The world of browsers is a bit of a mess at the moment. Chromium rules the roost in terms of market share, while Mozilla's Gecko is tied to a company that appears to have started moving against its own lifelong promises of privacy and user protection. While you can use a browser forked from Firefox to remove any chance of that happening (I use Zen Browser), there's very little out there by way of legitimate competitors.

However, one browser that recently caught my eye was Ladybird. It's an all-new browser developed from the ground up, using its own rendering engine not based on Chromium or Gecko, and it has some pretty widespread industry support. It's not going to be a Chrome or Firefox competitor for quite a long time (general availability is expected at present to arrive in 2028), but it's still an exciting development and one I built from source to play around with.

4 It's not based on Chromium

Nor is it based on Gecko

Ladybird is unique in one aspect thanks to its new rendering engine that it uses, called LibWeb. It has no relation to any other engine and is built from the ground up. Right now there are some teething issues, and it can be buggy or slow, but that's to be expected from something that is so in development that you need to build it yourself to even use it.

I have a lot of gripes with Chromium given how much it has essentially monopolized the internet. There are a lot of websites that will only properly render in a Chromium-based browser, and that's not a failing of competitors, that's a failing of web developers not testing their sites in other browsers. As others grow in market share, it forces developers to account for them.

Using Chromium and building up Google's market share inadvertently hands more control of the open web to Google, which is a major loss when it comes to privacy and security, especially when the internet shouldn't be owned by an individual or company. Offering up a whole new competitor is exciting for those who want to get away from the duopoly of Google and Mozilla.

3 It has a lot of industry backing

Some major companies are involved

One of the more exciting parts of Ladybird's development is that there is a surprising amount of industry backing. The project has a number of sponsors, some of which are fairly high profile. First, here's how much the project gets paid per tier of sponsorship:

• Platinum: USD $100,000
• Gold: USD $50,000
• Silver: USD $10,000
• Bronze: USD $5,000
• Copper: USD $1,000

Ladybird already has FUTO and Shopify as Platinum-tier sponsors, with Proton VPN, ahrefs, Guillermo Ranch, and ohne-makler paying for Gold sponsorship. There are a bunch of other names on the list too across the remaining tiers, so it's clear that the industry is excited by what the team is doing.

There are some people that really believe in the project too, such as GitHub co-founder Chris Wanstrath. He donated one million USD to it just last year, which is a pretty crazy amount to think about for such a new project.

2 It's fully open-source

Anyone can contribute

Ladybird, like many other browsers in the space, is completely open-source. You can download the source code and build it yourself, which I did on my Mac. It's not exactly stable right now, but it does actually work and render pages. You can contribute code to the project if you wish, and there are a lot of people making code commits on GitHub daily.

The UI itself is fairly rudimentary, but the reason for that is that development is focused on other aspects aside from the user interface, such as basic rendering and features. Given that we are still a year away from a public alpha, it's going to be quite a while before it gets any "enhancements". With that said, the open-source nature of the project means you can track its progress and build it yourself whenever you want.

I wouldn't recommend using this browser just yet, and unless you're a developer wanting to contribute to the project, there isn't really much reason to even build it yourself. It doesn't have any unique features yet, but it's interesting to get a look at the project and how it's doing so far.

1 Tests show Ladybird is catching up fast

It's one of the best outside of the big three

Web Platform Tests are a great way to standardize testing of your browser so that you can be sure that your browser has the features it needs to run. Ladybird has been steadily improving on these tests and is approaching the minimum 90% required to be eligible as an alternative browser on iOS. While there's still a long way to go before it can be rolled out after that (and it'll be nowhere close to ready realistically at that point), it's a pretty major milestone to achieve.

Even better is that the browser's implementation of JavaScript is one of the world's best. In January 2025, it was rated as the best by test262, the official compliance test for JavaScript. It's now slightly bested by SpiderMonkey, but that means Ladybird's JavaScript implementation is still second best... and it's not even in alpha!

Ladybird is an exciting new project

The web is becoming an increasingly closed-off landscape, and Ladybird is a breath of fresh air. It's built from the ground up with its project lead, Andreas Kling, being a well-respected developer in the space. He's also the developer of SerenityOS, a Unix-like operating system built for technical users, and has even worked on Apple's WebKit in the past.

I'm really excited to see where Ladybird goes. It's undoubtedly not aimed at general usage right now, but even being able to build the browser and view a webpage has been pretty impressive considering how early we are in its development. We're a year out from a public alpha, and with continued funding and support, it could really go somewhere in the future.