Hey kosolam! There are already many forks and ports of existing browsers. Do we really need another one? :)
By building a new engine, we can increase ecosystem diversity and put all these open standards to the test. We regularly find, report, and sometimes even fix bugs in the various web standards - stuff we find just by being the first to try and implement everything from scratch in a long time!
We also believe it’s good for the world to have more engines that aren’t directly or indirectly funded primarily by the advertising industry.
That's the unique value proposition of Ladybird. It uses the open standards as the jumping point, investigates and de facto documents the divergence of modern browsers from them. It is a precious and important work.
How is knowing where the published standards diverge from de facto standards precious and important work? You say that's where the value is, but the subset of people and organizations who would pay for that (if it's valuable, people will pay, right?) has to be pretty small.
No? There are tons of valuable contributions, pure and applied, that "people" (markets) do not pay for at all, or pay pittance relative to their usefulness.
It makes it much easier to build new engines in the future. Even if only a few people are interested in this knowledge, they can make a big impact with the software they write.
I'm also curious about this. When it was just a toy project it made sense to write everything from scratch. If it's supposed to eventually be usable by people, a hard fork of Chromium, or at least some Chromium components might make more sense. Having a browser that improves hackability and user freedom while working just as well as Chromium sounds like heaven to me. Anyways, I'm clueless about browser development so I might be completely wrong.
