Ladybird is being built from the ground up right now, looks promising. Too bad every site under the sun bows to chromium and even when they don’t follow web standards they still become the defacto defaulto standard. Ugh.
Do you think any of these qualify as anything more than hobby projects?
I’m not sure I’d consider a single-threaded browser application to be relevant in 2026. IE7 still technically exists too, and if you really wanted to you could run Netscape Navigator, but I wouldn’t count them among functional current browsers.
no, that is exactly the issue. The fact that Andreas Kling is willing to interact with lunduke, dhh, and similar people on a semi-regular basis is not a great look.
Oh, that podcast was with Kling, not about him. That is unfortunate.
I remember there was some drama with Ladybird after some he/him pronouns were changed to they/them in the (instructions?). Back then, from my very not-involved point of view, it seemed to come from some sort of misunderstanding/improper pull request. Maybe I was hopeful.
… this lends more credence to my hope being misplaced.
hey, links2 is still alive and well, and there are now terminal browsers like chawan that can render images mostly correctly. There’s also a few that are actually either chromium or gecko. avoid those.
I do use links2 sometimes for looking things up on wikipedia or reading blogs or something like that, easier than starting a gui browser. but the usecase is a tad niche
I wouldn’t call all of them simple reskins. Some actually improve on the browser with privacy features and stuff (like brave, but it also ruins it by adding crypto crap).
There are 3 browsers. Everything else is just a reskin.
Ladybird is being built from the ground up right now, looks promising. Too bad every site under the sun bows to chromium and even when they don’t follow web standards they still become the defacto defaulto standard. Ugh.
You could argue Goanna is its own thing by now. It was forked from Gecko, but Blink/Chromium was initially forked from WebKit.
There’s also Servo and LibWeb, but I don’t think either is really usable yet.
Do you think any of these qualify as anything more than hobby projects?
I’m not sure I’d consider a single-threaded browser application to be relevant in 2026. IE7 still technically exists too, and if you really wanted to you could run Netscape Navigator, but I wouldn’t count them among functional current browsers.
What about LadyBirdEdit: that’s LibWeb
vibecoded fashtech, but servo does exist
I won’t entirely disagree with the vibecode part, but I don’t think Lunduke is a particularly trustworthy source.
no, that is exactly the issue. The fact that Andreas Kling is willing to interact with lunduke, dhh, and similar people on a semi-regular basis is not a great look.
e: more people you really don’t want to associate with
Oh, that podcast was with Kling, not about him. That is unfortunate.
I remember there was some drama with Ladybird after some he/him pronouns were changed to they/them in the (instructions?). Back then, from my very not-involved point of view, it seemed to come from some sort of misunderstanding/improper pull request. Maybe I was hopeful.
… this lends more credence to my hope being misplaced.
This is Lynx erasure.
And only 2 main lineages left, Chromium and WebKit are both KHTML descendants
There’s also QtWebEngine, WebKitGTK+ and all the tui browsers.
which is Chromium
which is WebKit
…yeah, and I’m sure someone out there still has a working telegraph, but I wouldn’t list it as part of telecommunications infrastructure.
hey, links2 is still alive and well, and there are now terminal browsers like chawan that can render images mostly correctly. There’s also a few that are actually either chromium or gecko. avoid those.
Oh good, so they’re kind of on the level of Netscape Navigator.
around and about sorta. still no javascript tho
I do use links2 sometimes for looking things up on wikipedia or reading blogs or something like that, easier than starting a gui browser. but the usecase is a tad niche
QtWebEngine is just Chromium.
But yes, Links and Lynx are real.
You meant Konqueror, the other WebKit browser
I wouldn’t call all of them simple reskins. Some actually improve on the browser with privacy features and stuff (like brave, but it also ruins it by adding crypto crap).
then what’s konqueror?
WebKitSorry that’s not correct. It used to be WebKit via QtWebKit, but now it’s Chromium via QtWebEngine.
Fun fact: the KHTML code base that was developed for Konqueror was forked by Apple to create WebKit, and Webkit has been adopted by Google for Blink, so Konqueror is kind of the origin point for all current web browsers except Firefox (which is descended from Netscape).