Building a web browser from scratch in an era of giants

Science · Published 1 November 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Most modern browsers are built on shared engines like Chromium or WebKit, creating a consolidated web infrastructure. Ladybird is different. It is an ambitious project aiming to build a completely independent rendering engine and JavaScript interpreter from the ground up, seeking to break the existing technological monopoly.

Ladybird began its journey in 2019 as a component of SerenityOS, a hobbyist operating system. However, it was spun off into a standalone project in September 2022 by Andreas Kling. Unlike many browsers that rely on established foundations like Google's Chromium or Mozilla's Gecko, Ladybird uses its own unique rendering engine and JavaScript interpreter with WebAssembly support. This independence is central to the project's identity as an open-source initiative funded entirely through donations. The technical progress has been significant despite being a new entrant. As of March 2025, it ranked fourth on the Web Platform Tests—trailing only Chrome, Safari, and Firefox—and held the second most conformant JavaScript engine after Firefox's SpiderMonkey.

To modernize its architecture, the project began porting approximately 25,000 lines of its C++ JavaScript parser and bytecode generator to Rust in February 2026, utilizing AI tools like Claude Code and Codex during the transition. The roadmap is rigorous: an alpha release is planned for 2026, a beta for 2027, and a stable public release targeted for 2028. To ensure security as it nears these milestones, the project announced in June 2026 that it would no longer accept public pull requests from non-maintainers. While it remains open-source under the BSD 2-Clause License, this move reflects a shift toward high-quality, controlled development for its primary targets: Linux and macOS.

The project's funding highlights a growing interest in browser diversity. In July 2024, Chris Wanstrath, co-founder of GitHub, donated $1 million to the Ladybird Browser Initiative. It also secured corporate sponsorships, including Shopify—the first corporate sponsor with a $100,000 contribution in 2023—alongside others like Proton and 37signals.

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