Ladybird Browser: Building a New Engine from Scratch
Ladybird is attempting one of computing's hardest challenges: building a modern browser engine from zero. The project has backing from Cloudflare, Shopify, and GitHub's co-founder—serious technologists who believe browser monoculture threatens the open web. It's pre-alpha, buggy, and slow, but that's expected when you're competing with decades-old codebases from Google, Apple, and Mozilla.
Most engineers would call it impossible: building a browser engine from scratch in 2025. No Chromium code. No WebKit. No Gecko. Just a small team taking on Google, Apple, and Mozilla's decades of work. Cloudflare just committed $100,000 to make it happen.
The Browser Engine Problem Nobody Talks About
Three engines control the entire web platform: Blink (Google), WebKit (Apple), and Gecko (Mozilla). Almost every browser you use is a derivative of one of these. Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Opera all run on Blink. Safari uses WebKit. Firefox stands alone with Gecko. Companies like Cloudflare, Shopify, and 37signals are funding alternatives because this concentration creates dependencies they'd rather not have.
Ladybird is building a completely independent web engine that doesn't touch any of these codebases. GitHub co-founder Chris Wanstrath seeded the project with $1 million from his family. That's the kind of money you put in when you think browser monoculture is a problem worth solving.
What It Takes to Build a Browser Engine in 2025
Ladybird's codebase is roughly 1/50th the size of Chromium, 1/20th of Gecko, and 1/15th of WebKit. Google, Apple, and Mozilla have spent decades building engines that power billions of devices. Their browsers handle millions of edge cases, optimize for hardware you've never heard of, and implement web standards that run to thousands of pages.
Ladybird is competing with all of that from zero. No code reuse. Custom JavaScript engine. Custom rendering pipeline. Everything built from scratch. Most alternatives fork existing engines or wrap them in different UI. This doesn't.
Ladybird's Approach: No Code Reuse, Just Craft
The zero-dependency philosophy sets Ladybird apart from other independent efforts. Unlike Servo—Mozilla's experimental Rust-based engine that serves as an embedded component—Ladybird is building a full consumer-grade browser with no existing engine code.
That means writing everything: HTML parsing, CSS layout, DOM implementation, networking stack, JavaScript execution. The team is tackling one of computing's hardest problems with full awareness of the complexity involved. They're not claiming to have solved it yet.
Who's Betting on This (and Why)
Cloudflare's platinum sponsorship isn't charity. The company said they want to accelerate development on critical features including JavaScript support, rendering improvements, and compatibility with modern web applications. When you operate at internet scale, having genuine alternatives to the dominant engines matters.
Shopify and 37signals joined the funding roster for similar reasons. These companies understand web infrastructure. They've built businesses on top of browser platforms controlled by three vendors. Ladybird represents a bet that browser diversity is infrastructure worth investing in, even if the payoff timeline stretches across years.
Current State: Pre-Alpha Means Pre-Alpha
Ladybird is slow and sometimes too buggy for daily use. The JavaScript engine has security vulnerabilities in heap allocation reuse that the team is actively addressing. Performance trails both established browsers and Servo by significant margins.
These are expected growing pains when you're building something this complex from scratch. The alpha release is scheduled for 2026, marking this as a multi-year journey. The team hasn't oversold current capabilities, which builds credibility with the engineering community.
Why Systems Engineers Are Watching This
Browser engines are infrastructure. Whether Ladybird reaches feature parity with Chrome or not, attempting this validates that browser diversity is worth pursuing. The project has 57,963 GitHub stars and is trending because systems programmers understand both the technical complexity and the value of having options.
Success doesn't mean "beating Chrome." Success means proving that a small, focused team with serious backing can build something real enough that developers consider it a viable alternative for specific use cases. That's the bar—and it's still hard.