Indeed, and as a school those 18 months are well worth it, but it is in many ways also 18 months wasted. There is a strong sense of NIH with the Ladybird dev(s), and I wonder if that isn't their whole reason for doing this.
replyI've seen another team doing something similar, they went through endless rewrite cycles of a major package but never shipped, and eventually the project was axed when they proposed to do it all over again, but this time even better.
The sense of NIH is from Serenity, and that was probably the reason for Jakt's existence too. Now it's spun off into its own project there is a lot more pragmatism.
replyWell, here's to hoping because we really need a stand-in for FF. I realize the irony here in terms of that being the ultimate 'NIH' project but that one I can get behind because the browser landscape is much too fragile. Of course they might end up taking users away from FF rather than from Chrome, Edge or Safari.
replyIn case you didn't know they're using a lot of third-party libraries now for pretty major things: libcurl for http, Skia/Harfbuzz for rendering, libxml, OpenSSL, ffmpeg, etc:
replyhttps://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/tree/8017f8a7ed3...
The core browser engine, JS/CSS/layout etc will always be original.