I am also really rooting for Ladybird [0]. I wish they'll take some inspiration from this and provide prebuilt versions for people to try soon.
[0] - https://ladybird.org/
One reason of course is that Ladybird wrote its own JavaScript engine while Servo uses SpiderMonkey.
Ladybird scores over 500 on https://html5test.co which is better than Firefox 60. And Ladybird is not too far behind Safari on the Web Playform Tests (ahead of Servo).
I wish both projects well.
But the fact that Ladybird scores over 500 and you are getting 546 in Firefox tells us how advanced Ladybird is getting.
When I tried Servo a month ago, it was scoring around 400.
> We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version on Linux and macOS. This will be aimed at developers and early adopters.
With that being said, building Ladybird is quite trivial, the scripts in the repo take care of everything, it just takes some time.
He was first branded as a fascist when a non-contributor to SerenityOS submitted a bug or a pull request to change male pronouns to something else. Kling asked to keep the project contributions and discussion technical and not political. That is it. His crime was the classic “asking me not to be political is political” drama.
Next, and admittedly worse, he said something related to Charlie Kirk like “I hope more people engage with words and not fists”. Since Charlie Kirk was a massive douche, people do not like implying that there was anything good about him. While I get this, the idea that this comment confirms Andreas Kling to be a fascist is, well, a bit fascist for my taste.
Kling is famous for starting his videos with “Hello friends”, he has hundreds of good natured videos online, he is very open and humble of his experiences with drug addiction, and he lives in a country that is almost exclusively left wing by US standards. He seems far better behaved than his critics. I am going to have to see a bit more evidence than the above to start boycotting Ladybird over his politics. But that is just me I guess.
Nice to see donations are steadily growing, it's a well deserved project for the health of the web.
Independant from Safari's and Chrome's engines.
- The Sovereign Tech Agency (a branch of the German government) is funding Igalia ~€500,000 over two years to work on Servo (https://www.sovereign.tech/tech/servo).
- And there have been several NLnet grants (that are worth up to €50,000 each) to individuals working on Servo (NLnet gets there money from the EU).
Those aren't huge sums in the context of browser development, but they're not nothing either.
I haven't been super happy with Mozilla's management of Firefox, although it's my daily driver and a great browser. I just don't have super high confidence it'll be viable long term from a corporate standpoint, especially since it's largely been payrolled by Google which makes Blink, so having another real alternative would be great. Having a sustainable, grassroots community project in Servo makes me have hope again (after Mozilla dropped the ball on them...)