Andreas Kling, founder of the web browser Ladybird, announced a change in the project development process. Ladybird will now stop accepting public pull requests and will move to pushing changes into the codebase only through maintainers. All already open public pull requests will be closed. Source code will continue to be distributed under the BSD license. Messages about problems, vulnerabilities and site testing will continue to be accepted without changes. Outside enthusiasts will also be able to participate in discussions related to standards support and project architecture.
The decision to stop accepting public pull requests is attributed to the preparation for the first alpha release, necessitating a stricter distribution of responsibility for changes. According to the creators of Ladybird, code should only be accepted from trustworthy individuals willing to take personal responsibility for each line of code, assessing whether it aligns with the project’s architecture and can be supported in the future.
One of the concerns raised about accepting changes from multiple sources is the potential decrease in trust in patch authors, given the rise of AI-generated changes. This shift also removes the need for patch sizes to align with development time and labor costs, simplifying attackers’ activities in introducing hidden vulnerabilities into the code.
In a recent May report on the project’s development, notable achievements were highlighted:
- The content scrolling code has been moved to a separate compositing process with an asynchronous work model.
- The API Media Source Extensions has been enabled by default, improving streaming video performance.
- A system for caching JavaScript bytecode on disk has been added.
- A JIT compiler for WebAssembly, based on Cranelift, has been implemented.
- A new unwanted content blocker based on adblock-rust has been introduced.
- The HTML parser has been rewritten in Rust.
- An incremental