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. 🤷♂️
The title is an oxymoron lol
Your an ox and a moron
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.
