I'm surprised by how little funding they're getting. Are those just from 3rd party individuals excluding big orgs?
Given how vocal a lot of people are about the web browsers being owned by Google through chrom(ium)e would think more people/companies would be interested in seeing a contender happen faster.
There's probably some kind of tragedy of the commons, where nobody thinks they should be the one funding this stuff.
I also believe there's the impression that making a brand new browser with an engine written from scratch is not realistic, so why found one? Fortunately Ladybird might have changed things on this front.
> There's probably some kind of tragedy of the commons
I think you mean the free rider problem. In the tragedy of the commons, a shared resources is depleted. In the free rider problem, it's only that users benefit without contributing. In both cases, the resource is non-excludable (it's public or common in a sense) but in the case of the free rider problem, the resource is non-rivalrous, meaning that consumption by one user does not reduce its availability to another. People using Servo but not contributing it does not exhaust any shared resource that we have access to (i.e. Servo itself). The resources used for its production (and any potential resources that could be) are all private, not common or public.
I guess nobody's really using it yet though since it's not really usable so it's not really formally the free rider problem yet either. It's just that nobody's really funding it.
> where nobody thinks they should be the one funding this stuff.
I wonder if it's not more like people just assume someone else is contributing or maybe they don't even know they can or don't believe they can have an impact because they don't know the details. It seems like there could be a lot of reasons and I'm not sure how to find out why they aren't getting what they need.
> I also believe there's the impression that making a brand new browser with an engine written from scratch is not realistic, so why found one? Fortunately Ladybird might have changed things on this front.
I think there are better ways to think than that. We should do what we can, even if we fail.
I think that a lot of the vocal people are not the ones with the big money. Or even organizations with that kind of money.
And some of the organizations that do have that kind of money have thrown in the towel. Like Microsoft, who switched Edge to chromium a few years ago.
I also think that many people who are vocal about it rather donate to something like Firefox (although it is quite difficult to actually donate to specifically fund firefox development....) because that is an established alternative for Chromium.
Agreed, they still have a long road to travel before they are a true alternative to other browsers and engines. But I think it is good that there are genuine efforts in developing alternative browsers and engines.
Ladybird browser is even further away from a mature product, but also an example of a project I am glad to see existing.
I’m not sure if Ladybird is further away. Ladybird is seemingly targeting pretty relevant standard pieces and seems very far along in comparison from being a mature project.
I’m exclusively referring to my personal experience of playing with these. Ladybird can render (with errors) quite a few sites including Wikipedia where Servo fails catastrophically.
Given how vocal a lot of people are about the web browsers being owned by Google through chrom(ium)e would think more people/companies would be interested in seeing a contender happen faster.