A new American nonprofit organization Ladybird Browser Initiative promises to create a browser based on a new engine that will not use "a single line of code" from other browsers, DevClass reports.
The organization was founded by developer Andreas Kling and GitHub co-founder Chris Vanstrat. The development will be funded only by sponsorships from those who "care about the open Internet."
Chris Vanstrat also donated $1 million to the development and said that every major browser engine today is "funded by Google's advertising empire."
The browser will be open source on GitHub and will use the BSD-2-Clause license. The page already has code for an alpha version of the browser that can be run, but, according to the developer, this version is not yet suitable for widespread use.
The browser is written in C++. According to the project's homepage, the choice of language is due to the fact that Kling was "most comfortable" with creating SerenityOS, but the team is currently "evaluating a number of alternatives" and plans to add a second language to the project soon. Kling confirmed that “our next language will be a memory safe one.”
Ladybird first appeared as an HTML browser for SerenityOS, a Unix-like operating system for x86-64 processors created by Kling in 2018. Last month, Kling said that all his attention is now focused on the Ladybird browser, which will be targeted at Linux and macOS.
He also said that, unlike SerenityOS, Ladybird will “leverage the greater OSS ecosystem,” meaning that it will use other open source libraries for some features.