True open source web browsers on Windows, and MacOS, are dead in the water.

This is because of the lack of Widevine CDM, and the majority of people wanting to stream stuff using services like Tidal, Netflix and Spotify.

They will also want to use a single browser for everything, which in practice means Edge, Chrome, Firefox or Safari.

Ladybird will very likely not have access to Widevine, because of the cost, requirements, and Google as gatekeeper. Some developers of small opensource Chromium/Electron based browsers also earlier tried and Google simply said no.

And even if they have reverse engineered the CDM extension (which will make Widevine work, not unlike a small hack/workaround with regard to Chromium and Chromium forks) it will not work because all browsers using Widevine on those two platforms require something called VMP (Verified Media Path) which is, as far as I understand, a certificate and verification library supplied by Widevine embedded within the browser.

Without VMP embedded in the browser streaming from popular commercial providers such as Netflix will not work on Windows and MacOS, even when the Widevine extension is in fact active.

Believe me, I checked.

IMO all of this is not only set in motion to (try to) protect from piracy, but also to kill any serious competition from small parties like LadyBird, and to keep the browser market firmly in the hands of the likes of Microsoft, Apple and Google. Because who will use a browser in 2025 unable to stream content, or without hacks at 720p maximum? (looking at you, Brave and Netflix)

This also means that browsers like Brave, Vivaldi and Firefox are in fact not true opensource browsers because their respective public repositories do not contain the assets needed for VMP signing.

On another note, at this moment the majority of people should be glad that browsers with corporate backing and enough income like Brave (whatever you might think of Brendan Eich's ideas), Vivaldi and Firefox exist because without them you would have no serious choice on Windows or MacOS at all.

If they'd just have used an Electron stack from the get-go, it would have been cross platform already

Alpha is supposed to come out next year. Until then they don’t want to offer downloads so people who don’t understand software development don’t download highly unstable pre-alpha software and judge it based on that. Those kind of first impressions can stick.

I use these on Mac https://sizeof.cat/project/ladybird-builds/

Its pre alpha, you can build it from source.

A large amount of tests includes rendering text and basic elements correctly, which is an incredibly difficult problem. Getting JS to render right is one thing, but preventing bugs like "Google Maps works but completely breaks when a business has õ in its name" requires a lot of seemingly useless tests to pass.

Fixing a few rendering issues could fix all of the tests that depend on correct rendering but break, so I think the rate at which tests are fixed makes a lot of sense.

https://wpt.fyi/results shows that even the big players have room for improvement, but also has a nice breakdown of all the different kinds of tests that make up the score.

>We’ve continued to make solid progress on WPT this month. There has been a significant increase in passing subtests, with 111,431 new passing subtests bringing our total to 1,964,649. The majority of this increase comes from a large update to the test suite itself, with 100,751 subtests being added - mainly due to the Wasm core tests being updated to Wasm 3.0.

They fixed ~10k tests, but indeed this month is a bit of an exception as there were lots of new tests added.

They've started to gradually use Swift in the last year or so.