Ladybird is now its own project, independent of SerenityOS: developer Andreas Kling announced an official fork of the free and open web browser at the beginning of the month. Unlike most other web browsers, Ladybird is not based on Google’s Chromium browser engine, but rather the team is completely reprogramming it.
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Background: Until now, Ladybird operated under the umbrella of SerenityOS, a project previously started by Kling – which also aims to create a completely independent desktop operating system. Ladybird was born as a simple HTML viewer, but evolved into a more comprehensive web browser. The latter has now been able to attract commercial sponsors as well.
Better development independently
Kling is responsible for the division that has occurred now in their declaration Two main reasons: First, Ladybird will increasingly dominate development – and take up his time in particular, which means he will no longer be able to devote himself sufficiently to SerenityOS. In the future, developers should be able to focus solely on the operating system or the web browser, without being distracted by other projects.
But there is also a technical reason for the fork, as SerenityOS does not accept any code from third-party projects. Kling now wants to change this restriction for Ladybird. That’s why Linux and macOS will also be the official targets of the web browser in the future, while SerenityOS will no longer be available. However, Kling emphasizes that the focus in the last two years of development was on the Linux version anyway.
Fun for the community
On the other hand, SerenityOS should once again become an inspiring project that programmers enjoy. Accordingly, Kling hands it over to the community. Ladybird now has its own GitHub repository and its own Discord server. Linux and macOS users can try the web browser directly, Windows users will have to use WSL 2. However, the project is officially in the pre-alpha stage.
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