I hope they both persevere, we need more browser engine competition.
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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If you're leaving firefox for ideological reasons you may want to also avoid Ladybird. The dev had a public freakout over the idea that women exist.
the dev is a recovered addict and ex-convict who took up os development to be able to focus on something other than the world around him, in a country where the pronouns debate barely exists. him initially not accepting a documentation change from an unknown contributor that only changes pronouns does not qualify as a public freakout.
Edit: not to mention, this has been fixed. read the history of the documents touched by the offending PR and you will see that they were changed years ago.
All code is political, especially foss code. If he had accepted the change, even after initially being skeptical, no one would care. But he picked a side in the dumb culture war and stuck with it.
but... he did. the documentation has all been changed to use second-person pronouns for user actions. that was years ago. the most rudimentary checks of the git history shows this. yet people are still going at him for it.
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Stop spreading this nonsense. He made ONE comment that made it clear he is not accepting contributions for political reason from people not part of the project.
The "freakout" was entirely external.
At this point I'm going to personally donate to Ladybird because you people have been spreading this bullshit for months
Source?
It looks more like the dev felt the PR being introduced was purely for political reasons, which he disliked. I'm not saying I agree with the dev, but you've stated he "had a public freakout over the idea that women exist" and that doesn't appear to be the case here.
Consider that claims like yours, and the responses to his rejection of the PR, probably only strengthened his belief of the PR's intent.
I don't think Ladybird can compete with the other browsers with that speed.
Oh and I still wonder why they chose Swift over all the other compiled languages to this day. Was OOP really that crucial?
I'm waiting for Servo tbh.
Primeagen interviewed the creator, who basically said they chose swift because it was fun. Other languages they tried were less fun.
As a professional dev (okay, okay, forgot where I was, aren’t we all) I approve of this reasoning
Swift is great! The guy who made Rust worked on Swift for 3-ish years, so there's a fair amount of overlap in interest between the two. Those were the two main contenders, and I guess OOP was the deciding factor.
I'm waiting for whichever is ready first.
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servo is written in rust so gotta be better :>>>
Unfortunately, the lead developer of Ladybird, Andreas Kling, has engaged in transphobia and enforced misogynistic language in his previous project's documentation, SerenityOS. This post documents and links to multiple examples: https://toot.cat/@EveHasWords/114081930465217200
I followed the links to see what he actually wrote. There's nothing transphobic or misogynistic about it.
If you are referring to some other incident, then please link it so we can see for ourselves.
https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814#issuecomment-830793992
Really?
This screams "women not wanted" to me
Really?
A better fix would be to remove the pronoun entirely.
To prevent this, remove
anonfrom thewheelgroup and the user will no longer be able to run/bin/su.
But honestly, it doesn't matter at all.
Yes, I'm sure that PR would have been accepted instead /s
But you're right, it doesn't matter at all, the reasonable thing to do would have been for the guy to spend 3 seconds clicking the accept and merge button, or 6 seconds making your change. instead he wrote a comment stating that inclusive language has no place in his project
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I really can't figure out if you are trolling or not.
nah. it may not be a huge deal (esp. if you're male) and "screaming" might be exaggerating it, but "keep personal politics out of code" is classic "I consider your existence political".
I'm happy to see if the guy's politics has changed in the years since this happened, and I don't know if their involvement in the project is worthy of a boycott, but those are personal choices (and the relevant comment was even helpfully linked).
Follow the link. He denied a pull request for gender neutral language in documentation, calling it "personal politics." https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/pull/6814#issuecomment-830793992
In other words, Andreas insists the OS developer be referred to as "he/him" instead of not assuming gender. Not only that, he's doubling down. It's textbook misogyny. Fuck him.
"Personal politics" is a vague phrase that generally just means someone's views and priorities. There is nothing pejorative about it, nor in the way he used it.
In other words, Andreas insists the OS developer be referred to as “he/him” instead of not assuming gender.
The build instructions in question follow English language conventions that have existed for hundreds of years (and are shared by more than few other languages). All he did was decline someone's proposed change that would have applied a very new convention regarding pronouns for a hypothetical person. This is not the same as insisting that anyone refer to anyone else in a particular way.
It's also not unreasonable. We can ask people to adopt new conventions, but we don't get to expect or demand it.
Change to a language takes time.
It’s textbook misogyny.
No, it is not.
It’s textbook misogyny.
No, it is not.
Yes, it is.
It's sexist when you assume someone is a man because they're a doctor. It's sexist when you assume someone is a woman because they're a nurse. And it's sexist when you assume someone is a man because they're an OS developer.
When you continue insisting that the OS developer be a man, even though it's been clarified to you that they just as well may not be, that's when your behavior crosses the line to misogynistic.
It isn't a fucking "convention" to push women down by insinuating they're not welcome in your profession, and it's not a "new convention" to fucking avoid doing that.
None of what you claim was done in the document being discussed.
It isn’t a fucking “convention” to push women down
No, but choosing either the male or female pronoun when writing about a hypothetical person has been the convention for a long time, and using the male one has been the usual default for far longer than any of us has been alive. It's not to push women down; it's a grammar compromise, and is not exclusive English.
You are misunderstanding the language as it was used, and you have jumped to a false conclusion that seems to make you so angry that you think it's okay to publicly vilify someone... for your own mistake.
I hope things get better for you.
Good day.
a very new convention regarding pronouns
Singular they is old. It may be newer than the gender neutral he, but its not new
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pronouns are really nothing new. he/him has meant a male person for hundreds of years, didn't it?
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Annoying that you're being downvoted, you are absolutely correct. We should not support Ladybird as long as Andreas is involved.
Do what you want, but IMO that's a really lame reason to hate on a software project. Evaluate the software on its merits, not the merits of random people associated with it.
When you donate to a software project, you're not giving money to some inanimate concept. You're giving it to the developers, the "random people associated with it."
Kling's actions are harmful, and contribute to an open source environment less welcoming to ~4 billion people. I don't want to reward that. Unless you do, you would be better off putting your support elsewhere, too.
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Servo will succeed.
Considering the road Firefox is going down, I am very happy for any alternative, so I'm looking forward to both of these. But I've also been playing around with the Gemini protocol, which looks really neat, although it's very simple.
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Ladybird seems to be C++, I don't really see a new project written in a language that is that horrible to use attracting a lot of contributors in the long term.
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