While there may be plethora of web browsers on the market, the all-new Ladybird is one that stands apart as “truly independent.”
Among the many web browsers on the market, the majority of them fall into three well-defined camps: they use rendering engines based on or related to Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Apple Safari. In some cases, various browsers go far beyond that, relying heavily on open source code from existing browsers and making only minor modifications.
Ladybird breaks from that trend by starting from the ground up and not using any code from existing web browsers. At the same time, the browser is based on web standards. Ladybird started out as part of the SerenityOS project, a UNIX-like operating system. Ladybird was split off from that project so its creators could focus on the browser.
The focus of the Ladybird project is to build a new browser engine from the ground up. We don’t use code from Blink, WebKit, Gecko, or any other browser engine.
For historical reasons, the browser uses various libraries from the SerenityOS project, which has a strong culture of writing everything from scratch. Now that Ladybird has forked from SerenityOS, it is no longer bound by this culture, and we will be making use of 3rd party libraries for common functionality (e.g image/audio/video formats, encryption, graphics, etc.)
We are already using some of the same 3rd party libraries that other browsers use, but we will never adopt another browser engine instead of building our own.
The creators say Ladybird is an important project since it represents freedom from the advertising models that dominate the existing web browser market, as GitHub founder and Ladybird co-founder Chris Wanstrath points out:
Today, every major browser engine is open source, which is wonderful, but there’s still one issue: they’re all funded by Google’s advertising empire. Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, and Opera all use Google’s Chromium. Apple receives billions to make Google the default search engine in Safari, and Firefox has a similar deal where they receive hundreds of millions each year.
The web is too essential to have one primary source of funding, and too important to have that source of funding be advertising.
That’s why I believe that Ladybird, a new browser written completely from scratch, and the Ladybird Browser Initiative, a nonprofit funded exclusively by donations whose sole purpose is the development of the Ladybird browser, can make a difference.
The world needs a browser that puts people first, contributes to open standards using a brand new engine, and is free from advertising’s influence.
Wanstrath says his family has pledged $1 million to help support Ladybird development. The developers are targeting an Alpha release in Summer 2026 for Linux and macOS, with more platforms to follow.
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