Ladybird Passes the Apple 90% Threshold on Web-Platform-Tests

https://github.com/mozilla-firefox/firefox

https://github.com/chromium/chromium

https://gitlab.com/verso-browser/verso/

Seemed to have fairly frequent commits but they abruptly spotted 3 months ago.

https://gitlab.com/verso-browser/verso/-/commits/main?ref_ty...

Chrome has the best compliance with standards of any of the big three (see wpt.fyi) - which is not surprising, because they also have the most engineering time dedicated to their browser, and the most people working on standards.

These bodies require buy in from multiple vendors, but generally not unanimity. That said, browsers can and do ship things which haven't been standardized (e.g. WebUSB, which is still only a draft because only Chrome wants to ship it). In a lot of cases this pretty much has to happen pre-standardization, because it is difficult to come up with a good standard from the ivory tower with no contact with actual use. Chrome is unusually good about working in public to develop specifications for such features even when other browsers aren't currently interested in shipping them.

I don't know what problem you think this proposal would solve.

Shopify, CloudFlare, and others.

And how could ladybird attract so many sponsors for such a project? Why wouldn't they fund Firefox instead if they want to achieve some diversity in browser engine field?

I'm curious, not skeptical.

Do I need accelerometer support to watch a full screen video in landscape on YouTube? That’s probably a big deal for anyone who doesn’t use the app, for example.

Just because consumers are unaware that a problem exist doesn't mean they wouldn't care if they knew.

Consumers in a general sense don't know much of how the world works - safe radiation exposure, food safety, drug dosing thermodynamics, household electrical wiring, airborne particulate, airline maintenance...

This is why we have a government regulatory regime to protect them. The government has to strong arm companies out of bad behavior, because consumers do not understand.

Some people who have Apple and Google stock will voice opinion against regulation. Or people who really love their devices and don't understand the harms.

But the fact is that this Titanic command of markets damages the robustness of the economy. Google and Apple are doing massive harm.

Capitalism should be hard. It should be a treadmill. You shouldn't be able to coast.

We like the market. We like evolutionary pressure. Giants this large, however, are an ecological hack that get to escape the same algorithm we subject every other company to. They created an artificial and illegal means to prevent themselves from facing competition. They're an invasive species picking on ecosystems that literally cannot fight back.

It's a good thing that new companies can (or could) threaten old companies. It's a renewing forest fire, a de-ossification. It rewards innovation capital rather than institutions.

Apple and Google have found a way to forever avoid this by wedging themselves in as "owners of mobile computing". These two companies own it. Period. You don't. Consumers don't. No other company can even enter into the arena. You play by their rules.

Antitrust enforcement has never been more needed. We've had two decades of devices we really only rent and don't own. Devices that strangle consumer control over how we spend our time and money.

If America doesn't do it, foreign countries seeking sovereignty should.

As such, 90% test pass rate but low usability simply means that 10% of the tests cover a lot of very visible usability features that ladybird hasn't addressed yet.

there by definition is no vendor lock-in by forking an open-source engine. The worst case is the original maintainers going evil tomorrow and you being on your own, which is no worse than starting from scratch, except you saved yourself some ten million odd lines of mindless spec implementation in the case of a browser.

It’s that Chrome and V8’s implementation has grown to match resourcing. You probably can’t maintain a fork of their engine long-term without Google level funding.

It's doable, but not easy especially when the train engine is being stuffed with high-octane fuel by Google's resources.

They changed course.

However, a jump like that means precisely and exactly what I said it means; very suddenly, that metric became much more important to the team. It is written straight into the graph.

A large number of encoding-related tests that were probably relatively easy to fix in bulk is certainly a plausible explanation.

A lot of people are imputing to me assumptions that they are bringing to my post, such as assuming that such improvements must be fake or bad or somehow otherwise cheating. Nope. Moreover, if you are thinking that, don't take it up with me, go take it up with the graph directly. It's not my graph. I'm just amused at the spectacular demonstration of Goodhart's Law.

Are the commentators who think I'm being critical of the Ladybird project going to defend their implicit proposition that the browser got twice as good in whatever period that graph is in, a week or a month or whatever? Of course that's not the case.