Episode 800 transcript

FLOSS-800

Jonathan: Hey folks, this week Aaron joins me and we talk with Andreas Kling about Ladybird. That's the from scratch web browser that's almost ready for primetime. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. This is Floss Weekly, episode 800, recorded Wednesday, September 10th. Champagning the Ladybird browser.

It's time for Floss Weekly. It's the show about free Libre and open source software. I'm your host, Jonathan Bennett, and today is no exception. We're going to have a lot of fun. We're going to talk about Ladybird, the from scratch web browser, which, boy, that just, it sounds weird to even say it, but We've got the, we've got the man himself we're going to talk to in just a minute.

But before we get to that, we've got the other man. It's, Wow, that transition did not work as well as I thought it would, but here we are. We've got Aaron. Welcome, sir. Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me. It's good to have you back. I am so glad. One of the things that makes me extremely happy about moving to Tuesdays is that we get to have Aaron back as one of our co hosts.

And I just, I get a kick out of that because I've always, always enjoyed being able to work with you. And I was very glad to be able to have you back in the rotation.

Aaron: Yeah, for sure. I just noticed that my maybe because of my mustache, my beard's a little longer, it needs a trim. But I've noticed that like, I've got the old man syndrome.

Like the older you get, the more your face droops and I'm sitting here smiling and I'm realizing that it's just like a straight line across now. It doesn't go up in the corners anymore. So yeah, I've got a, I've got a hope that people know that I'm smiling, but I am, I'm happy to be here.

Jonathan: Yes. So Lady Bird, what, what do you know about Lady Bird?

Aaron: Absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. It'll be, I'm really interested for this conversation though, because you know, a, why do we need another browser anyway? Like what's the problem that they're trying to solve? I think. A lot of us know what that is, but I still, I, it's a lot of effort to do a browser.

There's some

Jonathan: problems. Let's just say there's some problems.

Aaron: There are problems, right? We'll get into that. And then, you know, I'm, I'm old enough to, to go back to the days of using mosaic and text based browsers and gopher and, you know, I was around at the beginning of the internet, um, at least that part of it.

So. So, yeah, I mean, I remember when new browsers were popping up you know, pretty frequently and it was like a big deal, like when Netscape navigator came out, it was like, Whoa. So anyway I remember those days. So I'm kind of curious, like, what are we going back to those days of like, Hey, let's just get back to basics here.

Or, you know, is there, you know, how do we, how do we accomplish that? And also make sure we can still do the things we want to do. Right. On mine. So, yeah, I'm really curious.

Jonathan: I'm, I'm kind of excited that we have a new browser that's not just Chromium with a different skin on it.

Mm hmm.

Yeah. We have, we have a bunch of those, and so people, I mean, you just talk about this browser and you go and look at it.

It's just Chromium, guys. It's Chromium with a theme. It's, do we really need to do a whole show about this? Lady Bird is a bit different. Well, let's, let's go ahead and bring Andreas Kling on, who is the man when it comes to Ladybird, and I guess the man when it comes to browsers. Welcome sir, thank you for being here.

Hello, how's it going? It's great, it's great. So, Ladybird, it's, it's a browser. Let's see, where should, where should we start? I have lots of questions. Shoot, I don't see a download link. Let's start there. Okay, the audience knows this, just so you know this, I will ask a lot of questions that I either have a guess or I know the answer to.

I'm pretty sure I know why there's not a download link, but I'm, I'm trying to be a proxy for our audience in asking me to share.

Aaron: Well, that's the first thing I did this morning as I went to go download it. It was like doing exactly that. I was like, Oh,

Jonathan: I see a project,

Aaron: but no download.

Jonathan: Do I have to, do I have to compile this from source to be able to use it?

What?

Andreas: That's crazy. No, like you were saying we are doing something different, which is that we are not starting from Chromium like everybody else does. And because of that, it's going to take a little bit longer to, to get this thing ready. So the, There is no download today but you can download the source code and build it.

I think it's two commands that you have to run and then it should take care of everything for you. We, we do get a lot of positive comments about how easy it is to build our project. And we are aiming to put out an alpha version in 2026. So that's sort of the timeframe that we're looking at right now.

But we, to go more public because we started a nonprofit earlier this year. So that's why you've been seeing us more and more because we started to get more serious about this. And I hooked up with Chris Wanstroth. Of GitHub fame. And we started this nonprofit to fund and develop Ladybird.

And we've talked to a bunch of companies that are also interested in, in like having a new browser on the scene. So that's sort of how it's come together. And but at this moment you can, you cannot download a running product. We are pretty far from that, but because. It's a lot of work to build a browser.

We do need a little bit of funding, at least not as much as everybody else, but a little bit, so we have been raising a little bit of money. And yeah, that, that's kind of the, the general state of things. And a lot of people, of course, brave early adopters and courageous open source enthusiasts still go and build the browser.

And they are typically disappointed, but come away with a bit of hope at least in their, in their stomachs, I would hope because it doesn't work Well, for daily driver browsing today and we're not trying to mislead anybody about that. And we are actually two years out from, from what we would consider an alpha version.

So we don't encourage anybody who's not technically minded to even bother with this at this point in time. Because you're just going to have a bad time. But for people who are technically minded, you are most encouraged to try it out, mess with it. Try your favorite website, maybe a website that you made yourself.

Tell us what didn't work, what didn't work right. And maybe even figure it out yourself and see if you can help us fix it. So we've been doing a lot of that. Trying to collect new developers.

Jonathan: Is using ladybird right now a better or a worse experience than trying to use something like the links browser?

Andreas: Oh, wow. I don't have an, I don't know. It might be better.

Aaron: It's gotta be better.

Andreas: I would hope it's

Jonathan: better.

Andreas: It's, it's probably better. Yeah. Cause yeah, but the links is that links to one, but JavaScript.

Jonathan: No

Andreas: links

Jonathan: is text based links is the entirely text based browser. I don't think it runs JavaScript at all.

Andreas: Oh, yeah. Then you're kind of screwed.

Jonathan: Yeah. Okay.

Andreas: Yeah, no, we, we, we can do bare, we can do JavaScript, not just bare minimum, but like we can do real JavaScript. But we do struggle with performance. We struggle with some of the more intricate features and especially stuff like a YouTube doesn't work yet because of a million intricate little things that we have to figure out.

And there are a lot of these bot detection systems that we have yet to like convinced that we are a real browser. So CloudFlare and Google and, and whatnot, they have like these you know, mechanisms to make sure that you're not a bot and we look like a bot because we're just doing stuff wrong.

And that's entirely on us. You know, they're, we're not complaining about them. We just have to get better.

Jonathan: I could actually see somebody like Cloudflare getting interested and excited about the project. You know, they're all about having, in some cases, their own technology stack. And so, having a browser that's not run by one of the big guys is maybe something they'd be interested in.

Andreas: Yeah, so we've spoken a little bit with one of the engineers on the team at Cloudflare that makes this anti bot software. And we have a little bit of a back and forth there, but there's just a lot of work on our side to do. And of course, not to mention any of these fingerprinting things, you know, where you can check, Hey, how fingerprintable is my browser?

We are possibly the most fingerprintable browser right now.

Jonathan: So, okay. So what's the origin story here at, at what point did you wake up and go, I'm going to build a browser from scratch. And like, what, what sort of my, where, what was your headspace? What, what kind of crazy headspace did you have to be in to make that decision?

Andreas: What, it never happened to you?

Jonathan: Not that in particular, no.

Andreas: Other crazy things, yes, but not that one. Right. Well, it all started when I decided to build an operating system from scratch. Which was its own crazy headspace that Somehow seems less crazy? In some ways, perhaps, yeah. In retrospect, it was a simpler time.

But yeah, so I was doing that for a while, starting in 2018, I built the Serenity operating system, Serenity OS, and it was a. Passion project for myself that I did as a sort of personal therapy to keep myself out of trouble. I used to have a pretty big problems with drugs, alcohol, stuff like that.

And I needed something to focus on that was healthy. And yeah, I went pretty hard on building an operating system, put it online. A lot of people liked it and started to work on it as well. And a community formed around this and the community just kept growing. And we became more and more ambitious with our scope and we would add things like well, initially it was pretty modest, you know, we would add networking and we thought that was a big deal, but And then, like, why don't we have a photo editing program, or a music production studio, or visual programming tools.

And it just kind of kept growing in scope. So it was natural one day that we just decided that we should have a browser also. And a big part of SerenityOS, the SerenityOS mindset, was that we do everything ourselves. Like, we don't borrow code from anywhere, we just do everything ourselves, because it's more fun that way.

And I'm sure every hacker ever can relate to that. Even if you wouldn't necessarily do it at work, you at least enjoy doing it at home. Sometimes. So yeah, that's sort of, that's sort of the where the whole thing started from was that we wanted a browser for SerenityOS because we were adding everything to it.

And I have a professional background in working on browsers. So I was working on the KDE browser Conqueror like 20 years ago. Since then I've worked at Nokia on their browsers and then at Apple on their browsers. So working on browsers was like my job for a long time. So it was very natural for me and once I started working on a browser again, I kind of just slipped into this old habit, and it became my main focus, and I kind of stopped working so much on the rest of the operating system, to the point where they became two distinct projects, and we forked because, The browser was getting so much attention and people were focusing exclusively on the browser.

And we were living in this GitHub repository together with an operating system, with a photo editing software and music software. It was just a really cramped space. So projects split up and now I work only on Ladybird. So the browser only. And we've sort of changed the rules a little bit. So as I mentioned, it used to be that we don't use third party software.

Like we do everything ourselves since we're in the US, but in Ladybird, we want to actually make a product that people could use. And so we have admitted to ourselves that we're going to have to use a little bit of third party software to, to make that happen in this lifetime. So Over the last couple of months since we forked, we've been integrating some of the sort of open source ecosystem for things like fonts graphics formats, audio formats stuff that would take us a long time to do ourselves exhaustively and correctly.

We can just like piggyback on, on the existing stuff.

Jonathan: And

Andreas: yeah, that's sort of the origin story. Yeah. And that's where we are today also.

Jonathan: So speaking of where you are today, I'm going to, I'm going to hand it over here in just a second, but I do want to ask first, like what, what is the state of ladybird?

How much of the web actually works? How much of it renders correctly? What, how, how frustrating is it to try to use it?

Andreas: Oh, well, it's pretty frustrating. I'll tell you that much. But we've been focusing on our own sort of Dogfooding use cases. So we tend to use a lot of

Aaron: dogfooding. It's champagning

Andreas: champagne.

Aaron: You're drinking your own champagne, not eating your own dog food. Right. Or maybe not. Don't be yet. As the case may be.

Andreas: Yeah. I don't know that that will work for me personally, but I can see how dog fooding is a bit of a weird term. Yeah, no, at Apple we always called it living on. So like you would be living on the latest build or living on Living on Ladybird.

And we're trying to do that. So we're focusing in on our own daily use cases, like using GitHub, using you know, Google and reading web specifications more than anything, really and getting communication software working like discord and stuff like that, like stuff that we use every day. And those kinds of things have been seeing pretty good development.

They're not super great yet. GitHub is, I think, the thing that we handle the best. But once you sort of stray outside of the things that our developers use every day, you're gonna probably run into issues. And It's, we've taken kind of a vertical slice approach to developing the browser where we've been just picking a website and then doing whatever it takes to make that site work as well as possible.

Which is, you know, one of many approaches. Another one approach you could take is you could pick a spec and then try to implement as much of that spec as possible. But we've been kind of going after these like, let's try to make this site actually work. And I, I often liken it to video game emulation, where you know, like if you're going to implement an emulator for the Super Nintendo or whatever, you're not going to sit there and implement every CPU instruction.

You're going to try to get Super Mario Kart to run or whatever. So we've been taking that same approach to getting websites working. Which means just to answer your question it's, it varies greatly depending on if the site you're visiting is something that we have worked on or not, but over time The, the rising tide lifts all boats or whatever, right, where because all of the fixes that we make for the various websites that we do work on, they are all in service of, of you know, supporting the web platform.

And it just happens that we pick sort of scattered random Parts of the web platform to implement at a time. But over time, our general standard support, our general support for the web has been improving. And recently we've also started running, there's this test suite called the web platform tests, which is a sort of a collaborative test suite that all different browser vendors contribute to.

So, you know, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Mozilla. And ourselves. Can contribute tests to this giant battery of like millions of tests. And we've been running that recently and I think I think we're passing like a bit more than half of the tests. And we're like actively working on passing more of the tests and Yeah, we, we definitely want to just get those numbers up.

But because we haven't been running the test before, it is there's a lot of low hanging fruit that we're dealing with. Yeah.

Aaron: Does it support Flash? That's a joke.

Andreas: It, it doesn't actually I mean, coming from

Jonathan: SerenityOS, that would be very on brand.

Andreas: A little bit, I guess. Oops. Oop. Somebody's got a dog.

It's all good. No, we don't support that.

Aaron: That was just a joke, but seriously, though, like, like, why, like, well, let me ask this first. Actually, I want to know, like, you kind of told the origin story. I want to know, like, why you think we need this number one. But before I even get there, the thing that I'm most curious about is how much interest have you received over the past, whatever, six months since the whole Google antitrust Yes.

Stuff has been going on. Have you like, you know, gotten way more interest all of a sudden, because of all of that?

Andreas: I don't know that I could really separate interest coming from that from interest for other reasons, but there's certainly been a lot of interest over the last couple of months, but we only went public with our.

Nonprofit in July. So, and the, the, I guess the latest Google rulings were pretty recently. And when people donate to our nonprofit they sometimes write a little message and there have been a lot of messages mentioning the, the state of affairs of the industry. Which I think, you know, it was positive and.

When I, when I talk about the origin story, it's, it's sort of it's sort of Ladybird just evolved out of hacker culture in some ways, but at the same time, it's also finding reasons to exist that aren't just organic. Because there, I think there is a need for a like a truly open browser that isn't connected to like the advertising industry, right?

And isn't necessarily depending on the exact same browser engine that everybody else uses, but like a new implementation that is standalone and doesn't have to do whatever Google wants at all, at all times. And yeah, it's, it's, it's a tricky little bit of a tricky subject because I've been in the browser industry for a long time.

I know people working out in every browser. There are a lot of great people everywhere. But at the same time, I think we should also acknowledge that the industry is a little bit messy. There are a lot of weird incentives. For, for the major browsers. And we are very keen to try a new approach to this where we are a nonprofit and we say very publicly, very explicitly that we will not take any kind of strings attached sponsorships.

So we're just going to. Do this with a small team you can sponsor us if you want, but you're not getting anything other than a logo on our website. We're not gonna, not gonna put your search engine in our default settings. We're not gonna send data your way of any kind. And We, we understand that this drastically limits our budget compared to the competition, but we think that this is something worth exploring because the world should have a browser that is independent of all of that.

And we kind of started in hacker culture and just organically grew a browser. But we find ourselves in a position where like. There's nobody else to attempt this. So why not us? Why couldn't we be the open community developed browser with no attachment to any advertising money?

Aaron: Right. Right. I think it's a, I think it's a very ambitious and very noble thing to do.

At the end of the day, it may be too early to tell this. I don't know. Are you going for, for parody at this point in terms of functionality or you know, when we get to 2026 and there's something that is on the download page for people to try will there be noticeable difference? What will the differentiation be between Chrome, let's say, and this, when it actually comes out?

What are you, what are you hoping to achieve?

Andreas: So what we're aiming for is that you can do your daily browsing with reasonable, Stability, reasonable performance. But it's unlikely that we will be faster than any of the other browsers because they have thousands of engineers to throw at performance.

We don't have that. We're not going to have a sophisticated developer tools that like help you write your CSS and develop your website. We're going to have some tools, but we just don't have the manpower to put all that together that they have, you know, a 10, 20 year lead on us. That's going to take time for us to backfill all of those things.

But in, in terms of just like rendering the web we are hoping to make something that will work well enough that a user can use our browser. And. Not think about the fact that they're using Ladybird. That's sort of the happy outcome is that you would just use this browser and it will work and you're not thinking about what browser you're using.

If you look under the hood or if you start to poke around in the menus and you try to try to do fancy things, you will quickly discover that we don't have those yet. But our hope is that it will be a decently well enough working browser for common websites that you're likely to visit. You know, your LinkedIn's, your Facebook's, your Gmail's.

All of those kind of things. And then It's seems very likely that we will spend, if that all works out really well, then we will spend the next year or two just fixing the last 5 percent of bugs. Because I think it's one of those things where like the first 90, 95 percent are going to take two years and the last 5 percent are going to take 10, 20 years.

Jonathan: Yeah, well, part of that's because the web is, is such a moving target. Like there's constantly new things getting added to the JavaScript standard, to the CSS standard, to the HTML itself with, you know, HTML five and all of that. Is there, you, you might get to the point to where you sort of caught up, but if, you know, if it's going to continue getting supported into the future, I don't think it's ever going to be done,

Andreas: right?

No, it never will be. This is definitely a project that can go forever. And. There are all the other actors. So, you know, Google, Apple, Mozilla, they are all actively adding new features to the web. We are passively just implementing what they've. Come up with maybe one day we will decide that we, we can think of some great features too.

But at the moment we're just keeping it cool, you know, just implementing what's there. I do wish that people would slow down a little bit with the feature development but we do also recognize that the web has to evolve. Maybe not as quickly as it does sometimes. Yeah.

Jonathan: Yeah. So, so Aaron asked about the the idea of differentiation between Ladybird and Firefox and Chrome, and there is something that comes to mind, and I wonder if this is, this is something that you guys have realized, if other companies have talked to you about it yet.

Both Firefox and Chrome are huge, and they're difficult to install and work with. Like, they're just unwieldy. Like, particularly Chromium, trying to do a compile of Chromium is just a pain. And you mentioned earlier that Ladybird is pretty easy to get building and to get installed. And I could see it having a life in, in some places, you know, like you've maybe even embedded just because it's so much easier to work with is, is that something that you've, you've kind of had conversations about?

Andreas: We're not ruling it out. I know that there's been some interest in the embedded use case, but we haven't really been targeting it. We, we've been playing a little bit cowboy like with memory usage and resource usage in general. Because it's easier to just allocate lots of memory than it is to be careful and Precise.

And a lot of people, you know, a lot of people look at Ladybird and they assume that because it's new and because it has a limited set of features, it must be using less resources, but that couldn't be further from the truth. We managed to implement fewer features with a lot more resources than the other browsers.

But of course that's because they've been optimizing. Their browsers for decades and we haven't. So we're catching up a lot on, on that. And I think the embedded use case requires a ton of pretty sophisticated optimizations that we're going to have to do anyway, but I don't know, I don't know what kind of interest there would be.

I guess that's something we'll, we'll find out eventually if somebody comes to us and says, Oh, I have this great idea for an embedded use case. We're definitely interested in helping them, but it's not something that we're pursuing ourselves. Like we're primarily interested in making a desktop browser for people and for ourselves is the, is the current target.

Jonathan: Yeah. I have a I have a Raspberry Pi in my hallway. That is my HVAC controller. And the idea there is that it's supposed to run a web browser to, to show, you know, your, the webpage of what your temperature is. And it's kind of a pain to work. I think, I think, I think. I don't remember if it's Chromium or Firefox is what it's supposed to be doing.

It's not working at the moment. I need to spend some, you know, some engineering cycles on that again to get it working again. I think it could be a lot of fun, because the webpage it runs is just Stupid simple. It'd be fun to try to do that with ladybird. So I, I am

Andreas: For that kind of thing. Yeah. I mean that shouldn't be terribly difficult.

We could probably throw in some command line switches for you to like start in full screen mode. There's no ui and stuff like that, right?

Jonathan: Yeah I could that seems like that would be a huge win. I could definitely see some some businesses wanting to use that. What's the what's the license? What license is ladybird under?

You

Andreas: We are under a two clause BSD license, so pretty permissive, very permissive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Not everybody's favorite, but I don't think there is a license that everybody would agree is the best ones. Right.

Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's the thing there. And what about platform support? Is this you know, X86 64 only, does it work on ARM?

Does it compile on RISC V you know, MIPS, there's a whole bunch of different architectures out there,

Andreas: right? So far it's been X86. 64 bit and arm 64 bit as well. So we run on Linux and Mac OS at the moment. And like, you know, the, the wide family of random Unix's as well. Since we come from, from SerenityOS originally we had pretty, like, generic Unix fundamentals in the project, so it's been easy to port it to, like, FreeBSD, Haiku you know, NetBSD, other systems like that but Windows is the big elephant in the room because it's so different and not Unix like that, you know, Windows support is something that frequently requested, but we don't have any active person working on it.

But this, this is probably not the podcast to, to complain about Windows support.

Jonathan: And, and somebody could run it like in, in the what, what are they called the, the Linux subsystem L S W. No, that's not right.

Aaron: Linux subsystem for Windows. Yeah. LSW.

Jonathan: That does not seem like the right acronym, but okay.

Okay. WSL. I think it's WSL. It's WSL.

Aaron: Windows subsystem for Linux. Yes,

Jonathan: which was always a confusing way to put that. It feels backwards. It has led to some discussion. Is Windows looking to replace the Windows NT kernel with Linux?

Aaron: Right. Right,

Jonathan: but if somebody wants to there's there there's that right? I'm assuming it runs just fine.

Andreas: It does it does Yeah, although it is probably the worst developer experience that we have so people who try to do it that way They're the they complain the most out of everybody that comes to us.

Aaron: You're really making a Trying to try to force a square peg in a round hole

Andreas: Indeed

Aaron: at that point Yeah, you can do it, but you know, why not just start up a virtualized environment in your Windows desktop and yeah, you know, just do just do that.

Just run Linux on top of it in virtualization. What I had a question and now we had that discussion. I'm not sure what it was. Well, I guess one thing that I was wondering is like, what are the biggest hurdles do you think knowing the space so well? Oh, I remember what the other one was too. But the first one is what are the biggest hurdles do you think that you have, like, this is just going to be impossible to build from scratch because.

You know?

Andreas: Oh, what do you think? I think I never really thought of it that way. Or maybe

Aaron: because everything's a standard. Sorry to interrupt you. Maybe because everything's a standard, you can just write to the standard and you don't have to worry about it. I don't know what the answer is there.

Andreas: Well, that's partly that.

So the standards are a lot better today than they ever have been because the various groups that work on the standards, they've been doing a really good job and backfilling all of the stuff that used to be unspecced, used to be sort of browser voodoo mystery stuff. Over the last 10, 15 years, specs have gotten really good.

So if you're writing a browser from scratch today specs will get you a long way, but there are still some things that you sort of have to figure out what other browsers do and then mimic that as well. And. That continues to be one of the more annoying challenges when the specs are lacking. So we ran into something just this week.

And not the first time, which is JavaScript date parsing. So if you look into JavaScript specification, the way that they explain date formats is that there is the ISO. 86 0 1 date format that the spec says you must support outside of that format. The implementation decides what additional formats to support and in practice every other browser supports like a giant collection of random date formats.

You know, like Jan one comma 1972 or Mm-Hmm, one, Jan, 1972. And. There's no list of these anywhere and people have tried to spec how this works, but it kind of just, they just get bogged down and, and they get tired of it and abandon the attempt. So even today, the spec doesn't explain how to parse dates.

And that's been pretty frustrating for us as a new engine. Because we frequently inquire, encounter new date formats that we haven't seen before. And then we have to implement parsing for that particular format. And now the, some websites starts working.

Aaron: Weird.

Andreas: And yeah, then there are, there are a couple of things like that.

A couple of touch points where you have to just look at what other browsers do because the specs, you're just kind of shit out of luck with the spec. But you know, to, to the credit of, of the standards groups, These number, the number of such things has been going down aggressively.

Jonathan: That puts you guys in an interesting position where you're, you're sort of doing an audit of the web specs.

It might be interesting to try to put all of that feedback into a document and, and make it out, put it out there, make it obvious, so hopefully someone could get fixed.

Andreas: Well, we are doing Ubuntu better and we are actively reporting and fixing bugs in the specifications. That is one of the great benefits of new engines coming on the scene is that we end up really putting the specs to the test because people have been iterating on these specs for years, but nobody ever tries to implement them from scratch.

And so we come along and we do that and we find like, well, this doesn't actually make sense. If you try to implement it it falls apart. That happens a lot. Regularly, I would say. We just come across some little thing where it doesn't Have internally consistent logic. And then we report bugs and it gets fixed and that's fantastic.

And it always feels so wholesome when I see somebody from our team go and find a bug in a spec, report it and it gets fixed and the whole ecosystem benefits. So yeah, we are very much auditing the specs and doing our best to be good citizens and, and reporting bugs in specs, or if you find bugs in other browsers, we try to report those as well.

Yeah. Try to be, you know, try to be good boys in the club. Very good.

Aaron: So what, my other question was in terms of the other open source OS vendors, Red Hat, Ubuntu, name your favorite one you know, since, since you've already described how this kind of grew up out of SerenityOS, like, do you, are you getting support from those folks more like you would expect you would, or no?

Andreas: Not really. I didn't really have any expectations though. So there's been some interest in packaging our stuff, but it's so early still, you know, we don't have anything that We could in good conscience, ask an end user to try. So even when distros do try to package our stuff, there's been like I think Arch has some package.

Nix has some package. And I see a lot of people trying these packages and they come to us and they complain that it doesn't work. And yeah, because this is not ready to be packaged. So. I have kind of mixed feelings about Distro's packaging pre alpha software. I think maybe they should just not do that.

It's not a service to anyone. It doesn't help their users and it doesn't help, it doesn't really help the projects they're packaging either. At the same time, it is also exposure for the project and like, you know, sends people our way, just you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, I wish that we would get to manage our own first impression, I guess.

Aaron: Yeah. I'm just surprised that, that, you know, those, those bigger players aren't like, you know, in your sponsors. And I guess there's a, there's an argument to be made like, Hey, most of the browsers are based on open source anyway. So, you know, I grew up in the days of Richard Stallman, well a little bit after when he was really going, you know, but in the 90s when he was still preaching, you know, all that stuff pretty heavily and everything has to be open source and you need a clean release of your distro and.

You know, back then it was proprietary browsers with proprietary code in them that you were fighting against. Now you could make the argument, well, good enough, right? There, everything's open source. It's good enough. We don't need this, but I am a little surprised that some of them haven't come on board and said, you know what we would like to, yes, well, there's a lot of open source out there, but we would like to separate ourselves from the commercial entities of the world, the Googles and the other players, because we don't want to be beholden to them.

So, yeah, I'm just kind of surprised that they're not in the list.

Andreas: Right. Well, they are very welcome to join the list. If anybody from, from any of these entities is listening, please get in touch. We would be happy to have them as sponsors, obviously. And I, I totally feel that way as you described that it's great that we have all these things that are open source.

I think that's a fantastic, amazing development that happened. The fact that all of the most important software on your computer today You can read the source code for it, modify it and publish your modifications. That's fantastic, but We can take it a little bit further than that, you know there are other things that matter too.

And it, I think it does matter where all the, this huge pile of money comes from. And it's kind of like this elephant in the room in a way it's been like that for a long time. I feel in the browser industry that there's been this browsers being developed by hundreds or thousands of engineers, and there's a huge pile of money.

But we don't really talk about like what that money comes from until recently when it's become much more public knowledge and people are starting to see like how much their search search queries are actually worth to these companies. Right. So yeah, that's been really, I think that's been really great.

And it's a really healthy thing that that information is out in the open so that people can start to maybe care about this in different ways other than only like, is it open source or not? There's like other, other parts of a spectrum here that we can care about. Yeah.

Aaron: Yeah. I, I kind of sarcastically.

wonder, like, you know, why did it take so long to get dark mode? And it was because it took that long for someone to figure out the, the, how to monetize or not how to monetize it, but the monetary value of dark mode, like, Oh, you know, we did these tests and we realized that when you have dark mode on, you spend an extra five hours a month, you know, in your browser.

And that means X, many more ads that you see. And that means, you know, so now we have to do dark

Jonathan: mode. And now we know why it's called dark.

Aaron: I, I have to have dark mode. I mean, my eyes aren't good anymore and dark mode really helps. And

Andreas: that's true. So it's

Aaron: like, do you have dark? Let's ask the question. Do you have dark mode yet?

Andreas: We have something like dark mode. So CSS has like a preferred color scheme properties these days. So websites can advertise that, like if the user prefers dark mode, then the sites should look this way. And otherwise it should look some other way. The problem is that there's a large portion of the internet that doesn't specify how it should look like in dark mode. And they kind of assume that the background will be white by default.

The text will be black by default. And if you start to violate these assumptions, then you break some content. So that part is messy. But we, we do have sort of state of the art dark mode. Yes. And I hope that it's something that will evolve further so that even older websites can display consistently in a dark way.

But it kind of depends on heuristics at the moment where we sort of have to just take a guess at what would be a great way to dark modify this website. Right.

Jonathan: I see on the website you talk about things like having a runway of funding and some other sort of business esque terms. And I'm curious, is this a business for you guys? Is it more like a non profit? Like, what does that side of it look like? What's your thought process there?

Andreas: It is completely a nonprofit.

We have no intention of ever selling anything other than maybe a t shirt and a coffee mug or something. But that's a nonprofit. We are a 501 C3 registered in California and we take. What's it called unrestricted donations only so You you can't give us money and tell us what we should do.

You can you can just sponsor and trust us to to do what's right and You know that that does Exclude a certain type of sponsor from ever wanting to support us, but it's okay. You know, we don't, we don't need all the money in the world. We believe, and I believe from experience that a small team can build a competent browser.

It's just you have to focus and you have to be more selective about what features you do. And. Stuff takes time. There's real elbow grease involved, but it should be doable. And yeah, on the sort of business side, there is no business model. It is either we get this thing funded by donations and sponsorships or it falls apart.

And it's a, you know, we're kind of going out on a limb here taking a chance, but we're hoping that We'll be able to deliver something in an alpha version that will make people see, okay, there's something real here, something worth getting behind and sponsoring so that we can actually have this thing for, for our species for and if we can, if we can get it to that point where people see that this is something worth sponsoring then we think that we can continue it and, and perpetuity funded in that way.

That's at least that's what we're hoping to achieve.

Jonathan: What does the community look like? Do you have people on the outside sending in patches? Obviously, bug reports. People come in and complain about things. You can't stop that if you wanted to. But, are you getting patches sent in? Are there outside entities?

Are there any outside businesses working on this? Saying, man, it would be nice if Here's the code to do this thing.

Andreas: Sure. Yeah. We have a fairly large community. So I think in terms of like active developers, we are seven full time engineers right now paid, I think. Oh, wow. That's impressive. So that's pretty good.

Yeah. And and they're all people I hired who were previously open source volunteer contributors. So it's, it's been lovely to be able to take and like give jobs to all these people that showed up and worked on, on Ladybird.

Jonathan: Absolutely.

Andreas: And it's, I would say it's even like one of the coolest things I've ever experienced was just to be able to do something for fun for a long time and then give people jobs doing it.

Yes. But yeah, so, so a bunch of us now are full timers, myself included. And we also have a, an open source community. I think we're usually maybe like 30, 40 active people like contributing multiple times a month. And then a long tail of people. Contributing either, you know, one once in a blue moon or once ever.

So, but it's, it's been growing slowly. And I think historically like working on browsers, as you mentioned, like it's really complicated to build Chromium or to build Firefox and because it's been a really complicated thing it's been a little bit hard for people to get into it, but Our project is fairly easy to get into.

It's a lot smaller than the existing browsers. It builds faster easier to, to learn. So we're welcoming new developers all the time who are sort of working on their first browser project ever. And that's been really positive as well. So I'm hoping to turn them into more frequent contributors.

And I'm also hoping that we will be able to fundraise a little bit more so we can hire a couple more contributors to be employees and But yeah, you mentioned business lingo on the website about runway. And indeed we are trying to be careful with, with the said runway because. We recognize that our funds are limited and the classic startup thing to do would, I guess, would be to hire as many people as we can right now and burn the money for the next six months and see what happens.

But that's not really compatible with our view on how this should be handled. So yeah, we're holding ourselves to a strict, like there has to be two years of salaries in the bank. At all times, because or we should aim to have that before we hire anybody new. Right?

Jonathan: Sure.

Andreas: And if that slows us down, then it slows us down.

But I don't want to, like, when I give somebody a job, I feel like I should It's my responsibility to make sure that that person has that job for a longer time. Then six months and us just burning through the Capitol to, to go faster.

Jonathan: Yeah.

What does the leadership structure look like? Are you a BDFL?

The Benevolent Dictator for life? Or maybe not for life?

Andreas: I don't know. So I was that. I've been a BDFL, but evidently not for life. I was that of SerenityOS until we forked, and then I sort of transferred ownership of SerenityOS to the group of maintainers that That I had previously invited to, to, to do that.

And and Ladybird, I think I'm not really the BDFL. I'm just the the president of the nonprofit that runs the project, but really the project is run in practice by the nonprofit and by the people that work on it, and then Code contributions are sort of quality gated by a group of maintainers, but there isn't any formal structure outside of that.

And I think it's something that will evolve and formalize a bit more as we get closer to, to releasing stuff. Or as, as our organization structure grows, but at the moment it's very like flat structure. Everybody's welcome to work on everything. Nobody is like.

We, everybody just kind of finds the thing that matters for making the web work in the browser and then they focus on that. It's possible that we will change that. We're kind of in a luxurious period right now where you can sort of like you, you, you throw a bug fix anywhere in the browser and it's, there's a real chance that it fixes some important website.

So And the future is going to be, you're going to have, you're going to have to look harder for valuable things to fix. But yeah.

Jonathan: Yeah. Interesting stuff. Aaron, did you want to jump back in? We're getting close to the, close to time. You want to make sure we're getting

Aaron: close. Like, I guess I don't want to jump too far into the weeds with this one, but maybe I'll just open up the can of worms anyway, and we'll see where it goes.

Jonathan: Just crack it. Let the, let the worm air out and not near the worms.

Aaron: Yeah. Sometimes these questions go in, in, in weird directions, take a long time to answer, especially for novices like me. But the question is architecturally speaking, like, what would you say are the biggest differences or even like some of the things that you, that you're seeing maybe some indications of like, this is going to be a game changer.

In terms of technology and how we're developing this, because we don't have to conform to. whatever chromium webkit, but we're able to do it this way. And that makes a big difference.

Andreas: Right. Architecturally, what are some advantages? I guess one thing is that we have a lot of flexibility right now because we're not big and complicated yet.

And there are a lot of features that we haven't implemented yet. And so we don't have like a gigantic code base that has to be retrofitted to do. Some some like security mechanism, for example. So like every other browser, they started out as a single process browser. But we started building our browser after multiprocess browsing was a thing.

So, we were able to get that stuff in pretty early. And as a result, we don't have a code base that, I mean, we were single process originally, but we were able to make ourselves multiprocess pretty quickly because we didn't have a gigantic code base with millions of lines of code that had been shipping in a single process way, you know, for decades.

And then we had to retrofit multiprocessing into that. And I, I think we have a lot of opportunities still to do interesting architectural things for, for security, for stability, for performance that are much harder for other browsers because they have so much code that, that just has to be changed in complicated ways, let's say.

Yeah, that's, I think that's our biggest opportunity.

Jonathan: Yeah, pretty cool. Why, why C Why with a new browser? Did you not write it in Rust or Go or some other everybody's favorite language?

Andreas: Right. Well, I guess there's no language that everybody loves, but everybody loves to hate C lately. And we started, I started SerenityOS in C because as I mentioned, there was a, it was a personal therapy project.

So I just. So the language that I knew the best and was just doodling around. And then I didn't mean to, but, you know hundreds, thousands of people ended up wanting to work on it also. And then it kind of just you know, I got a little bit out of my hands. And now we have this gigantic code base written in C plus plus.

And we have a lot of things going on and we want to find a way forward where we can You know, feel like we're doing our best by our users in the future, that like we're doing our best to deliver something that's safe and secure. So in practice, that means that we have to, we probably have to evolve past C in some way.

Because C is not evolving towards safety as, as fast as we would like. And so I don't know. We've looked at a bunch of the different languages recently and ended up with Swift as a secondary language to introduce into the code base. Not everybody's favorite choice, but we did this experiment where I asked people like, please try to implement some part of the browser in a couple of different languages and then tell me which one you like the best.

And. Everybody came back liking Swift the best and fair enough. It was a, it was an empirical process and I had the same experience. I liked it the best out of the languages that we messed with. And so we are aiming to introduce that now with the new version of Swift that is coming out in the next couple of weeks.

And the idea there is to have a safe language that we can incrementally introduce into the code base because Swift can talk to C and vice versa. And that's kind of, that's kind of our plan there, but it's going to take time to do that. But it's something that we feel like we have to do something because.

You know, safety is a thing people do want to hack your browser and we probably have more bugs than we know. I'm sure we have more bugs than we know. And if we could like systematically prevent many of them by using a safe language, that's something that we, we definitely need to pursue. But yeah, we are still like on square one with that because we're depending on the next version of Swift because it's the first one that can actually understand our super modern C that we've been using.

Yeah, so that's kind of where that's at. And I know that there are a lot of languages that people always ask me like, why didn't you use my favorite language? Or why didn't you use this language? And I just never engaged with that because I feel like Nothing good ever comes of, like, criticizing somebody's favorite language.

Right?

Jonathan: Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. Have you, have you been in So first off I've got to think there there are people out there to go Swift they went with Swift. Oh, they're selling out to Apple. That must be what that is Yeah, you've gotten much pushback from that.

Andreas: I Have been told by many people that like congratulations on the Apple money

But No, we haven't the the We were acknowledged in the sense that I think the the head of the DevTools department at Apple tweeted at us saying something like, cool. But that was it. Yeah, no, we're not, we're not selling out. It's just, it just so happens that Swift has a really compelling story as like a C plus plus successor language.

Like that's something that they're investing in. Yeah. Sort of this narrative of like, Hey, do you have a huge C code base and wish you could be safe, but it's just too much to just rewrite everything? Here's Swift. You can rewrite incrementally. That's really compelling to us. So.

Jonathan: That's interesting from the kind of the standpoint of looking at the language too.

This is something we're seeing with Rust as well, where they're putting Rust in the kernel. It's forcing Rust to grow up. And. If they gain traction with that, with Swift, trying to get other C developers to use it. And maybe Ladybird will be part of the story too. Putting it in use, they're going to find places where, oh, this thing in Swift is not working quite as well as we thought it did.

Or there's a bug in trying to make this work. I think that could be really interesting going forwards, as you guys I'm assuming you will try to, you know, kind of work closer with the devs from the Swift language. And it should be a good thing for like both projects.

Andreas: I think so. We've already found and reported a number of bugs and have had a good experience interacting with a Swift team so far.

So that's, that's really positive. And I think it's absolutely the case that, you know, whenever you take a language and bring it into a new domain where it hasn't been tried before, you're going to find tons of interesting and. Not interesting problems. And we've had a lot of not interesting ones also.

I will mention like trying to get CMake to understand how to build.

Jonathan: Oh

Andreas: it's not very interesting.

Jonathan: No, it's just pain working with compiling tool changes. Just pain.

Andreas: Yeah. Thankfully though, we have somebody who, who derives. Some amount of pleasure from, from working with build systems. So I'm really grateful that we have Andrew who's been figuring that out.

But yeah, no, we're, I think a lot of good things will come with that. Just like you mentioned with Rust and Linux and everybody has to grow up a little bit, everybody has to compromise a little bit But usually something good can come out of that.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Andreas: I think it will be the same for us.

Jonathan: Absolutely. Is there anything coming down the pike that you are particularly excited about in Ladybird that you want to want to plug, let folks know about?

Andreas: Well semi related, I'm running a a coding jam this weekend called Browser Jam.

Jonathan: Perfect.

Andreas: Where people are invited to come and we're all gonna write a new browser over the weekend.

Oh. And I don't think it's ever been done before. People do game jams where they make games over a weekend. And I We thought that we could do a browser jam where everybody makes a browser. So the idea is, you'll show up on Friday afternoon, and we will give you a piece of HTML, and then you have a weekend to build a browser that can render that HTML.

We'll see how that goes. But if you're interested, you can go to github. com slash browser jam, and you'll find the information there. That's great. That's a lot of fun. That's

Aaron: kind of fun. I mean, you know, that's what, I mean, that's what I like about doing that kind of stuff with HTML. ESP 8266s and 32s in the Arduino, like, stack just to like, you know, you don't need much there, right?

Kind of like the project you were talking about before, Jonathan, where I just need to read an HTML page and maybe some little JavaScript and make it work, you know? And if you can get to that point and understand how it all works, that's a great learning project. I think it's

Jonathan: Absolutely. It may be early in the project for this question, but is there something that someone has done with Ladybird that just really surprised you?

Like just off the wall or odd or, or other otherwise surprising that somebody has used it for?

Andreas: It might be a little early for that. Yeah. But I am frequently surprised whenever somebody gets some really complicated website working. I am just so surprised that we're already at the point where we can like do Facebook or we can Log into YouTube or things like that So it's more like i'm just continually surprised at the progress that we're making it's been really inspiring and especially because i'm Maybe not.

Yeah. We don't have a lot of people with previous browser experience on the team. It's me. And then a couple of people have been contributing a little bit here and there, but most of us are like complete noobs at this and just sort of learning as we go. And the fact that relatively or very inexperienced team has been able to assemble a browser of, of even this quality level in this timeframe is I think amazing.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Andreas: And I'm really proud of, of the team and, and it's been awesome to get to see people grow. Like we've had people join the project when they were like 16 and they're now in university and still hanging out and chatting and like fixing stuff. And that's been a, it's been a lovely process to witness.

Jonathan: Yeah. Question from the chat room, mashed potato wants to know, is anyone live streaming the browser jam event? Is there some place where we can watch people code in real time?

Andreas: That's possible. I don't know. So we're, we have a discord server where people are coordinating a little bit, making teams and stuff like that.

And I saw some people were talking about the possibility of live streaming. So if you're interested in that join the discord it's on the github. com slash browser jam. And yeah, see if, if somebody there is streaming, hopefully somebody will.

Jonathan: Sounds fun. We are, we're getting down towards the very end of the show.

Is there something that you, you wanted to mention to folks that we didn't ask about? Did we miss anything?

Andreas: No, I think you covered a lot of the stuff that's important. And I'm glad that I'm glad that we talked about the issues that exist in the industry. I feel like it's easy to, To forget to acknowledge that, but it feels like we're in this new reality now where we acknowledge that browsers have been funded by Google and it's no longer a secret that only some people know about, but like it's something that everybody understands now and we can start to look.

Real solutions to, to that. And I think we're trying our best to offer one possible solution. And we would be very happy if, if people experiment with other solutions. I don't think that Ladybird has to be the only new browser. I know that there are some other. Up and coming browser projects as well.

There is the Servo project they're doing browser engine in, in Rust. Mm-Hmm. . And they're very big on sort of the embedded use case. And I'm glad that they're exploring in that direction. And I think there's room for more. I'm, I'm really hoping that there will be sort of a, a new age of new browsers.

I guess that would be really, really fun. As a, as a fan of browsers, I would love to see that.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Andreas: Yeah, so I guess shout outs to Servo for for also going down this path.

Jonathan: It, no, no, that you mentioned them. I'll have to see if I can reach out and get somebody from Servo on the show too. Cause that would be a lot of fun.

All right. So before we let you go,

Aaron: one thing before you drop, what's the best way, easiest way for people to get involved or the best way to get

Andreas: involved? Right, of course. So the easiest thing you want to start with going to our GitHub repository. So it's at github. com slash ladybird browser and join our discord server.

That's really where all of the day to day coordination happens. People like working on stuff together or discussing bugs. It's fairly pleasant space. People are very nice, welcoming, professional. And as I mentioned, like we're welcoming new developers all the time, so you won't stand out or be weird, even if you don't know what you're doing.

Join our Discord and come chat. And what I usually tell people to do if they don't know where to start is to Build the browser, and then go to a website that you made yourself. Hopefully you have something. Hopefully it's pretty simple. And see if it works correctly. If it doesn't try to figure out why.

And see what you can learn from it. And maybe you can figure out how to fix it, but at the very least you can make a pretty good bug report even if you can't figure out what to do. Yeah, and then take it from there.

Jonathan: Yeah, very cool. All right. Last two questions that we are required to ask or the chat room gets mad at us.

And that is what's your favorite text editor and scripting language?

Andreas: Oh, well, it's, I don't know what my favorite text editor is, Vim. And I, it's just muscle memory, I think, even if I, I've tried to install other text editors, but I never used them because to start a text editor, I just type Vim. So there's that.

But I, I tend to program in IDEs. So like I do like in practice, a lot of my text editing of source code, I end up doing in like the JetBrains IDEs or VS code or something like that. But on the command line, it's always Vim. And then scripting language. Oh, scripting language, right. Probably has to be JavaScript, just because I keep working on it every day.

And, or no, I'm going to tell the truth. My favorite scripting language is PHP. And I'm not ashamed.

Jonathan: Well, having a background as a C programmer, PHP is kind of friendly towards the whole C style of bracketing and all of that. So that's not terribly surprising.

Andreas: Yeah, true, true. But it's terribly out of fashion, I feel like.

Jonathan: Oh, it is. It is very much out of fashion. But PHP still holds a place in my heart as well.

Andreas: Yeah, it's like, it's like Perl, but slightly more modern. Just slightly. Tiny bit. Tiny bit. Yeah.

Jonathan: All right. Hey, this has been awesome, and we sure appreciate you being here Andreas, and thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for telling us about the project. Yeah, thanks for having me guys. Yeah All right.

What do you think?

Aaron: Yeah, it's pretty cool. I love learning about these projects early on, you know, and having the opportunity to kind of get in on the ground floor, so to speak. You know, I often, I often tell When they ask people, when people ask me, what, what is Floss Weekly? You know, I have to explain it.

I'm like, well, you know, we talked to the Kubernetes guys, like when they were still at Google and the project was just getting started. Like that's a big part of what. Over the years, just organically, I think has happened because people want to come on the show and talk about their project when it's in the early stages.

So it just kind of works out organically that way. But the benefit for us and for listeners and viewers is they get to hear about these projects and get involved. You know, on in the kind of the early stages and

Jonathan: yeah, I think this

Aaron: is another great opportunity like we we We've just come to the point where everything has consolidated so much in the browser space that we just need another alternative if for no other reason than to have another alternative.

So we're not locked in. So yeah, I think it's a great project. You know, I guess stay tuned, right? Like either, either go try it if you're the type that. Likes to build things, build your own software, then go try it. And if not, then wait a little bit and come back and check it out in, you know, another six months or a year when there's a beta version or something.

Jonathan: Yeah. You know, I was thinking as we were talking so much of computing now is just the web. Right. And so we used to talk about, you know, your favorite. We still, we asked everybody that's on the show, like, what's your favorite text editor? We do so much work on the web. Maybe we need to start asking people what their favorite browser is.

But to kind of carry that, that thought through, you have different text editors for different purposes. And I could, I could see a future where you have a bunch of different browsers for different purposes that, you know, are not all just reskins of Chromium, like we started the show talking about. So yeah, no, I think this is, I think this is really cool.

And I really do think that there are going to be Some really interesting, maybe niche, but some really interesting use cases where it's going to make a lot of sense to run Ladybird or Servo rather than Firefox or Chromium. Yeah,

Aaron: yeah. I like the ones you came up where the, the one that you came up with, and I think that branches out into others where you need to run a kiosk or you need to run something and you don't want to be encumbered with maybe even the fear of the unknown, right?

Like who knows what. Chrome is going to do or Chromium is going to do how it's going to change. Right. You need something stable. You need something that's going to be, you know, you can count on. And yeah. And, or I just want to, I just want to run a kiosk, like you said.

Jonathan: Yeah, definitely something to be said for that.

All right. Did you want to plug anything, Aaron? I know you've got that, you've got at least a YouTube channel, which you'll mention.

Aaron: Yes. I will give you a preview quickly of an upcoming video. It is September. So I've got two channels. I've got the main channel, which is RetroHackShack on YouTube. And I've got RetroHackShack After Hours, where I do e waste Wednesday and a bunch of like smaller, like maybe slightly less interesting to the broader audience kind of things all around vintage computing.

But on the main channel, what I've been working on for months, people don't know behind the scenes how long these history video takes, history videos take, but I'm working on a history video. It'll be relatively short, but on the history of the Tandy

Jonathan: 1000.

Aaron: So the Tandy 1000 was kind of. They kind of fell into this position of being a major player and having a really successful product because of the failure of IBM's

Jonathan: PCjr.

Aaron: So it was really interesting history where Tandy came along and they said, Hey, we're going to make a PCjr competitor. And then PCjr got discontinued. And they just happened to have like all the features that people wanted at that point and ended up being a super huge important and for a lot of people either their first computer, their first family computer, you know.

So that video should be coming out I'm hoping by this weekend, fingers crossed, but they just, those history videos, you have to go in and get credits for all the images and all that kind of stuff. And it just, it just, it just takes a long time to do. So yeah, be on the lookout for that.

Jonathan: And it's RetroHackShack and RetroHackShack After Hours.

Aaron: Yep. Yep. RetroHackShack everywhere. Just search for RetroHackShack on your social things or on YouTube and you'll find it.

Jonathan: Yeah, awesome. Alright, I do want to let folks know that next week it's, we're back to Java! And it's JBang, which it lets students, educators, and professional developers create, edit, and run self contained, source only Java programs with unprecedented ease, which, Sounds like we're doing Java for scripting, which that'll be really interesting to talk about looking forward to that.

So that's next week. Make sure and catch that you can follow me. Of course on Hackaday, we've got, well, that's the home of Floss Weekly. That's also where my security column goes live every Friday morning. There's also the untitled Linux show that's over at twit. tv at the twit network. And we have a lot of fun there talking about what's going on with Linux, the news, some open source stuff there as well.

And then. You can also keep an eye on my YouTube channel. You can search for me. I think it's Jay Bennett at YouTube. And some fun stuff mainly around Meshtastic, which we're about to have a big 2. 5 release the, the first alpha of that come out as some really exciting stuff there. So check that out.

We sure appreciate everybody that's here, both that watch us and listen to us live and those that get us on the download. Make sure to come back next week and we will see you then on Floss Weekly.