from Hacker News

Understanding Complexity Like an Engineer – The Case of the Ladybird Browser

by awesomekling on 2/12/24, 8:58 AM with 55 comments

• by ofrzeta on 2/12/24, 2:50 PM

  Related (chat with Andreas Kling about SerenityOS and Ladybird):

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36620450

  However I don't understand why many people are longing for Ladybird as another free browser. There are already some and Firefox is losing marketshare every day. So please do use it.

  Ok, I guess Mozilla Foundation's running the Firefox project is not to everyones liking, so that would be a valid reason. But not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

  Firefox is a great browser and the only reason I sometimes use Chrome is that more and more sites require Chrome (e.g. Teams).

• by robador on 2/12/24, 6:17 PM

  > As an example, the recently launched website for Dialogic requires about 700 JavaScript-modules, and has about 19.000 lines of code of its own. There is however a staggering amount of complexity hiding beneath: just this website alone depends on (potentially) another 1.3 million (!) lines of code in modules it uses.

  This is fine.

  Seriously though, that's insane.

• by andrewstuart on 2/12/24, 5:54 PM

  I put it to you that the web browser and the operating system are the two most sophisticated applications ever built.

  No doubt it’s possible to build a simple web browser that gets some 50% of the job done and could serviceabley display some websites.

  However there would a very very long tail of detail and nuance and edge cases that would be very very hard to catch up.

  This is why you should use Firefox and we should never lose Firefox.

  If you don’t follow it closely, the pace of new feature development in web browsers is stunning. There is a huge amount of new stuff going in constantly.

  I’m not knocking this project….. developers can build whatever they like. I’m just observing that the web browser is already the Pyramids of Giza or some other such gigantic human endeavor.

• by yogorenapan on 2/12/24, 2:23 PM

  Looking at the screenshots, it’s crazy good. I only frequent 5-6 sites on a daily basis; will actually daily drive LadyBird if at least 3 work

• by fifilura on 2/12/24, 5:32 PM

  He was lucky that the fix was to disable the functionality.

  More likely would have been that it was non-compliant but chrome renders it anyway.

  And from there starts the work of figuring out how exactly to make it bug-compliant with Chrome.

• by epgui on 2/12/24, 5:18 PM

  Very cool project, but this article isn’t really about complexity, and complexity makes a background appearance at best.

• by tantalor on 2/12/24, 5:54 PM

  Engineers don't do stuff for fun, they do it for money.