We're on the brink of another world browser war

the worldwide web is arguably the most critical pillar of human civilization today John Perry Barlo called it cyberspace the new home of the Mind in his Declaration of Independence of cyberspace he said we are creating a world where anyone anywhere May Express his or her beliefs no matter how singular without fear of being coerced into silence or Conformity freedom on the web has caused governments to fail it's minted millions of new Millionaires and has allowed this one humble cat to be viewed trillions of times but there's an existential threat to this openness we tap into

cyberspace via web browsers with chrome Safari Edge and Firefox accounting for over 90% of the market share all these browsers Share technology or funding controlled by Google thank God Google's not evil but hypothetically if it was evil it could pull its resources to exterminate all cap memes from the internet as a society we can't allow that to happen and luckily there's someone actually doing something about it it is August 12 2024 and you're watching the code report he who controls the spice controls the universe but he who controls the browser controls the Internet you may

not realize it but the browser Wars are raging right now Firefox just launched tabs managed in the sidebar which was already supported on the increasingly popular Arc browser but as we speak two separate open source browsers built in Rust are trending right now Verso which is built with the servo engine and Blitz a super minimal web renderer but I want to talk about something even more ambitious a futuristic open source browser called ladybird in October 2018 Andreas clling a software engineer who worked on webkit at Apple and Nokia had just gotten out of a 3-month

Swedish rehab program and was unemployed and bored and when smart people like him get bored and don't have access to drugs they start doing extreme things like when he built his own operating system to use as a daily driver that included a 1990s guey with a late 2000s Unix CLI everything from the colonel to the web browser had to be made from scratch and this is how Serenity OS was born which is named after the Serenity Prayer God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change the courage to change the things I

can and the wisdom to know the difference on July 4th 2022 the serenity OS browser engine declared its independence as a cross-platform project and now a full web browser it was renamed ladybird over a th000 contributors half a million lines of C++ code and two years later Andreas joined forces with one of the GitHub co-founders to form a nonprofit to manage the browser believing the way to not have bad incentives is to have no incentives the project is funded entirely by sponsorships and donations and most importantly the code is entirely free and won't borrow from

other browsers and that's a big contrast even to privacy focused browsers like Brave which is for-profit and built on top of Google's chromium but speaking of tools that are free and open source another incredible project you need to know about is convex the one true Firebase alternative and sponsor of today's video as an app developer it allows you to make one decision for your back end by providing schedule job server functions database queries and file storage all in pure typescript and that gives us this beautiful trcp style autocomplete and type safety across the entire stack

in addition convex delivers an acid compliant database with optimized caching and optional schema enforcement but without the pain points of SQL like migrations and ORS and like a true Firebase alternative you can get automatic real-time subscriptions on all database queries use the link on the screen to build a project for free right now seriously convex is an awesome project but now let's get back to ladybird and talk about the disappointing part the first Alpha version for Linux and Mac OS isn't expected until the summer of 2026 and you'll probably die of old age by the

time the windows version comes out the good news is that you can play around with the code and build it from Source on GitHub but building a web browser from scratch is extremely complex and the general consensus is that it's impossible to pull off in order for web developers to build websites with their half-ass HTML CSS and JavaScript code browser engines need to follow the w3c spec which contains over4 million words and it constantly evolves with new features that raise the barrier to entry it's not a project you build in a weekend by pring chat

GPT the developers have already built their own HTML and JS engines creatively named lib HTML and lijs and are leveraging established tools like FFM Peg for videos in software development the cycle goes from make it work to make it good to make it faster and they're very much in phase one of the cycle making a web browser ain't easy but it's honest work regardless of the market share ladybird gets we all benefit from them trying because the consolidation of power on the Internet is only getting worse and who knows maybe one day it'll be our

last hope to smuggle dank cap memes in and out of cyberspace this has been the code report thanks for watching and I will see you in the next one