He did not even use the C++ standard library, when he says "from scratch" it includes his own string class, for better or worse, which is fine since it's "just for fun", "to learn" etc. And just when you think a library and an OS are crazy, he announced a browser and a JavaScript engine on top. Then a JIT compiler, then Jakt, their own novel programming language, because neither C++ nor Rust is what makes him perfectly happy.

More than his expertise I admire his modesty and kindness - unlike Linus etc. he is not full of himself, and each of his videos gives lots of credit name by name of who did what. A perfect role model for open source.

Also, you would think that having to implement EVERYTHING themselves ( they are making their own image decoders as an example -- inclding SVG ) would slow them down. However, as it is written in a mono-repo from soup to nuts, this allows them to very rapidly add support throughout the stack. They do not have any of the endless conversation and arguing that happens between components in Open Source. They do not have to work around things missing upstream. If they need something, they add it.

Considering the vast amount of exploits that continually comes out of media decoders everywhere, this basically guarantees I will never ever use this browser.

It’s like crypto, you have to be very deliberate with your choices, and it’s generally ill-advised to roll your own.

Otherwise how would new/better stuff ever get built?!

> Otherwise how would new/better stuff ever get built?!

The problem here is that people are salivating to use this as their daily driver. When WireGuard was still in development, everyone got told in very strong terms to not use it in any setting that required actual security.

Browsing the web at large is sort-of hostile by default.

Ladybird is a great project, and I hope it keeps developing, but any user that thinks their media decode libraries will be bulletproof libs free of vulnerabilities are nuts.

Perhaps a few devs have nowhere near the required escape velocity to create vulnerabilities before they can be fixed, nor the pressure of PMs to ship substandard code?

Sure. And its a high bar to challenge the same or better vulnerability profile that the established players have. But a "small scrappy team" which is capable of doing everything this team has done certainly garners a lot of confidence that the bar is possible.

Edit: Seems like it's using OpenBSD's pledge API? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpRw6KQnY0k&t=8107s

There would be absolutely nothing sacrificed by using open source, well-tested libs for image decode.

Don’t get me wrong, how far they’ve gotten is very laudable and as a educational exercise it is really cool, but it starts being a pretty massive risk if users start using this as a daily driver.

Small scrappy team writing simple and consice code from scratch is likely to produce fewer bugs than enterprisey monstrosities.

Just because something is widely used doesn't mean it's more secure (example: libwebp). The security issues tend to happen mostly when creating optimizations that bypass the "obviously secure" way to do things, but rely on an internal state that gets broken by another optimization down the line. This is way less frequent in "smaller" projects, just because they didn't need to go through that round of optimizations yet.

For this question specifically, tho, I think Ladybird is extremely interesting in terms of creating a security-focuses C++ project. Between the constant fuzzing that each part of Ladybird already goes under (courtesy of the OSS-Fuzz initiative), the first-class citizenship of process separation for the different features of the browser, the modern C++ used in Ladybird (that prevents a lot of the issues cropping up in commonly used media decoding libraries), the overall focus on accuracy over performance in library implementations, and the compiler-level sanitatization utils (UBSAN, ASAN) that are enabled-by-default, I think it's less likely that an critical security-impacting bug would exists in Ladybird's .ico support than in Webkit's for example.

(At PARC we avoided) putting any externally controlled system, in- house or out, on one's critical path. ... Thus, virtually all the PARC hardware ... and software ... were completely built inhouse by these few dozen researchers.

This sounds disastrous, (because) in programming there is a widespread first order theory that one shouldn't build one's own tools, languages, and especially operating systems. This is true --- an incredible amount of time and energy has gone down these ratholes. On the second hand, if you can build your own tools, languages, and operating systems you absolutely should because the leverage that can be obtained (and often the time not wasted in trying to fix other people's not quite right tools) can be incredible.

1. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf

One more reason to start from scratch: to get the functionality you want from an existing offering, you would also have to include a lot of other stuff you don't need, resulting in unnecessary complexity and resource consumption.

For Ardour, we feel entirely free to just bring an upstream library into our source tree if we need to. And we also have our dependency stack builder that configures and occasionally patches upstream libraries to be just the way we need them. We do not wait for upstream adoption of our patches.

Most recently, for example, we became aware of impending moves by various Linux distros to remove GTK2, which we rely on. Even though we don't support distro builds, we want Linux maintainers to still be able to build the software, so we just merged GTK2 into our source tree.

This idea that using a 3rd party library becomes some sort of constraint is very, very far from reflecting universal truth. If we need to hack a 3rd party lib to make it do what we need, we just do it. Meanwhile, we get all the benefits of that lib. Ardour depends on about 86 libraries - we would be insane to rewrite all that functionality from scratch.

I can't imagine how it can be for worse; the standard C++ string library is awful. It makes perfect sense that a super-talented C++ dev would make something better if they have the energy and time.

TBH Jakt defaults to reference counting, which makes it compete more with Swift and Go rather than C/C++/Rust.

That being said I've seen a few people here suggest it's easier to use rust's Rc and Box for everything and treat it like Haskell or Scala. So it might not be so different in practice.

(Though to be fair reference counting can be considered a rather rudimentary way of doing garbage collection.)

Would love to read more details about this, or have a link to a video where he describes and follows the process.

It’s still really impressive but he is not the new kid in town when we talk about developing browsers.

Divide and conquer for the win!

Ladybird also comes with their LibJS runtime, which has good coverage of the JS standards and even manages to implement some new features before the big browsers all get to it.

Ladybird's approach has been to start with a somewhat naive implementation of features, then choose popular websites and apps and just continuously iterate to make them gradually look better, by fixing the parts that stand out. This pragmatic approach means that their supported feature set, while nowhere near 100%, can decently render 90% of websites due to being aligned with the most commonly used features.

Servo themselves say they only pass 55.8% of tests[1]. This thread[2] says Servo doesn't support SVG[2] as of Nov 2022.

[1] https://wpt.servo.org/

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/browsers/comments/z2d7pr/servo_base...

Here's Wikipedia: https://i.imgur.com/IshNWU2.png

Ladybird implements far more web technologies than more well-funded, longer-running alternative browser projects.

For the mainstream browser engines, yes, but if you're starting a browser from scratch the amount of stuff you have to implement is massive and cannot be implemented in the span of even a couple of years.