This is just straight up awesome news: Ladybird (the web browser that grew out of the Serenity OS project) has brought in $310,000 so far during the month of June!
The lead developer (who, in the past, worked on Apple's Safari web browser) announced this massive funding milestone on Twitter and his YouTube channel:
The funding came in the form of 4 specific payments:
$100,000 from Shopify
$100,000 from Anonymous
$100,000 from Anonymous
$10,000 from Ohne-makler (a german company who hired Andreas Kling, on contract, to improve Ladybird's rendering of their website)
When asked what he planned to use this new capital for, replied simply, "Short answer: hire people to work on Ladybird 😎."
This is a massive win for the future of web browsing.
Recently, the majority of the web browser marketshare has been gobbled up by a single browser engine: Google's Chrome (aka "Blink"). Brave, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, and many others all rely upon this exact same engine, controlled primarily by Google.
The only major web browser to not utilize the Chrome engine being Mozilla's Firefox -- which accounts for less than 3% of the market (and is primarily funded by their primary competitor: Google).
Even if you count Firefox... that means there are only two web browsing engines in mainstream usage. And both of them have significant problems, often stemming from a combination of huge quantities of legacy code baggage combined with corporate priorities.
The Ladybird project is being developed from scratch. No legacy baggage.
And, what's more, it has no singular corporate master. Which means it can make decisions based on a combination of true web standards and the needs of the users.
Massive congratulations to Andreas Kling (and the rest of the Ladybird crew) for their absolutely stellar accomplishments. This gives me tremendous hope for the future of the web.
Copyright © 2023 by Bryan Lunduke. All rights reserved. The contents of this article are licensed under the terms of The Lunduke Content Usage License.
