Don't forget that pretty much 100% of iOS users and a nontrivial percentage of Mac users are on Webkit/Safari. That's not to say Safari is really leading the pack on anything at all, but Google also hasn't led Apple by the nose on pretty much anything on the web in recent years.

Yup, the split is really Blink+WebKit. Gecko marketshare is tiny these days.

What's interesting is seeing a few non-Apple WebKit browsers pop up, like Orion (Kagi) and Epiphany.

Call me cynical, but I don't see Ladybird or Servo do much beyond making a splash. Browser engines take an incredible amount of dev hours to maintain. Ladybird is hot now, but what about in a decade? Hype doesn't last that long and at that point the money and a chunk of the dev interest will have dried up.

Blink and WebKit both have massive corporations championing them, so those engines do not run that risk.

> Blink and WebKit both have massive corporations championing them, so those engines do not run that risk.

There's always risk. IE/Edge also had a massive corporation championing it, until it didn't. The US DOJ also appears to be considering actively prevent Google from backing Chrome. Which could also do for Firefox given that it's revenue comes from the same source.

No doubt that wouldn't completely kill those engine given our reliance on them, but in those kind of circumstances we might welcome the existence of some simpler engines that are cheaper/easier to maintain.

I don't see the current US DoJ doing anything that harms Big Business and doesn't cater to the petulant whims of the current Presidential Administration.

Plenty of the petulant whims of the current Presidential Administration are harmful to big business.

Safari leads in many, many ways and is a fantastic browser. No one’s updated their priors from 5 years ago unfortunately.

Ladybird seems to be progressing at an impressive pace also, time will tell however if their choice of C++ will be a big problem or if modern ways of doing things are safe enough.

Their choice is actually Swift and by the time there's a stable release all the C++ code is intended to have been replaced.

Time will tell if that will be a big problem or if more mainstream ways of doing things are better for a project intended to run everywhere!

I remember they mentioning Swift a few months ago, but currently I don’t see any swift in their github repo, didn’t checked other branches besides main.

> all the C++ code is intended to have been replaced.

That is not their goal at all, I don't where you heard that. Swift is currently stalled due to some blockers listed on their issue tracker, but any usage of it will be in safety-critical areas first and not a complete rewrite of existing code.

Very excited for Ladybird and Servo. I wonder if a good thing that may emerge from this era of LLM code-support capabilities is that its more feasible to support alternative browser codebases even as they get into the multi-million lines of code.

They're announced they want to move to Swift to combat some of this.

Yep, but there was another post mentioning half a million lines of C++ code so far.

While the C++ interop in Swift seems sane with Clang being embedded I wonder how much time/energy they will have to actually move significant parts if it's so large already.

No they didn't. It's C++ because the primary author was most familiar with C++ and only allowed C++ in SerenityOS.

https://ladybird.org/#:~:text=The%20choice%20of%20language%2...

That was the answer I remember Andreas give in a update video to answer the "why not rust" question.

That doesn't really make sense to me either. Even if WebIDL is inheritance based, that is going to be processed automatically so you can easily use codegen to make the resulting interface nice in Rust, in a way that would be relatively difficult if you were hand-writing it.