Multiple independent implementations are crucial for the long-term health of the web platform, so we're trying to do our part! :)
It's really great that you're doing this work. This principle also applies to many other specs. I've implemented a few and found multiple issues with real-world impact.
The browsers may have been written to "work" / not crash over adhering strictly to the spec.
At least Chromium has integrated multiple different fuzzers into their regular development workflow and found lots of bugs even before going public.
That's a bit of a... non-sequitur. Imagine if you had tweeted "eggplants are my favorite vegetables", someone corrected you "actually they're fruits", and then you declared: "And thus demonstrated is the value of Twitter! Someone already made me a better-informed citizen in response to my tweet." This feels kind of similar.
This isn't to say what they're doing isn't valuable, or that there isn't value in having lots of implementations of a spec. Just saying that implication isn't there (yet) with this particular example.
I'm still working on Ladybird every day, and I also manage two full time engineers now, thanks to the generous sponsorships we got from Shopify & others last year. :)
If the hacking comes back some day, I'll be delighted, but just wanted to say thanks for the fact that we have such a wonderful backlog thanks to your long term efforts.
That said, I think those videos are a significant contributor to the project success. I hope they do not go away completely.
In fact, I think the videos are as important a contribution as the project itself. I remember seeing a quote once from a musician that said he was inspired by both the Beatles and The Rolling Stones. The Beatles showed him what a band could be. The Rolling Stones made him feel like he could do it too. I see that in Linux and Serenity. Your videos make me feel like I could solve any problem by just starting it and breaking it down into smaller, more solvable chunks. They are inspiration and I am not surprised SerenityOS has attracted people to contribute other ambitious aspects. The PDF browser, the GPU stack, and the RISC ports are examples of amazing projects in their own right. I think one of the reasons we see such ambitious contributions in such a young project is the inspiration provided by your leadership and the example set in those videos.
Regardless, thank you for the contribution so far. With the recent improvements to HTMLInputElement, I was able to use Ladybird to leave a comment on the OSnews site recently and it gave me a huge thrill.
Your overall pragmatism and no nonsense C++ style is something more developers should aim to replicate imho.
When I'm developing something, work or otherwise, I find that I often write my worst code when I'm writing something bottom-up i.e. designed, because it usually turns out that the user of that particular code has completely different needs, and the point of integration becomes a point of refactor. I think the top-down approach applied at the project level is much nicer because it allows you to _start from somewhere_ and then iteratively improve things.
That is not to say you shouldn't take precautions. In Ladybird, stuff like image decoding and webpage rendering/JS execution are isolated to their own processes, with OpenBSD style pledge/unveil sandboxing. They aren't perfect of course, but it allows for the kind of development that Ladybird has without much worry about those aspects.
This seems like a pure passion project: to return to the pleasure of building something just for the sake of it. Design and explore. Hack.
Not every endeavour has to become a product. As soon as you get users, you get obligations, and this tends to destroy these feelings.
E.g., myRect.style.x = '50px' will work in both Chrome and Firefox, even though SVG 1.1 doesn't allow for this because "x" isn't a presentation attribute (and only presentation attributes are supposed to have corresponding CSS properties).
Relevant to animations-- the fact that Chrome and Firefox allow most (all?) SVG attributes as css props lets the user do a nice end run around SVG animations. They can just treat the SVG objects as if they were HTML and use the web animations API to animate them.
It is slow. It is fragile. But it works. That alone is amazing given how young the project is and how they have written literally everything from scratch.
I am really looking forward to Ladybird maturing.
