Ladybird is lucky in that it has someone who knows how important marketing is, even for opensource projects. There are other opensource browser engine projects languishing because of lack of PR, patronage and / or volunteers. For e.g. NetSurf https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ - website is outdated because of lack of volunteers but the project has active development - https://source.netsurf-browser.org/netsurf.git/ (already has partial support for CSS3, and Flex layout). It can develop into a great alternative if it had some more volunteers. Servo (https://servo.org/) is another project but it has some decent PR because of its Rust codebase and the Rust PR team. There's the Goanna browser engine too ( http://www.palemoon.org/ ) but, like Mozilla Gecko, the project isn't truly modular to offer a stand-alone browser engine as Goanna also strives to be an XUL renderer.
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I think that Ladybird's success has more to do with the fact that kling is one of the few people who knows how to write the whole browser than with marketing. But yeah, kling is also a great communicator.
SerenityOS was already quite successful before they started Ladybird. So successful that he was already making enough off sponsorship to do it full time. It was having the time to take on something as ambitious as a full web browser for SerenityOS that led to the project to begin with.
I agree that Ladybird is lucky to have a dev not only of his seniority but of his specific expertise. However, there is no denying that a huge reason for the success of his projects is non-technical and more about his ability to build community and engagement.
Also, I really, REALLY wish the devs don't surrender to user's pressure for the plethora of features offered by the commercial products, done ASAP.
Please maintain the tinkering, passion and devs-first codebase it has now, and don't end up as a huge mess just because users want things like VDPAU asap.
I don't mind waiting a few more years. For the "just works" part of my life, I already have chromium+Firefox
Learning to market yourself and your projects is so important! I wish I had the skills.
Thanks I forgot about NetSurf. After Microsoft abandoning Blink and Opera abandoning Presto to use Chromium, the internet needs these alternatives more than ether
Is Palemoon the most popular Goanna-based browser?
The data isn't available because PaleMoon doesn't collect any analytic or telemetry data. So they don't know how big their userbase is. (Recently though, I think they have started collecting some data on hardware because they wanted to revamp their code base. See this discussion - https://forum.palemoon.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=30909 - I however don't know how extensive, or persistent, this data collection is / was).
Quick clarification: Microsoft abandoned Trident for Blink/Chromium.
Microsoft abandoned Spartan (the original MS Edge rewrite) for Blink, Trident was just phased out and left to die.
Oh wow, I actually completely blacked out that they attempted their own first. Those were interesting times to be a web developer.