ladybird VS Ferdi

A browser is not a web app, it doesn't have a strict separation of "frontend" and "backend" in the same sense that a web app would have; the lines are drawn quite differently. The rendering engine is never "just" the rendering engine; you can't abstract or swap it without tremendous effort.

If you'd like to learn more about how a web browser project would organize its internal architecture, but are discouraged by the complexity of Chromium, Firefox, etc. I'd recommend source diving Ladybird (https://github.com/SerenityOS/ladybird), NetSurf (https://www.netsurf-browser.org/), or Dillo (https://www.dillo.org/).

I'd love to see a stable version of a brand new web browser, not based on Blink or Gecko, such as Ladybird or Flow Browser. Competition is a good thing.

note, native Windows is not currently supported:

https://github.com/SerenityOS/ladybird/issues/113

Google is dominating, pushing through Android and via Googles-Webservices and Microsoft is using it now. A reason to worry because developing new web-engine requires an big effort. For instance Microsoft only allows usage of Microsoft Teams Web with a webbrowser based upon Blink. So were back in 2002?

WebKit features also WebKit2Gtk (Epiphany) and Qt5-webkit (Otter) with native integration. They use the native toolkits, which is an advantage! Interaction with the open-source community around WebKit seems rather good and the engine is integrated by others. Gecko seem not to be integrated by others, but by forks only? You remember when Chrome was considered slick and fast? Originally Google used the native toolkit on every platform but know they use an own solution on every platform, like Firefox.

Maybe there is a new kid on the block:

https://github.com/SerenityOS/ladybird

Funny you should ask: https://github.com/SerenityOS/ladybird

I've not heard of Ladybird before. True, it's a free and open browser engine and a very interesting project!

It's subscription priced now...? Maybe try Ferdi instead...? Same App but without subscriptions. https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi

Suggesting this one must be cheating https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi

This probably was already a problem in Ferdi. There is/was an issue on github https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi/issues/1458

I use Ferdi to multiplex my messaging apps and have them all in one place. It's basically a glorified web browser that only opens iframes to specific pages (eg: discord). In this environment Discord has some interesting behavior where the menu bar at the top left is very slow to respond, and despite large window sizes (and refreshing at these large window sizes) the screen always seems to be in a single column layout, never showing the chat messages + channel list at the same time.

I just noticed the getferdi.com website is up again including a video, link to the code etc.

Then you can use https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi, which is a unrestricted Fork of Franz

Ferdi (Website, GitHub): Free fork of Franz. Announced on June 11, 2022 that "There will be no further updates to Ferdi. 🏄‍♂️" but that tweet is now deleted and the repo is updating again... But they've disabled the issue tracker behind a $9/month paywall.

I see that the repo is back (https://github.com/getferdi/ferdi)