Considering that the two projects funded by Cloudflare are headed by known bigots (Andreas Kling and DHH), it makes me distrust Cloudflare even further.
Can you elaborate on why they are bigots? Im interested.
Both developers have been actively hostile to DEI initiatives, and at least on the case of DHH, also coddling with ultranationalism viewpoints.
On Kling: hyperborea.org/reviews/softwar…
On DHH: tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-c…
How can there be so many pieces of shit working in tech? It baffles me. The space were everything is in constant motion and “innovation” has this sorts of people being vocal about their fascism.
Easy money, easy power, easy delusions of grandeur I’m guessing. Pick any two of three.
You are not much challenging the status quo by partnering up with the NSA.
i give them the benefit of the doubt, as stated on their website:
All sponsorships are in the form of unrestricted donations. Board seats and other forms of influence are not for sale.
AIPAC doesnt partner up with politicians. They just give them. “uNrEsTrIcTeD dOnAtIoNs”.
Is there evidence or something to support your assertion that Cloudflare = NSA?
Even if Cloudflare = NSA, there no evidence to support your parallel. If the Ladybird team does something suspicious or hostile to the interests of its users - please let us know.
Edward fucking Snowden and the Patriot Act.
Cloudflare is not authorized to disclose that they are.
They decrypt all traffic going through them for deep packet analysis. It would be dumb of the US not to make use of that. Look at Palantir. Or the recent Azure fiasco with the Unit 8200.
It is naive to trust any US-based service. The devil’s advocate in me just wanted to hear why you believe what you do, so thanks for that.
My angle was mostly to point out that Ladybird hasn’t done anything obviously morally bankrupt like the politicians you pointed out - the only detracting factors to me about the project are 1) that the nonprofit is based in the US 2) that it’s not written in Rust.
Of course, it’s worth being suspicious of a web browser of all things. I just see Cloudflare’s contribution in a neutral light given Cloudflare’s general strategy towards PR and the fact that the Ladybird browser is likely going to be a very niche product - and they aren’t even focusing on Windows support for the foreseeable future.
Do I trust Ladybird more than Mozilla? Only very slightly, but the bar is pretty low - and it’s not blind trust.
As the top comment on the Hacker News thread notes,
Cloudflare clearly wants to move us to a future where only approved browsers are allowed to access the web… an independent open source web browser is obviously against that ethos.
I’m suspicious on that basis alone.
Giving how apple adjacent the project is I have never had much faith in it being able to truly become an alternative to firefox.
Apple adjacent?
You go to the website and the images promoting the browser are using apple. The project is being developed only for macOS and linux. They decided to change the programming language to swift.
To many signs that the devs are appleheads and I get the feeling that the main target is apple, linux second and windows completely out of the box (states by devs themselves). Myself personally, not a fan on apple, I don’t have that kind of money to buy hardware and I don’t see any advantages on doing so.
It is being rewritten using swift
I’m hyped as long as Ladybird supports uBlock Origin; hoping it’s technically feasible.
When it incorporates something like TreeStyleTab, I’ll look into it, horizontal tab bars are just silly - most have widescreen displays and content is usually in narrow columns.
I guess I won’t be using it then. 🤷♂️
Really hoping this project goes well and has a strong start.
Without a Windows release it will remain a niche browser even if by chance it becomes the most used on macOS, GNU+Linux and other Unix-like OSes.
windows browsers are all niche when you introduce anything to the mobile market. An android / iOS ladybird browser would crush it
As far as I know, there still aren’t any non-WebKit engines for iOS, even though the possibility is theoretically there as of 17.4… (It may need to be EU-only? I’m not clear on that part.)
ew what
deleted by creator
I’m out of the loop, I thought cloud flair was a good company
Good for them. I like to keep the free and open browser that works, free and running… So I donate a little to Firefox and Thunderbird, every so often.
Cloudflare and “challenging the status quo” in the same phrase ?
Well, the browser status quo. I guess they want their own Chrome.
Its sponsorship only of an open source browser, with no telemetry, advertising, crypto, etc, etc built in.
Sponsors get listed as sponsors, thats it.
For now
So when they do just fork it?
I likely won’t touch it anyway, but it is fully open source, so it can be forked easily. With the transition to Swift I suspect there would be plenty of devs who could take things forward if they wanted to.
If you look at history, Google did the opposite with Chrome, they forked an open source browser and turned it into the world’s most used.
I guess we’ll see.Thats google though, with the added ability to put it direct into an extremely common OS (Android). With ladybird, you’ve got an apparent neocon and 3 years currently planned for a GA release (2028). Its future is already pretty uncertain regardless of sponsorship.
So when they do just fork it?
say the same for chrome, and think again if you mean it seriously.
Iridium, cromite, edge, brave, thorium, vivaldi, pale moon…
And this is a drastically simpler browser that would be in swift 6.
and what can they do against the manifest v3 migration? they cannot afford to keep maintaining the code for mv2 addons. it is an important topic for efficient content blocking.
its funny you bring up edge as an alternative. brave too has opt-out telemetry and other shenanigans.
Cloudflare has announced its sponsorship of the Ladybird browser, an independent (still-in-development) open-source initiative
Is it still independent?
Yes, and their donations are limited to 100k a year per corporation/organization, so there cant be a company who comes, donates 20million and then tries to gain control of them through money
Yes, and their donations are limited to 100k a year per corporation/organization
Interesting that they did that.
Frankly, that’s really cool and I think all NPOs capable of doing that should follow suit… though I suppose that paves the way towards ghost or shell companies sneaking in that way… Hmm…
Yes, it is still independent. Cloudflare is just one of the three Platinum sponsors. Other two are Shopify and FUTO. Proton is also a sponsor, but in Gold tier, iirc.
Shopify being a sponsor makes it highly suspect instantly.
Andreas (lead engineer) has told the story of how he got that money - they just happen to know each other and $100k is peanuts for the Shopify founders.
But you’re right to suspect anything of the sort!
I think It’s on their charter that no matter how much corporate money they’ll get they’ll never accept any outside influence just the same. The donators are amply warned to not expect anything other than development as usual or faster.
People always imagine this as “I will pay you $100 to kick the puppy” and of course they would never.
But what actually happens is that you have a long-term donor. You rely on their help (they’re paying for you to be able to hire a nice college intern who’s really smart and has been fun to have on the project). They never tell you what to do so you see them as more of a friend than anything else. It’s perfectly normal to get some lunch with friends and talk. You’re stuck on some problems and they have some good connections that help you out. That might even be worth more than $100k, but it’s not money at all so it’s OK that they’re helping you like this. They also talk you up, which is like free advertising except you didn’t ask for it so that also doesn’t count. Anyway, at some of the lunches they’re telling you about what’s going on with them and there’s some problems they’re dealing with that you could help with. They don’t ask for help, of course, because they know you’re independent. But being independent means it’s OK for you to do what you want. Even help a friend out who didn’t ask for help so they’re not influencing you…
This guy politiks
they stated on their website this project will remain independet and that donators don´t have a say in how this is being developed
No browser with third party investors can be really independent, they always will obey more the interests of the investors as on those from the users. Anyway the guys from Ladybird have balls of steel to develope an browser engine from scratch in an market saturated of browsers of any kind and a brutal competition, this would had more sense 15 years ago, but not now. Good luck, maybe in 2029-2030 there is an good browser multi-platform with all the needed infrastructure, servers and extensions, but I’ll see to believe.
How can you say it’s saturated when chrome has an effective monopoly. If you look at browser engines, there’s basically only 3 for desktop, with one of them targeting only Macs.
As said, there are currently three engines + two forks of these (Gonanna and Qt), except some basic render engines from text only browsers (Links, Lynx and some others), but over hundred different browsers which use these engines, + almost 70 abandoned ones, because outdated engines and others which also tried to develope an own engine. This is what I mean with saturated. It’s nice to try to release a browser with a new independent engine, but if there are not enough users which also use it, it’s a death born child. For some products the market is limited. Make it eg. sense to release a new OS? There also existing only 4, Unix, Unixbased like Windows or Mac and Linux with tons of distros. It’s not only the browser engine, in over 20 years there are also growed complete infrastructure arround these engines, dedicated plug ins, extensions, etc, which don’t exist for a new indie engine, precisely because other browsers, which also tried to release a new engine, before Ladybird, are currently all death. Sad, but you need also a minimum of infrastructure for an browser and which offer also somewhat more as only a new engine. It need security and privacy measures, inbuild or with extensions/plug-ins which need an extra developement and other things more.
No browser with third party investors can be really independent, they always will obey more the interests of the investors as on those from the users.
That’s why they limited donations to $100k per organization. No one is allowed to make themselves indispensable to the project.
