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this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2025
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Is it still independent?
Yes, and their donations are limited to 100k a year per corporation/organization, so there cant be a company who comes, donates 20million and then tries to gain control of them through money
Interesting that they did that.
Yes, it is still independent. Cloudflare is just one of the three Platinum sponsors. Other two are Shopify and FUTO. Proton is also a sponsor, but in Gold tier, iirc.
Shopify being a sponsor makes it highly suspect instantly.
Andreas (lead engineer) has told the story of how he got that money - they just happen to know each other and $100k is peanuts for the Shopify founders.
But you’re right to suspect anything of the sort!
I think It's on their charter that no matter how much corporate money they'll get they'll never accept any outside influence just the same. The donators are amply warned to not expect anything other than development as usual or faster.
they stated on their website this project will remain independet and that donators don´t have a say in how this is being developed
No browser with third party investors can be really independent, they always will obey more the interests of the investors as on those from the users. Anyway the guys from Ladybird have balls of steel to develope an browser engine from scratch in an market saturated of browsers of any kind and a brutal competition, this would had more sense 15 years ago, but not now. Good luck, maybe in 2029-2030 there is an good browser multi-platform with all the needed infrastructure, servers and extensions, but I'll see to believe.
How can you say it's saturated when chrome has an effective monopoly. If you look at browser engines, there's basically only 3 for desktop, with one of them targeting only Macs.
As said, there are currently three engines + two forks of these (Gonanna and Qt), except some basic render engines from text only browsers (Links, Lynx and some others), but over hundred different browsers which use these engines, + almost 70 abandoned ones, because outdated engines and others which also tried to develope an own engine. This is what I mean with saturated. It's nice to try to release a browser with a new independent engine, but if there are not enough users which also use it, it's a death born child. For some products the market is limited. Make it eg. sense to release a new OS? There also existing only 4, Unix, Unixbased like Windows or Mac and Linux with tons of distros. It's not only the browser engine, in over 20 years there are also growed complete infrastructure arround these engines, dedicated plug ins, extensions, etc, which don't exist for a new indie engine, precisely because other browsers, which also tried to release a new engine, before Ladybird, are currently all death. Sad, but you need also a minimum of infrastructure for an browser and which offer also somewhat more as only a new engine. It need security and privacy measures, inbuild or with extensions/plug-ins which need an extra developement and other things more.
That's why they limited donations to $100k per organization. No one is allowed to make themselves indispensable to the project.