This Month in Ladybird – October 2025
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supportive
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positive
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Key topics
The Ladybird browser project updates its progress, sparking discussion on its development, usability, and potential impact, with users expressing both enthusiasm and concerns about its safety and readiness.
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Very active discussionFirst comment
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45
Day 1
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Based on 49 loaded comments
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- 01Story posted
Nov 4, 2025 at 6:52 AM EST
23 days ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Nov 4, 2025 at 7:21 AM EST
30m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
45 comments in Day 1
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Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Nov 5, 2025 at 1:37 PM EST
21 days ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
This is because of the lack of Widevine CDM, and the majority of people wanting to stream stuff using services like Tidal, Netflix and Spotify.
They will also want to use a single browser for everything, which in practice means Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari.
Ladybird will very likely not have access to Widevine, because of the cost, requirements, and Google as gatekeeper. Some developers of small opensource Chromium/Electron based browsers also earlier tried and Google simply said no.
And even if they have reverse engineered the CDM extension (which will make Widevine work, not unlike a small hack/workaround with regard to Chromium and Chromium forks) it will not work because all browsers using Widevine on those two platforms require something called VMP (Verified Media Path) which is, as far as I understand, a certificate and verification library supplied by Widevine embedded within the browser.
Without VMP embedded in the browser streaming from popular commercial providers such as Netflix will not work on Windows and MacOS, even when the Widevine extension is in fact active.
Believe me, I checked.
IMO all of this is not only set in motion to (try to) protect from piracy, but also to kill any serious competition from small parties like LadyBird, and to keep the browser market firmly in the hands of the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google. Because who will use a browser in 2025 unable to stream content, or without hacks at 720p maximum? (looking at you, Brave and Netflix)
This also means that browsers like Brave, Vivaldi and Firefox are in fact not true opensource browsers because their respective public repositories do not contain the assets needed for VMP signing.
On another note, at this moment the majority of people should be glad that browsers with corporate backing and enough income like Brave (whatever you might think of Brendan Eich's ideas), Vivaldi and Firefox exist because without them you would have no serious choice on Windows or MacOS at all.
is that really so hard?
DRM is not a good thing
I think many people will rather just use the 1 thing that does everything perfectly well, rather than switch back and forth between two browsers because one is slightly better "most of the time" but also completely unusable some of the time.
For me, I am thrilled to be able to make Ladybird my main browser eventually, and consume my streaming in other apps and browsers.
If so, why would Google allow this but not for other OSS browsers?
Which is not a big deal when you are watching on a laptop screen.or via a projector.
It does, but it's L3-only (software-based), not L1 (hardware-based) [0]. Streaming providers can then decide which content they'll let you access depending on the level. Speaking from experience, some providers work perfectly (full HD content with no issues), others only give you a really low-resolution stream, and others refuse to work entirely.
> If so, why would Google allow this but not for other OSS browsers?
When EME [1] was first released, Firefox had ~10% market share, and it would look pretty bad for Google to exclude another major browser maker. Smaller browsers don't have the political clout necessary to convince Google to give them access.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widevine#Architecture
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encrypted_Media_Extensions
Well, there's a niche.
Personally I have zero interest in Netflix and Spotify and I don't even know what Tidal is.
people who are not interested in these things, or can use separate systems for those things, are a viable niche for a pure-OSS distribution of Ladybird
Am I in the minority here? Do we have stats on what the breakdown of streaming traffic is by Mobile / TV / Desktop?
Also I believe a lot of households have a single TV and the rest of the household use a laptop to stream from anywhere in the house.
It's very possible it's a workaround to the streaming on PC situation though.
Without EME, we'd still be stuck with Silverlight or ActiveX DRM in these browsers. There are browsers without Widevine that stream just fine; they use FairPlay and PlayReady instead. The current situation is still a significant improvement over the days when "free" web browsers were still a thing.
This isn't a web browser problem, it's a video streaming problem. As it turns out, the vast majority of people care more about streaming Netflix than they do about software freedom.
The minority that wants a truly open browser can buy DVDs and Blurays, or pirate the content they want to stream.
If Ladybird is willing to agree to the right terms and sign the right paperwork, I'm sure they'd get Widevine support eventually, but obviously they wouldn't be able to publish the source code for any of it.
Seems though as if the WPT score is not super meaningful in measuring actual usability. The growth of passed tests seems suspiciously uniform across browsers, so I guess it has more to do with new passing tests being added and less with failing tests that got fixed.
Fixing a few rendering issues could fix all of the tests that depend on correct rendering but break, so I think the rate at which tests are fixed makes a lot of sense.
https://wpt.fyi/results shows that even the big players have room for improvement, but also has a nice breakdown of all the different kinds of tests that make up the score.
They fixed ~10k tests, but indeed this month is a bit of an exception as there were lots of new tests added.
I fear it’s ultimately going to be the most promising, least safe browser to use.
But hey, I want to be proven wrong, so I still gave them some money…
That's not to say it isn't realistic, but it's definitely going to be interesting.
I also think Swift will bring in more contributors
Why are you worried? Isn't the development journey the whole raison d'être of Ladybird?
I'm super excited to see this as an alternative to the mainstream browsers. It's also interesting how quickly it pulled in-front of projects such as servo that have been going since 2021 and received a lot of backing over that period [3].
[1] https://ladybird.org/#sponsors
Ladybird might be the next Opera but without reusing the Blink engine making it a Chromium clone. And, OFC, fully libre.
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