having worked on browsers for many years before this, it was just like falling back into these old habits—but good habits, not like the habits I was trying to avoid falling back into.
So I fell back into the habit of browser engineering, and then it just kind of spiraled. Initially, it was just rich text for a while. Then I thought, well, you know, what’s a really nice way to implement rich text? It’s CSS because if you just have HTML elements, you can do rich text, but it’s kind of cumbersome. CSS is a great way to do that, and so I added CSS.
And then, yeah, it just kept going like that. At some point, we went for almost a year, I think, without JavaScript. People kept asking, like, “When are you going to do JavaScript and build a real browser?” I would say, “No, no, no. Don’t ask; we’re not going to do that. This isn’t the real browser.”
And then one day, I thought, why don’t we try adding some JavaScript?
Yeah, it’s very organic, this whole thing. It grew like fungus, really. The whole operating system did, and the community as well, and in some ways, little by little every day, just people sort of expanding their comfort zones with what they were comfortable working on. Myself as well, like I’d never worked on operating systems before, but if you just start somewhere and work your way outwards, it turns out it’s pretty approachable.
But to your question about when did it become untenable or whatever to do this in the Serenity OS repository, it was almost more of a social problem. When the projects were still in one place, we just had a bunch of people who wanted to work on operating system stuff. They wanted to develop device drivers and work on window systems, and then there were these people who were working on browser stuff, and they wanted to do JavaScript optimizations or GPU rendering for web content. Those things are pretty far apart.
Then you try to put all of those into one CI pipeline where, like, “Hey, I’m working on the device driver for this network card and I have to run this battery of thousands of web browser tests.”
So, yeah, it was like a scalability problem; at least that’s how I looked at it. It was a controversial decision at the time because many people liked that everything was in one place, but it really just felt like it got too big for the one repository model. Our bug tracker was just a mess. You can imagine having a GitHub bug tracker for all these things—the world’s two largest projects together.
So that was an issue. We’ve separated into two projects. I think that split has been very healthy. Now the people who want to do kernel stuff work on Serenity, and the people who want to do browsers work on Ladybird. In theory, they are somewhat compatible still, but Ladybird has diverged quite substantially because in Serenity OS one of the core principles is that we’re going to do everything ourselves, no matter what.
That’s really fun, but it’s not a great way to ship software anytime soon. In Ladybird, we kind of relaxed that whole thing and said we’re going to use third-party software. We’re going to take stuff that’s not our core competency, like low-level GPU driver stuff. We don’t want to figure out how to talk to the GPU on every platform we care about; let’s get the Angle Library that already does this and gives you sort of an OpenGL ES3 context no matter what sits underneath. Other stuff like Skia, Curl for networking—so we just started sort of taking all these best and brightest libraries from the open-source world and building on top of those. That gave us a ton of speed, which has been great as well.
But in Serenity, you can’t do that. That’s why they’re sort of not really compatible anymore.
What’s the current state of what is implemented from scratch in Ladybird versus some of these big-ticket items that are shared in other places? Because I think people hear another browser, their first thought is probably like, “Oh, it’s just a Chrome reskin or something like that,” right? Which is obviously not the case for Ladybird.
So, it’s sort of an evolving thing; we’re not exactly sure where the boundaries are. But there is no Chrome here; there’s no Firefox. We’re not building on top of an existing browser; this is from scratch. We built out all the stuff from scratch that we have since replaced with some third-party stuff.
So we had our own graphics stack, for example, but it is just something that is not our core interest to build really fast graphics. So we started using Skia instead. In terms of what we are doing ourselves, we are implementing the web specifications—HTML, CSS, JavaScript—and various supporting specs, like URL encoding, all those kind of things.
Does that mean you’re implementing your own version of a JavaScript interpreter?
Oh, you are! Nice. What’s the name of it?
It’s called LIJS. It comes from the Serenity OS tradition of naming everything “lib” followed by the most obvious thing possible. So it’s not like Spider Monkey or V8; no, no. QuickJS is LIJS. The web engine is called LiWeb.
Can you believe it?
Wow, nice! That’s a good name! I immediately know exactly what it is.
Okay, so you are building your own. How far into JavaScript compliance with web standards are you? Because if I’m not mistaken, the W3 specification for the web is about 100 million lines; it’s a number that’s so massive that it would take a group of people writing a line a second for like a year to actually get it done.
Yeah, that’s very possible. I don’t know; that’s probably not the best metric to measure completeness of implementation. But in terms of compliance, our JavaScript engine is highly compliant. Just a few weeks ago, it was the most compliant. The JavaScript working group, TC39, maintains this test suite for compliance testing called Test262, and we had the highest score at least a few weeks ago.
I think the Firefox team dumped a full implementation of the new temporal proposal for JavaScript, which bumped them slightly above us. We’re sitting at something like 97 point whatever percent. They dumped code and bumped themselves up to 97.3, so we just have to catch up.
But yeah, we’ve been sitting on top of that quite nicely for a while. You can speculate as to why at the end of the day. It’s like super compliance with every little corner of the spec is not necessarily going to make you the most compatible with the web, but we are a nerdy project with many nerds, so we just like making the number go up. If we can just fix tests and make the spec compliance number go up, that’s just fun, so we do that.
Anyway, that’s JavaScript. Compliance on general web content is harder, and it’s not as well tested because, you know, there are many specs—millions of lines, as you alluded to. The closest thing that exists is this project called Web Platform Test, which is a giant project co-maintained by browser vendors—Google, Apple, Mozilla, and I guess Microsoft and whoever else builds browsers. They all collaborate on this thing called Web Platform Tests (WPT).
I think the idea is that when you fix a bug in your browser, you contribute a test to the shared test suite so that everyone can integrate that into their testing. It doesn’t always work like that in practice, but that’s kind of the idea. There are something like 1.8 million tests in there, so it is comprehensive.
It’s important to note that I think about 1.1 million of those tests are specifically about Chinese, Japanese, and Korean text encoding. Somebody wrote a test generator for his pet encoding issues and generated a truckload to test for that, so it’s a little bit weighted in that random arbitrary category.
But outside of that, it’s the best thing that we have, and we are currently at about 1.7 million out of the leaders, I think, who are at about 1.9 million tests passing. We’ve done all the low-hanging fruits, so strictly middle and top-hanging fruits remain, I think.
If you look at sort of the browsers that are ongoing in development right now, at the top in terms of engines, you have WebKit, Chrome, and Gecko—Firefox—and then you have sort of three up-and-coming engines, which are us, Servo, and a British project called Flow, which is a closed-source browser engine only shipping for Raspberry Pi at the moment. Of the bottom three underdogs, we are leading that pack.
Servo is the rewrite with Rust.
Right, Servo is Rust-based.
Don’t worry; it won! You got a lot of time. You’re going to easily be able to keep outperforming them. You’ve got years of runway.
Well, to be fair, they started back in 2012, so like I said, you’ve got years of runway.
Sure, I hope they succeed, but we have been able to stand up a new browser in half the time since they started. For whatever reason, there’s been a lot of chaos around that project. I think they used to be well-staffed by Mozilla, and then suddenly they fired everybody to save money or whatever. Only recently, the Linux Foundation picked it up and decided to fund Servo. Now it’s kind of up and kicking a bit again; they are making progress, which is great.
My hope is that we see many new browser engines, not just Ladybird. I would feel much better if they did ship and if they shipped something amazing, so that people get more choice. Ultimately, that is what I’m about; what we’re about is that we just want to inject some damn choice into this market because it’s been taken away from everybody.
For many reasons, but you see stuff like Microsoft just throwing out their own engine, consolidating back behind Chromium, and you see Opera doing the same. Anybody who says, “I’m building a new browser” in the last five years, they’re really just building something on top of Chromium. There hasn’t been an attempt to build new browser engines for so long. I think it’s something worth doing, especially now with what’s going on with the DOJ coming up on Google here. We don’t know what’s going to happen with that, but it is looking a mess. They might have to sell Chrome, whatever that even means; they might be banned from participating in the browser market for x amount of years.
What the hell happens to all the people building stuff on top of Chrome if Google is no longer developing that? It’s high time we see some new engines and some new approaches to this.
All of that to say, I hope Servo succeeds. I hope they ship, and I think it would be good for them to speed up a little bit. But I think they will.
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Speaking of being able to choose between browsers, I’m interested in how much you get to use Ladybird as a daily browser. Is it like, every website I go to, I’m opening it in Ladybird? How far away do you feel that is? I’m just interested, for that user experience, how are you feeling on it? How’s that going?
Right, so for the average user, it is completely unusable. There’s no way that you would not be disappointed—100% certainty you would be disappointed. You would say, “This is a piece of [__]. What the hell?” A 100% satisfaction guarantee—it’s guaranteed dissatisfaction.
Right, no doubt! This is why we’re not telling anybody, “Please download this and check it out.” We are pre-alpha for a reason; everybody would just be disappointed.
It’s still possible to build it, you know, because it’s open-source, and we’re doing it all in the open, but you do need to do that little manual step. There’s proof of work, I suppose, that you have to provide yourself to get the experience of being so disappointed in our new browser.
But to your question, I don’t—I try to use it every day for like random websites. Every time somebody sends me a link, I try to open it in Ladybird and see what breaks. A couple of websites work well, like our GitHub development workflows, for example, reviewing pull requests—stuff like that. We’ve tested those a lot; we tend to fix whatever gets broken there, so that stuff works.
But you know, you throw a random website at it, and chances are just so high that they’re using some random CSS features that we haven’t implemented yet or some combination of things. There’s really a lot of interesting ways to combine CSS features you wouldn’t think, like, “Oh, but if you put a flexbox inside of a float inside of an absolutely positioned grid that has this—”
And there is the Web Platform Test, but there’s only so much coverage in there. We’re constantly discovering new ways to combine web platform features.
Let’s say is CSS one of these kind of projects where, as you fix one, you realize you’ve broken ten others? It feels like they’re just so interdependent on each other that it feels like it’s just very dangerous to fix anything.
I will say that if you don’t have the right mental model, that will happen every time. I am still working on my mental model. I keep updating it and keep discovering things that I did not realize.
So it’s a journey, and sometimes the patches to the mental model are so severe that you just have to rewrite large parts of things—things that seemed like they made sense in the past. You discover, wait a minute, it doesn’t make sense because there’s this one edge case.
A typical thing that I always have to re-model is the relationship between heights and widths in CSS, for example. When can you figure out a width if you only have the height? What are the circumstances, especially when there are percentages involved?
This percentage can only be figured out once you know how big something is, and maybe the size of the thing depends on this percentage value. What order do you do things in? Yeah, that kind of stuff tends to just wreak havoc on your mental model when you discover something.
We’ve been doing a lot of that, but I would say the real chaos from CSS comes from the fact that it is continuously updated and edited. These specs are alive; it’s not like you can just get the CSS specs, print them out, and start implementing.
If you reload the spec tomorrow, someone might have changed something. Most of the time, when you’re lucky, they’re just clarifying something like, “Oh, this was a little ambiguous—we’ve clarified it.” But other times it’s like, “We added a new property or a new value that this property could have.”
Alignment is something like that, for example. They’ve really expanded the ways that you can align boxes within each other, and then you just have to kind of suck it up and say, “Okay, well, I guess you can align a box relative to this now.” Then you have to think of a way to do that in your C++.
But yeah, I guess I agree with what you said—CSS is like that. You have to keep working on it.
So, how often is this spec changing in ways that cause a really big churn? Something that actually feels kind of earth-shaking comparatively. I would assume REM and M were probably really painful, but they didn’t come around during Ladybird development; they predate Ladybird. I don’t know how old those are, but they’re new to me.
It seems like I keep seeing new units, which means you have to thread through just so much little bits of information just to be able to land in every single place. It seems very hard.
Does this happen frequently that you just get wrecked by a whole new feature that you have to rethread everything through?
No, I wouldn’t say so. Getting really wrecked by spec changes—that’s like once or twice a year so far.
Okay, just once or twice a year.
Just a few times a year, you know, not too bad.
That’s okay; we can handle that.
It could be worse; I guess you could be writing it in Rust. Then you’d definitely be sad to have to change everything.
Hey, we’re not making fun of Rust right now!
Oh, sorry, sorry, wrong format.
Continue.
Continue! Yeah, no, but you know, fair enough. C++ is pretty friendly when it comes to sudden rewrites. You have to rebuild or recontextualize some ownership model, and doing that in C++ where it’s not so strict about all the ownership stuff, you know—there are benefits to that, certainly, in terms of development velocity.
But there are downsides to that as well, which we acknowledge. It has certainly helped us, I think, being in a flexible language.
We are a very small team and also, like, with a small budget, relatively speaking. If you look at our budget compared to our competitors, we are something like 0.1% of their budget.
That means that we have a very different approach to development, obviously, and we have to prioritize differently and take some shortcuts, cut some features. The spec changes that happen day-to-day, we’re not necessarily always on top of those anyway. We were frequently just letting things slide.
And it’s more of those major, big changes that we try to catch up with. It’s okay so far. I do feel like tomorrow they could drop a big specs change on us that would just ruin everything. This has happened before. they did this big rewrite of navigation APIs and history management called navigables which is like a comprehensive change to the HTML specification which we are still reeling from. I don’t think it makes any difference to you as a browser user, but for us it was surprising, let’s say.
So obviously we hear all the time, I mean if you’ve been on Twitter for longer than 14 seconds, you’ll hear that programming in C++ is a horrible decision to make and that anyone that does it is an intentionally bad actor at this point, potentially Russian state level acting. So it sounds like ladybird is largely built, if not exclusively built, in C++.
Are there any other languages being used? And also is modern C++ as bad as Twitter actually makes it, or do the shared and unique features actually make it not as bad? Well, I think nothing is as bad as Twitter makes it.
Fair, true, true, good answer, good answer. But there are flaws, obviously. We are aware of the flaws and we are C++ almost entirely our own code of C++, but of course now we’ve started integrating third-party code so we’re also taking in C code such as the curl library, which is some very sturdy C that never seems to fall apart, which is cool.
We are happy to use whatever language our third-party packages use as long as they’re good packages with good APIs. For our own code, we don’t have that many problems with C++ unsafety, certainly not as many as Twitter would have you believe, but we recognize that there is the occasional terrible security issue that would have been avoidable with another language.
And so we do want to build a browser that people can use and feel good about using, so we do have to do something about these things. We’re using C++ just because that’s where Serenos started and SerenityOS started with that because I just wanted to make WebKit the operating system.
It’s just this weird sort of sequence of events that led to suddenly having a C++ codebase, but in the long term, we want to… well, we really would have liked it if C++ got their act together and added safety features to the language. There were some attempts, but the committee has sort of… how do I say this in a friendly way? They’re kind of getting in the way of… I’ve read about some of it. It sounds very, it sounds very lightning charged, some of the discussions.
Yeah, it’s been rough, and there are people who put forward some serious effort into designing safe versions of C++ and they’re just having a very hard time convincing the committee and the greater language community that these efforts are worthwhile. That was pretty diplomatic, and we would have loved it if C++ was solved somehow in this way.
Now it kind of doesn’t look like it’s going to be anytime soon, and we want to put out a browser in the next couple of years, so we are looking at alternative approaches and we’ve evaluated sort of a bunch of different languages, and the one that we ended up with was Swift, because everybody liked writing it.
We tested a bunch of them. People always ask like, which ones did you test? What didn’t you like about them? It’s like 100% bait, right? They just want to get into an argument. But seriously, which ones did you test and why didn’t you like them? Yeah, and be specific so we can really clip that out of context and make you look like you’ve never written code before.
Right, well I always say that I don’t want to comment on languages where I haven’t written at least 100K lines because my opinions on those languages are not really worth hearing. They’re not based on anything that you should use to make your decisions, so it’s very anticlimactic to hear for people who keep asking me.
Can I clarify one quick point with that? Is it a 100K sum or is it 100K singular project? I suppose that would be 100K sum, yeah, just because a 100K size project is a big project which exposes different warts of a language, whereas 100K a bunch of small projects, you could effectively avoid a lot of the warts by having 100 1,000 line code projects.
Right, yeah, just hello world all day or just like five JSX templates. You know, just produce enough code in some ways. Yeah, no, so we tested all the usual suspects. I had people on my team spend a couple of weeks writing Rust, for example, and trying to model various things that they thought were interesting. Like hey, take this part of the browser, try to rewrite it in Rust, see how you like it, see what kind of trouble you run into.
Initially, it was pretty good. People were excited, I think in part because there’s a lot of hype around the language, but there was some frustration that started creeping in. It’s not what happened when they tested some other languages. Swift was the one that people tested and they sort of came out of that saying, hey, wait a minute, this is great. I didn’t run into any major problems, and I was able to write the program the way I wanted. I didn’t have to argue with the compiler and it kind of just worked.
So it seemed like the right thing to do was to ignore the hype and just go with the thing that everybody enjoyed and then sort of work backwards from there to explain what is it about it that we enjoy and what is it about it that makes sense for a browser. That ends up being that it’s very object-oriented programming friendly, which is not the big thing these days, but the browser, if you ever looked inside a browser, it is very 1990s world because browsers really were like… the core architecture of browsers was invented when XML and Java was like the big thing, right?
Back in the 90s, they built this whole document object model thing around that, and now we’re stuck with that, and you have to model that in your programs. It’s just a lot easier to do if you have an O friendly language. If you look at Servo, for example, I know they have to jump through a bunch of interesting hoops and do a lot of unnatural patterns in Rust to express some of these things that you need to have in a browser.
You can still do it, but it’s just not natural. I think that’s certainly what I enjoy about Swift, is that it just kind of maps to these things that we want to do really nicely. But the big downside with both of those languages is that neither of them are garbage collector friendly, and the browser is a garbage collected environment because JavaScript is a garbage collector or has a garbage collector.
So whatever language we use, we have to do our own garbage collection. We have one that we have written ourselves, and now we are figuring out how to make that thing work with Swift. If we had used Rust, we would have to figure out how to make that use… how to make Rust understand it. So there’s no way around that. I guess I would say if I were starting over today, I would probably just pick a language with a garbage collector so that this would be a non-issue.
Can you explain that a little bit more? Are you saying like use Go or use C or use Java when you’re saying the language itself has garbage collection or a language that provides a garbage collector? I don’t know that the difference is meaningful. Okay, I would have just liked it if someone else took care of garbage collection.
Fair enough, because especially with modern programming style, garbage collection gets kind of complicated, especially when you have stuff like asynchronous programming or you make a Lambda where you capture a bunch of stuff, and then that has to stay alive until the Lambda executes. All of these things you have to take care of, and it would be real nice if somebody else just took care of it. But we put ourselves in this silly boat where we have to take care of that and we’re stuck with it.
So that’s what we’re doing now with Swift, just trying to figure out how to make Swift tell our garbage collector what it needs to know about everything. Are you saying particularly for like the JS runtime, or are you saying for the whole browser, you would rather pick something that’s garbage collected, or both? I guess I would also prefer something for the entire thing because the specifications just sort of assume that you’re in a garbage collected environment.
There’s no malloc and free in the spec. They just say like create a new thing and then set the reference to that thing to null somewhere, and then it just disappears, I guess. They never explain in any of the specs why things disappear, and so the implication is that it’s a garbage collected environment, but it’s just never explained. It’s something that other browsers traditionally have done a lot of stuff with reference counting.
So WebKit and Chromium, at least those are the codebases I’m more familiar with, use reference counting extensively. But then you have the problem of ref cycles where two ref counted objects point at each other, and now you leak. It would have been nice to… if you were using a garbage collector, you wouldn’t have that problem. For that reason, I say, hey, these specs are all GC assuming, let’s just use a GC language.
Out of all the things, that’s probably the thing I would do very differently today. So what’s the status of Swift in Ladybird right now? I know you guys are working on setting that up and interoperability. I’ve seen you do quite a bit of things in the repo, sort of generating. It looks like, at least from a quick overview, generating Swift files and other… what’s the current status? Are you actually getting to write Swift, or is it still sort of exploratory?
For properly shipping it to whatever prod means for you today, it’s still kind of exploratory. We’re working together with some folks on the Swift team to figure out our garbage collector integration. It’s not something that has been done a lot, and when I worked on the WebKit team, I know that the Swift team really wanted us to make use of Swift, but there were all these complicating factors such as the WebKit garbage collector, and WebKit never really integrated Swift that much.
So here I am 10 years later outside of Apple, but trying to put Swift into my garbage collector browser engine. You just never get away from it, I guess. So yeah, we’re still exploring, and what that means in practical terms is that we’re just trying to figure out how to get all the information the garbage collector needs across the language boundary. We’re making progress and the Swift team is very nice, very friendly and responsive, but we are sort of just giving them problems that they don’t normally have, and so it takes time to figure out the right solutions.
But we’re hopeful. It’s kind of exciting, I think, to see if we can get this working because we need Ladybird to be different from other engines in many ways. You know, like if we are just building… if we end up building Chromium again, then it’s less useful, I would say. So if we do things differently, then we have a bit more biodiversity in the ecosystem, which is probably a good thing.
Yeah, that totally makes sense. I’m interested in sort of where you envision Ladybird going. Max, what’s your roadmap? What are the things you’re shooting for? If there are any sort of really unique aspects of Ladybird right in that roadmap, I’d love to hear about those too.
Sure. So at the moment, we are just trying to make a browser that works. Fair enough, yep. So we don’t really have the luxury of differentiation yet, but we’re trying to plant the seeds for differentiation. It’s important to look at what are our opportunities to differentiate, and I think one of our key strengths is that we are not dependent on Google in any way.
All the other browsers are depending on Google either for their code or for manpower or for money. We are trying to find a new way to develop and maintain a browser that doesn’t require a billion dollars or a thousand people. I listened to a podcast from the Open Web Association this week where he was talking about the DOJ case against Google, and he had some interesting numbers. He said that there are about a thousand developers working on Chrome right now paid by Google and that he estimated their cost between $1.5 and $3 billion per year, which is a wild, I think.
That’s certainly what an operation at that scale costs, but if the DOJ decides that that kind of money is just not available, at least not in this way, then we’re all going to have to figure out how to build browsers in a different way with a very different budget. I think that’s an area that we are exploring, not that we have a choice. You know, it’s not like we can say, screw this, let’s just do the billion-dollar thing and say, oh, we’ll just do it with a billion dollars. I guess it’s fine.
No, so by necessity, we’re exploring what would it look like to build a browser with a tiny team and a tiny budget, and what kind of compromises do you have to make to make this possible? But, you know, as everything turns out, maybe that information is going to be super relevant to all browsers in the near future. Who knows?
I guess the follow-up question would be that if you become successful building Ladybird and Google is in the middle of potentially being dissembled at some level by the DOJ, wouldn’t your success then actually start to be like against the monopoly that is currently being prosecuted? Could you save Google by building a browser with just a few engineers?
I don’t think we have the time necessary to do that with the scale that we’re running at right now, but in theory, I think it could be done. If we could get everything to align correctly, you could certainly make the argument that, well, look at these guys. They’re building a browser at a much smaller scale. They don’t need all that money. Maybe Google just needs to be restructured a little bit, I don’t know.
So if you’re saying a bunch of engineers all of a sudden start committing to Ladybird under these unknown names and all that, it might actually be Google spending a billion dollars to get your successful all Gmail.com. Weirdly, they’re thinking very sneaky. Well, you know, a lot of people say that’s exactly what they’re doing at Firefox, right? That they’re just sending the money to Milla to save off the antitrust argument.
On the topic of fake emails, by the way, it’s funny. I remember back before Chrome was announced. Chrome was originally built on WebKit, right? And I know that the people who were making Chrome, they were like sending fixes to the WebKit team under fake names and fake emails for a while before Chrome was announced, so that was pretty good. It wouldn’t be the first time they’d under their fake identities contributing to other browsers.
But no, I don’t know. In all seriousness, I don’t think that we can save Google in this case. Sorry, Google. Yeah, yeah, would have loved to, but just going to have to let this one play out.
Do you have a guess for… obviously not like every website. I mean, I don’t think any browser works for every website, but do you have a guess for, let’s say, you know, I’m doing my daily drive of checking GitHub, scrolling a little bit on x.com, watching a YouTube video. When’s sort of a guess of when? Okay, you could do that. Maybe it’s a little slow, maybe there are a few edge case kind of scenarios, but someone could actually do that as a daily driver for Ladybird.
Right, so your GitHub stuff you can do today, cool. Scrolling on x.com you can kind of do today. You have to fake the user agent because if we tell them that we’re Ladybird, they just say no.
Interesting. Okay, we’ll phone a few friends at X and we’ll tell them to change that. We’ll get you on the list. Sure. Yeah, no, the user agent string is a constant source of pain for us, and every day it’s like, should we just suck it up and put like Chrome, WebKit, Gecko, Firefox… everything like everybody else does, just put every other browser name in there, and suddenly all the websites work?
So far, we’ve sort of stayed pure. We just say Ladybird. We don’t lie. Good, that’s been a long-standing problem in the terminal world. Like people just lie about… oh God, yeah. You know, so it’s like we don’t have to repeat the same mistakes from history over and over again. Maybe other people can just fix the other problems, and so that’s good.
I’m excited to hear you’re not caving to the pressure. That’s good. Well, we’re probably going to cave to the pressure. Oh no. Alright, let’s end it. We don’t even need to do live Q&A.
Well, the problem here is that there isn’t some new term cap or whatever that we can just go and fix. Fair, that’s fair. There’s just every website out there, many of them unmaintained. Nobody even knows what machine is serving up this damn website. They couldn’t find the server if they tried and we just have to deal with those machines being configured in those ways.
So at the end of the day, we’re probably just going to have to suck it up and say we are Ladybird. I mean Chromium. I mean Firefox. I mean Safari. Just don’t worry about it. Give us the content. But yeah, so today if you say that you’re Chrome, you say that you’re Safari, x will work. You can scroll there.
YouTube was your last request. That’s the hard one. YouTube is a very complex piece of web content. We are making progress on it. I think we have the video codec stuff necessary, but we don’t have all of the APIs hooked up for like media source extensions, whatever they’re called. Certainly none of the DRM stuff, and performance is not great for this kind of stuff either.
But obviously, everybody loves YouTube. We want to get YouTube working, so we are chipping away at it. In terms of a timeline, so that you can clip this, we’ve said 2026 for an alpha release. That means it’s something that we would pre-compile, so you can download it and test it out and tell us what didn’t work. It will be a lot of things, and we will by that point be in a position where we can actually meaningfully take advantage of this feedback.
Today, if you try it out and tell us something didn’t work, we know it wasn’t going to work. You don’t have to tell us, but hopefully, next year it will be a bit more valuable. But we’re not saying any specific date in 2026, just 2026 could mean a lot of things.
I guess my follow-up question is: how does it feel to probably ship an entire browser before Prime finishes a project on stream? It’s a good question, especially since mine are under 10,000 lines of code. I mean, I’m still giving you a whole year and a half at least for Prime to do it. But I’m just anticipating like my poly market bet for this would definitely be on Ladybird.
I guess I don’t feel great about that. I wish that Prime would get to ship first. Thank you. But where’s the but? I’m just waiting for it to happen. There’s no but. He’s just rooting for you, buddy. He’s just got your back. I just want you to… thank you.
Alright, but real talk: GTA 6 or Ladybird, what’s your bet here? Okay, we want a real one. Um, I think they might beat us. Oh, I want to believe that would directly impact the shipping of Ladybird.
Oh, see, now you’re asking the real questions. Um, possibly. Okay, because that’s like the danger of life is that you’re competing on two axes there. GTA ships early 2026; Ladybird is now late 2026. Weird, we don’t know why. Somebody at Apple told me that there was at least one cycle of Mac OS that was directly impacted by World of Warcraft coming out.
So this does happen. It does. See, I remember. I remember those days; they were very magical days. Yes.
Alright, awesome. Well, I actually want to go back. I want to go back to the DOJ. I have some more questions about the DOJ just and Ladybird in general. Because if this does happen, let’s just say that the outcome of this is that Chrome can no longer participate in some stuff for some amount of years, some sort of reprimanding or intentional government-enforced slowdown put onto Chrome.
What is the implications of that? Because that is not something I’ve really thought well through, especially since we have an almost total browser alignment around Chrome. There are a lot of implications. I guess the direct issue is that somebody has to take over a lot of things that Google are currently owning. That’s the Chromium engine, obviously.
But also, they do a ton of standards work. I would even say the majority of standards work is done by Google employees today. So if Google is just booted out of this entirely, then a bunch of web standards will just grind to a halt, I think, at least until somebody figures out what’s going on and other companies maybe start pitching in more staff.
Those are sort of direct effects because, like, the Google people disappear, but then you have a lot of secondary effects where money disappears from the other browsers. Firefox famously makes what, like half a billion dollars a year? Or something from exclusively why they pretty much exist is because of the page searching or whatever you call that, that they get all their money from.
That obviously presents a problem for the way that they’ve been maintaining an alternative browser. I don’t think that money is going to last that long, at least not unless they significantly change their structure and burn rate. You can see that they are sort of desperately flailing around looking for new revenue streams and stuff, and I hope they find something that works.
But is this the reason why Servo kind of came about? Or the rework on Servo? Do you think that has any implication from this? Because I know Servo died for quite some while. I think from Milla’s perspective, Servo was kind of a research project and they looked at it as a way to perhaps develop some interesting new approaches to browser engine technology.
They’ve sort of taken the best of Servo and put it into Firefox, which is great. I don’t know that they were looking at it ever as a way to build a new browser entirely. I think their ambition was to sort of prototype stuff and bring the best back into Firefox. But I may be wrong about that. I’ve never been inside Firefox; I just know some people who work there.
I think what they said publicly when they let the Servo team go, if I remember correctly, was just that they wanted to focus on other things and cost-saving measures, basically like the usual. And focus on other things outside of the browser. Everyone was like, huh, classic browser behavior, where they said they were going to focus on non-browser activities.
Yeah, I mean, I don’t like to crap on other projects and organizations and things like that, but it is a little bit sad because I was a huge fan of Milla ever since they came out. Yep, to see that they’re gradually scaling down their interest and investment in browser stuff and just trying to branch out into anything else like AI or advertising, the latest thing. It’s a little sad because we all fell in love with them because of Firefox.
So yeah, that’s been a little sad, but I have hope that they will find a way. Maybe not a way that costs them half a billion dollars a year, but a way. But then you also have other projects like Safari. Every time I say this, people always say, well, you know, $20 billion a year is like chump change for Apple; they don’t care.
But $20 billion is not chump change for anybody. I don’t care if you’re Apple; that’s enough to make you care. Yeah, that’s several research projects going in parallel. That’s a lot of iPhones. Even at iPhone prices, that’s still a lot of iPhones.
And I think, you know, if tomorrow Apple learns that, okay, you’re not getting those 20 billies anymore, I think the calculus looks a little different for how much they care about building a browser. I don’t think they would stop, but things will probably shift around significantly as a consequence of that.
And then you have all these browsers that are just building on top of Chromium. So Brave, for example, or what are all these other ones? Like AR… Valetti? Valetti? VDI? VDI. There we go, sure. I think you’re… Right, sure Valentino.
Yes, all of those that sit on top of chromium, they’re obviously also going to stagnate if nobody is developing chromium. So those are some of the basic sort of consequences and implications that you can easily reason your way to. I’m sure that if you think this through and if you have more context and you have a better understanding of what the DOJ is really proposing, you can figure out a lot of things that might happen as well as a consequence.
Who knows? Do you think it’s pretty serendipitous that you’re this far into a browser and these things are happening? Is this one of those moments where people talk about how luck is just opportunity meeting preparedness, and you just happen to have potential where maybe Brave or one of these browsers are like we need something different to avoid this entire potential conflict? Let’s choose ladybird, right? Because you potentially could become an alternative. I think what you’re saying makes a lot of sense.
What was that? Opportunity plus preparedness equals luck, right? A lot of people don’t define luck as random. Not all life is just one by pure random chance. It’s just like you happen to be studying browsers, you happen to devote your life to browsers, and now browsers are in this terrible weird state. You’re just like, well, this just happens to be a preparedness meant an opportunity, right?
Yeah, I think that would be lovely. I’ll say that if we can somehow, if it turns out that we can provide sort of an alternative solution to all of this—maybe not now, but like in a year or two—if we would be in sufficiently good shape that somebody could start prototyping, let’s say Brave on top of our engine, I think that would be fantastic. I would say the same thing, you know, if Servo is in great shape in a year and somebody could start prototyping their browser on top of Servo or whoever, because I’ve always felt that the way browsers are funded is not wholesome.
It’s not great that we have to track users and put ads relevant to them somewhere, and then like that money somehow changes hands a million times and eventually it pays for the browsers. I feel like it would be more wholesome if we had a different way of doing that. I can’t think of a way that would make as much money as the current approach does, but maybe it doesn’t have to be done with so much money.
That’s kind of, I guess, part of what motivated me to work on a browser. I always felt like, I mean, maybe I’m a little bit overly idealistic here. I know that, but I always felt like the browsers that exist are a little bit compromised because they can never really put the user first because their loyalties are always going to be to the hand that feeds, right? Is there such a thing as putting the user first and putting the user privacy first if you get your funding and staffing from advertising? I think not really.
And that’s not to say that projects like Brave aren’t doing hugely awesome work on user privacy. But at the end of the day, I would love it if we could have a browser that could put the user first and could say that with a straight face—no fingers behind the back or anything—or whatever you do in America. You can say it, and you can mean it. I think that would be nice.
One of the questions was actually about Brave that we have from our live Q&A. I don’t know if there’s anything else you sort of find interesting or cool about Brave or like some of the ideas. I know they were trying to do like a token and they’ve tried to do like a bunch of—
They got BAT, they have a lot of at least interesting ideas. I’d just love to hear a little bit more of your thoughts on that, if you want to share.
Sure, so I think Brave, they’ve certainly been experimenting to look for alternative ways to fund browser development. I’m not intimately familiar with how that has worked out for them, but I think it is great that they’re trying different things and they’re just, in general, experimenting.
People like to say like, “Oh, that’s just a Chrome wrapper or a Chrome skin” or whatever. I do feel with Brave that they are actually building browsers. They just don’t have a thousand people. They have the team and the budget that they have, and they do what they can with that. They are experimenting within the browser space looking for alternative revenue streams.
They’re not like Mozilla, just trying to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, so I do like them for that. I think they have a ton of interesting work on preventing user fingerprinting and things like that, like really locking down random JavaScript APIs to make the browser appear homogeneous.
We want to definitely do things like that. If in the future there is a future where we could be the engine for Brave, I would be super happy. We’d be happy to have them collaborate on that with us. But today, we’re nowhere near that being a reality.
But who knows where this goes? Go ahead. I was just going to read one.
How can you convince people and sponsors to join and believe in this project even before the first version of ladybird is available? Do you have milestones you’re hitting and more attempts you’re taking at raising more funds if that’s even what the right term is for this?
So we are a nonprofit created last year, and we’ve been raising donations essentially, saying that you can sponsor this project but you can’t really buy influence over it because we want to be independent. What we do is we’ll put your logo on our website and say thank you on social media, and then that’s the end of that.
As it turns out, there are a lot of companies and individuals with money who feel that what we’re doing or what we’re attempting is worth getting behind. We have companies like Shopify, for example, backing us, which they were our first sponsor actually, even before we had a nonprofit. They just like to see somebody trying this and somebody trying to inject some diversity into the web browser market, I suppose. I’m sure they can say that in a much nicer way than I’m doing off the cuff, but they were very supportive of our mission and we’re very thankful for that support.
Over the last year, I’ve been able to find a bunch of other companies and individuals who wanted to sponsor that as well, and none of them have been concerned with specific dates. It’s more about, “Hey, you’re doing something that we think is worth pursuing. We want to back you.” It’s been great.
One of your earlier guests, DHH, is one of our sponsors. We’re very happy to get him.
I could just I could just feel it coming when you’re going to say I just knew.
He was very nice and convinced his company to sponsor us and a bunch of others as well. Not only that, but we also allow individuals to donate, and I think we’re just looking for—we’ve set very tight constraints on how we allow ourselves to be funded.
We don’t want to sell out influence in any way. We don’t want to become dependent on a single company. We don’t want to be dependent on like advertising or tracking or anything like that. It’s pretty tight what we can really do, so it’s all about those sponsors, donations essentially.
How do you avoid doing that though, in a real practical sense? Maybe my view of the world is a bit too cynical, but at the end of the day when someone has proven time and time again to be a project-saving type of funding, how are you not swayed by what they have to say?
How are you avoiding that whole situation? Because that is—I would just assume it’s virtually impossible at some level to just always avoid that. It’s certainly an issue, so our main strategy is to keep our scope so tight that we don’t go and hire a bunch of more people just because somebody gave us a bunch of more money.
I think that’s the main mechanism by which we avoid stepping into this trap. If Google were to say tomorrow that they want to give us a million bucks to build this thing, that doesn’t mean I’m going to go hire ten more people right away. It just means that now our war chest is that much bigger, and maybe we will modestly scale up the team a tiny little bit by one person or two or something like that.
I think continuously monitoring sort of the diversity of funds that we have and looking at where it comes from, making sure that we don’t have just a single sponsor—I think that’s our main approach to this.
How is that going to play out over time in the real world? Well, I don’t know. I hope we’ll do a good job of it. I’m hopeful also that we will have a range of diverse sponsors so that this doesn’t have to become an issue that we even have to think about.
One easy way to avoid it, of course, would be to set a cap on sponsorships and just say like, “Well, we’re not going to take any more than this.” That kind of goes against all of the capitalist impulses that one might have, but that sounds a bit kind of risky to say no when you’re a nonprofit to money.
Yes, I’m just thinking out loud and not saying that we’ll do that. But yeah, it’s an important problem to keep in mind always, I think, because of what you see happen to everyone else who tries this. Every successful software nonprofit runs into some version of this problem.
You can see a lot of them, for example, giving out board seats to big donors, and then that has consequences. Or they become dependent on a single donor that gives way too much or whatever. So yeah, we’re trying to keep all these things in mind and move carefully and keep the team small.
I love that. Here’s another one for you. I’ll slightly rephrase, but basically I think, picture ladybird three to five years from now, right? You have a browser where you’re not saying, “Oh, it’s Alpha.” You’re like using it, it’s a daily driver kind of thing. What do you believe the next big hurdle or challenge is after that? Do you have a vision for the future where you’re like, “Oh, if Ladybird does XYZ, we’re going to be so happy. We’ve conquered our next big challenge?”
Oh, I think the—I guess that’s when the real challenge begins, which is the maintenance of this thing. Maintaining a browser is a bit different than maintaining other software projects because of the ever-changing specifications.
It’s a bit like you’re writing an emulator for a video game platform that keeps changing, and you have all these ROMs which are websites, and they’re releasing new ones every day. I think there’s going to be just an infinitely long tale of maintenance work to be done at the end of this. Maybe this, what we’re doing now, is perhaps the easy part.
Getting this to work with 80% of the web might be the easy part, and the rest of eternity is going to be the last 20% or whatever. I could see it playing out that way, and I don’t personally have anything I want to do after this. I just want to do more of this.
I love this. In some ways, I think when I left Apple, I missed my job, and I spent the next six years recreating it. Instead of advancing within Apple, I just created a new browser, so I became in charge of that instead.
It’s a little bit strange.
Straight to the top.
Yeah, you just started your own company instead—nice. Smart. I see the CEO is the way to go.
But okay, I have a couple of questions. I want to kind of do them back to back here, but the Apple one is kind of interesting because you’ve mentioned this quite a few times—that you were at Apple. I don’t know if you’ve stated it, but what made you leave Apple?
Because obviously, being at Apple for a long time, working on a very core feature means you’re probably in a very secure, good position. So leaving it is obviously a non-trivial decision, at least I would assume.
Yeah, there were a bunch of different things, but I think the main thing that really happened was that I left in 2017, and I just had started feeling like I didn’t fit in at the company anymore. It was in the year after Trump was elected, and that just kind of activated everybody inside the company.
People were now super eager to talk about politics all the time, and I tried to keep up with that, but I just wasn’t really interested or invested in American politics. I’m Swedish myself, and you should really shouldn’t even—right?
I just felt like that was not the environment that I wanted to be in. There were many other things as well, but it just felt like suddenly I could easily step away from this and do something else, and I wouldn’t even feel bad about that.
So you’re saying we can thank Trump for ladybird? Got it.
We’ll put that—that’s the title.
You very much clip it and ship it, boys. He’s building a browser.
Okay, the best browser. The best one I know of.
Right, okay. Okay, but on a kind of a, I guess maybe an equally kind of light-hearted note, if there was one browser feature that you could just take out back and Old Yeller, which one would it be and why?
Oh my goodness, JavaScript eval probably.
Oh, good answer. Good answer. I thought you were going to say with, but eval is also pretty good. But with has been deprecated, though it’s still alive.
And with, like once you implement with, then you’re good. But eval just keeps finding new ways to screw you over. You think that you have some great JavaScript engine optimization that you’re cooking up, and everything is looking great, and then somebody says, “Well, what about eval?”
Then it turns out that there’s some stupid way to add a new var if you just eval at the wrong place, and then if you add that new var, then it breaks everything that you thought you were going to do. Yeah, eval is a constant source of not fun. So yeah, probably get rid of that one.
Do I have to come up with more or is there—
If you have one that you’re just really jonesing about, you can. If not, I want to do the inverse, which is what is your favorite feature—the one that you implemented or part of it or saw it happen that just was like, “this is the best part”?
It’s got to be bolded text, right? That’s how the whole thing started.
Oh my goodness. We can put bold text on the screen. It’s just incredible. Started with a slash or a bracket B, ended with the browser.
I think my favorite feature might be Flex layout, because I learned web development in the 90s. When CSS first came out, and like Netscape 3 or whatever shipped with CSS, I couldn’t get my head around it.
It felt weird and clunky, but I eventually understood how it worked. When Flex layout came out, I thought, wow, this is how it should be. It made so much more sense to me because I was used to making GUI apps with Visual Basic and stuff like that.
It just felt like this is a better way to do GUI apps, and finally, CSS is amazing. I always had a soft spot for Flex.
If I had to pick one, I like this follow-up question too, which is the feature you wish that browsers added the most or what spec thing are you just like, can you please add this?
It just means more work, TJ. I’m not—does he wish for more work upon himself?
Tailwind natively in the browser?
Yeah, that’s funny. I talked with Adam a while back, asking him like what would that look like if we did Tailwind natively in the browser? None of us could figure it out.
But there you go.
Well, you say it would just be more work. My favorite type of feature is any new feature that allows us to avoid work. So whenever you have users doing something in JavaScript that we could just do in the browser instead, I think that’s generally sweet.
The big suck for many years was like JavaScript scroll handlers, right? You would handle the scroll event to do something like move something around before position fixed was a thing. For example, people would do that in the scroll handler, and like it was super janky.
Then position fixed became a thing, or position sticky for that matter. Just taking sort of those annoying poor performance patterns that people do in JavaScript and turning them into browser features, I just like those.
CSS animations, I guess, was a big one that just turned out pretty sweet. Anything where we can do the thing for you, I think, is nice.
It’s also the source of a lot of complexity in the platform because nobody ever agrees on what we should do for you. So we just end up doing way more things for you than maybe we should.
Everybody has that pet thing that they want CSS to do, you know? But yeah, that’s just nice—let us do the difficult stuff in the browser.
So there’s an old saying which is, “Whatever the current year is, this is the year of the Linux desktop.” It’s been going on for, I don’t know, a decade at this point. It’s obviously a funny trope that we all say all the time.
But there’s also one that kind of has it with browsers, which is, “This is the year of web assembly.” Is this actually like—are we actually living in the year of web assembly? Is it really ever going to happen, or is it always going to be, “This is the year of web assembly,” but there’s only like 10 people actually using it?
Oh, that’s a good question. I think we might already be living in the age of web assembly because there are already really cool tools built on it, like Figma for example.
It doesn’t make a lot of noise about itself; it just kind of works. That’s how I would like the age of web assembly to be—that it’s not something that like, “Oh, this website powered by web assembly.”
It would just be suddenly you have all this functionality that seems like it belongs in a native app, but it just works. I get the impression that a lot of websites have started just using web assembly and not making a big deal about it.
We’ve certainly discovered that when we built ladybird that this website needs web assembly and we’re not doing this correctly. I think we might have just sneakily entered the year of web assembly without fanfare.
Okay, because generally, what I see is that a lot of people do not reach for web assembly first. I cannot think of a single boot camp person that comes out that doesn’t say like, “React felt solid”—something like that, right?
It’s like this very specific way in which you build a modern app. I don’t hear anybody being like, “Oh, web assembly is actually the way you want to build a modern app.” That’s kind of what I meant by that—that it is seemingly for large projects like Figma, I think it makes sense.
I would assume Dingboard, I’m not sure if it makes sense, but it uses it anyway. There are a few places that use it, and I just don’t, you know—maybe I am mistaken because I’m not the one building the browser, so I actually don’t know the extent to which web assembly is being used.
So you’re thinking of like the year of web assembly means that now we’re building entire web apps in web assembly and screw everything else, yeah. It’s like in the sense that you no longer need to be held to the same standards that we were because right now, it’s just like you have to JavaScript all the things.
Maybe that’s just not a world you have to live in. I do like the idea of single-language programs, meaning that I could write my back end in C++ and I could write my front end in C++, and I could just assemble it down.
I actually just have that single-language kind of thing because that’s the benefit of, say, TypeScript or that’s the benefit of all this stuff that they always talk about, which is you have one definition for a thing, and it works uniformly.
I don’t know that we’re anywhere near that. I think the usual suspects that come up whenever people talk about this is, “Well, what about accessibility? What about selecting text?” Classic selecting text problem, right?
You’re essentially trying to go back to Adobe Flash, right? All roads lead to Adobe Flash. Do we want to go back there?
It was pretty sick. ActionScript was the best internet language of all time. Yeah, I was just watching Home Star Runner the other day, thinking Flash.
I don’t know if you guys are old enough for that.
Okay.
There has been some attempt to spec a web assembly-centric continuation or evolution of the web platform, but I don’t think that has gone anywhere. There was an effort by Ian Hickson, who was the original author of the web and the HTML5 specification.
One of the things he worked on in recent years was, like, what would the web platform look like if it was WASM and the framebuffer, and that kind of thing. But I don’t think that ever really picked up enough interest that anybody went to try to do it.
I don’t know. I think web assembly, at least the way that it exists today, is going to be a very incremental thing that’s just added to enhance websites in little ways here and there. You will see the occasional huge app, but for the most part, it’s probably going to be little widgets and ads.
I may be wrong. I don’t know. I barely make any websites. You should know that people who work on browsers, we don’t know much about web development generally.
I’ve written, you know, hundreds of thousands of lines of HTML and JavaScript, but as you were saying earlier, they were all essentially like three-line files just to make a unit test for something.
This is the reason why we needed you guys back then and no one was there.
Right, well, I think this actually wraps up the questions. There were a couple of other questions, but we’re going to ignore them for now. Thank you, Andreas, for being on here. Thank you, TJ, for being the co-host.
Andreas, if there is anything you wish you could shill to the best of your abilities—anything you want people to go check out, any links you want added to the YouTube video or for Twitch or Twitter to know about?
No, not really. I can take this opportunity to shill your terminal coffee company. Have you purchased it?
Good answer. No, I don’t drink coffee.
Okay, that wasn’t an answer, though. That wasn’t yes or no. I mean, there’s no question where you have to sign that you drink coffee before you order it—just throwing it out there.
Right, no, I haven’t purchased or drank any of the coffee yet.
Oh, we have a secret surprise; we’ll tell it about you after. We’re not going to tell anybody. It’ll get announced in the next month or two, but it would be pretty funny to do the demo in ladybird if it’s possible. We’ll talk about it afterwards.
We should try that.
But I mean, since I’m shilling things, do go to ladybird.org if any of this is interesting to you because we are always onboarding new developers. People are becoming browser developers in ladybird every day, and it is a lot of fun.
Anybody can learn how to do it if you’ve been programming for a couple years. Ladybird.org, I am spamming the links now. I did do ladybird.org sponsors, but I’ll also do ladybird.org.
Yeah, right, and if you just want to hear about development, you can follow ladybird browser on X. If you want to hear even more about random things, you can follow me on X as well.
Oh, I think that’s a great, awesome thing. Do I remember that correctly?
Let me do that.
Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on. It was really fun.
Yeah, thanks for having me, guys.
All right, well, hey, don’t leave. We’re going to leave, and then we got to talk for a second.
Yeah, yeah.
Bye, goodbye everyone. Thanks for coming on this top-shelf episode. We’ll see you guys later.
Well, I haven’t quite done anything yet.
I know, but then we can end the recording so there’s not two minutes of you just clicking keyboard sounds at the end. Everybody, oh my gosh, the YouTube retention.