Could you perhaps write up how this came to be? Did you know anyone there already, or did the contact come through some previous network? Did you put together a pitch deck or did they reach out to you first?
The reason I am asking is that I was some years ago I was working on an open source payment gateway for crypto which I was sure would be something interesting for companies like Shopify, and I even posted an "Ask HN" how I could approach companies to ask for sponsorships [0]. I'm not working on it anymore, but I'm pretty sure that I'd be if I were any better at establishing these connections.
Tobi (Shopify CEO) has been supporting my open source work via GitHub Sponsors since early 2022, so I reached out to him and said (very paraphrased) "I'm gonna start pushing harder on Ladybird, would Shopify want to be an official sponsor?"
Over time, my audience grew, and some people really liked my videos, so I first made a Patreon and later a GitHub Sponsors for those who wanted to help me turn it into a full-time job someday.
One question that might have already popped up: with more and more attention going to Ladybird (in contrast to SerenityOS), how will these sponsorships direct what you do in both projects?
We just talked about browser choices yesterday. I really hope we get back a “people’s” browser and not boxed in experiences from Big Tech that the market currently has.
I hope this project remains dedicated to such a vision!
Congratulations and thank you Andreas for inspiring and encouraging developers like me to contribute to open source through your content. I began my open source journey by adding a snipping tool in screenshot utility to Serenity OS.
It depends on what you enjoy doing, and how much time you really have.
Good bug reports & reduced test cases are always amazingly valuable. Perhaps you have a home page of your own? You can open it in Ladybird and see if you hit some problems. Maybe we throw a surprising JavaScript exception. Maybe our CSS layout isn't quite right.
If you can then reduce the problem to a minimal HTML/CSS/JS example, that's often enough for someone working on the engine to go ahead and find a fix pretty easily. :)
Congrats my friend, well deserved brother, well deserved!
My question is: can we get a Yak Shavers playlist on YouTube, where all SerenityOS development is gathered in one place? We have so much to learn from you people.
Late to the party, but I didn't see anyone mentioning this: Shopify seems to be curiously extremely involved in sponsoring WebAssembly-related projects. It's a gold sponsor on AssemblyScript[1], it used to develop javy[2] which compiles JavaScript to WebAssembly, a member of the BytecodeAlliance[3].
I wouldn't think they sponsor LadyBird just for LibWasm[4], as that doesn't make any sense, but technically, they add that to their wasm sponsorships now.
Honestly, it looks like a really nice place to work if you like WebAssembly, I wouldn't mind a collaboration or to work with them.
- Could be "just" goodwill, paying this out of the marketing budget to strengthen brand recognition amongst developers.
- Goodwill amongst developers is not just a feelgood benefit btw. Being known for supporting open source projects might help with the hiring pipeline for example. Making current employees feel better about Shopify would presumably also reduce employees turnover rate, leading to lower recruiting costs.
- Shopify as a company is extremely dependent on "the web" for its business, and would benefit from it being built on open standards. Supporting a variety of browsers leads to more competition in the browser space, which would support Shopify in the long run (see also the classic "commoditize your complement" article: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ )
It's also a way of effectively funding a non-committal proxy war on big tech.
I think almost everyone can see that the status quo creates a bad business environment, the big G can dictate terms far too unilaterally and is dire need of competition. Funding this sort of development can be a long term strategy to upset the status quo without risking the entire business by going on some kamikaze pivot that puts you in direct competition with Google or Apple. That would be investor relations suicide.
It's a very safe bet. It doesn't work out, and they lose $100k and can write it off as marketing and get some goodwill out of it. If it works out, and they sabotage Google for $100k.
One may say this is unlikely to succeed, that they are too entrenched, if it wasn't for the fact that this exact move succeeded already with Microsoft and Linux in the '90s.
Linus had nothing to his name but a janky Minix knockoff, and the entire userspace was filled with Richard Stallman's bizarre menagerie of hippie software. Does that seem like plausible competition for Microsoft, who at the time was by far the wealthiest software company in the world?
Well, as it turns out, yeah, Linux became one hell of a fly in the ointment for them.
I'd say the amount donated (100k) suggests it can only really be marketing budget (possibly folding recruitment into this).
For an organisation of Shopify's size it's way too low an amount to invest if they expect significant strategic advantage from actually using the software.
Investment size does suggest that, but I don't think it is as clear-cut as you say.
First, Ladybird is basically a one-man project and I don't think they are really looking to become a company as such. This means there is a practical maximum you can invest even if it was a very important project. The effect of investing 500k would be basically the same as investing 100k (ie, de dev behind can now work on the project full-time) and if you invest too much that might make it a shopify-exclusive project. If the goal is to sponsor a new widely used open source browser it makes sense not to monopolize it too much, because then people wouldn't see the project as "open" anymore. Now there can still be other sponsors.
Second, a project like this probably has a fairly low chance of actually succeeding in gaining market share from one of the big browsers. If shopify actually has some type of Strategic Investment Budget for commoditizing complements and the like, it would probably make sense to split it VC-style over many small projects rather than making big bets on only a few projects. If one of the small projects gains traction, you can always support it more when needed.
You make good points, and yeah of course there may be a behind-the-scenes understanding that further funding will be made available as needed / when specific goals are hit, that's true!
> The web is one of the most amazing and unlikely products of humanity. Free and deeply egalitarian. No app store would allow the web to launch today.
> But it's a gargantuan task to build a new browser from scratch, and there are few people with the range of skills to pull it off. Andreas is one of the few and we are lucky that he can focus on such a task.
> I think of Shopify as one of the 'killer apps' of the open web. Not unlike office to windows, visicalc to the apple2 or half-life to steam. As such, we love to support open source that makes the web better. This is why we support Rails, Remix, and now Ladybird. (and many many others)
Shopify is also sponsoring an eSports team, Shopify Rebellion <https://shopifyrebellion.gg>, and partnering with ESL to help sponsor StarCraft II events. I think it's a much nicer way of getting publicity than dumping cash on adwords.
Along with the other suggestions, if Shopify were looking to build a POS (point of sale) device - a "Shopify terminal" - on low cost low power hardware then Labybird could be a good fit for the UI.
There are other browser engines targeted at this sort of embedded product, and ladybird obviously isn't specifically targeting it. But it may be a good play due to licensing and royalties if they expect to build millions of them.
Another could be to build a WYSIWYG rich text editor. Obviously a lot of Shopifys front end is about point and click building a store visually. "contenteditable" based editors are a nightmare of browser inconsistencies and bugs. If you could compile Ladybird to WASM and render to a html canvas, you could side step all that with your existing editor, only having to target one "browser".
I've not seen anyone do that yet, but I think it's a really compelling use case.
(Accessibility of canvas based UIs is still an unsolved problem though)
We use shopify for selling a few products and it sure is nice to keep that extra 10% on every sale (vs. eBay and Amazon).
Now looking into their fulfillment options as the price is pretty good ($5.70 shipped to customer for our product in the USA and around $10.00 international).
Why do some rich guys hand out big tips everywhere they go? It makes them feel big and good, but it's also a good long term strategy to make people like you.
What is that link showing? Is he using Shopify as a random website to test his browser against or something? If that's it, that's so hilarious wholesome to end up getting sponsored by them I love it.
A list of videos when Andreas Kling uses the landing page of Shopify at the sample to implement new features or fix the broken ones, mostly SVG/layout related.
Like it was stated in one of the video, Shopify uses a lot of modern cutting-edge web technologies, so display the site correctly is quite the challenge.
You should watch some of his videos if you have free time, it is a pleasant surprise of what Ladybird can do after just some dozen months of development.
I don't know... I'm probably a Firefox fanboy, but all this fragmentation in the market of browsers that are not named Chrome isn't doing us much good in beating Chrome. I'm interested in Chrome being beaten, and it still seems Firefox has the best cards (though I don't know _how_). Once there's healthy competition in browser land, let's reconsider fragmenting it ;-)
I am also a Firefox fanboy but I don't have any hope Firefox will improve its market share in any meaningful way without significant changes at Mozilla. At this point I am convinced Mozilla is the biggest obstacle to Firefox's success.
I'll stick with Firefox for as long as I can, but I no longer trust Mozilla leadership with browser development.
Ladybird has a long way road ahead before it can actually compete. Servo and WebKit are in much better positions to get a competitive edge if a serious browser maker would actually give it a go.
That said, the modern programming standard employed by Ladybird makes me hopeful that it'll make for a better browser in the long term. Even if it dies a quiet death in a few years, it'll be a useful inspiration for ideas other browser vendors can hopefully take something away from.
It's sort of hard to take Firefox serious as a competitor to Chrome when their main source of income seems to be Google.
They're ostensibly kept on a leash, permitted to exist because it's convenient for Google to have token competition from an anti-trust perspective, but it's sure as hell not real competition.
Even looking past how little it's actually saying, there are so many contradictions.
> Individuals’ security and privacy on the internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional.
> Individuals must have the ability to shape the internet and their own experiences on it.
And yet...
* It's damn near impossible to disable telemetry in Firefox. It's very clear they're fighting to prevent you from doing this, as evidenced by the fact that there are options that sort of half-disable telemetry, but not all of it. Fully disabling telemetry requires navigating a minefield of dark patterns and obscure configuration dialogues. [1]
* Firefox will use said connections to, without asking let alone telling you, change feature flags in the software you've installed on your computer, or reset configuration options. [2]
* Firefox forces ads and third party integrations like Pocket onto its users. Time and time again. No respect for consent or user preferences. [3]
It's abundantly clear that privacy and user choice only matters to Mozilla when other organizations are violating them.
I feel like I'm on the ground level of when Firefox was first being built. It's a very exciting project that is 100% for a free, open web. What a great achievement!
Crazy to think that about one month ago there were some haters on twitter were claiming that the project would never amount to anything. Way to go, Kling!
I think the money is probably better directed at building out browser features than rewriting anything. Building a browser on top of a language that is still in heavy development is a recipe for a failed browser.
It currently runs on SerenityOS, Linux and macOS. And Windows with WSL (I know, I know..)
We’ve also seen screenshots of Ladybird on FreeBSD, Haiku, and even Android at one point. Those are not maintained though, but we’ll come back to them eventually I’m sure :)
If you’d like a quick intro to the Ladybird project, I presented it at a conference earlier this month: https://youtu.be/De8N1zrQwRs
Huge thanks to Mike, Tobi and the other folks at Shopify who hooked this up. <3