Ladybird: A truly new Web Browser (with a from-scratch engine) comes to Linux

The mad scientist behind Serenty OS brought the Serenty OS Web Browser to Linux. And you can watch the video of him doing it.

Tired of Firefox and Chrome based web browsers? Annoyed by their massive bloat, obscene memory usage, and years (nay, decades) of what can best be described as legacy schmutz?

Yearning for something truly new? A browser with a brand new engine, written from scratch? Something fast, light, and nimble?

Well, my good sirs and madams, you are in luck! Andreas Kling — the evil genius and mastermind of the Serenty OS project — has just ported the Serenty OS web browser to Linux using Qt!

Behold! A completely new, from-scratch web browser! And it actually works!

Ladybird running on Linux.

You can grab the source from GitHub, which includes some simple build instructions. Essentially you just need Qt6 and the basic build essentials.

“Neat! But there’s no way this is actually usable! Web browsers are too complex! Surely you need a half-billion dollar mega corporation, like Mozilla, in order to develop a functional web browser engine!”

Au contraire mon frère!

The Serenety OS web browser engine scores a perfect 100 / 100 on the Acid 3 layout test. While that certainly isn’t everything a modern web browser is expected to do (thanks W3C, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft for bloating web browsers to a ridiculous degree!)… it is a massively good start.

And, most importantly… it is surprisingly usable!

The same browser engine, running on Serenty OS.

Now, this new Ladybird browser doesn’t have a million features. There’s not a bunch of preferences, tools, extensions or the like. It’s bare-bones for the moment. You type in your URL and go. But, honestly, that doesn’t make me sad! In fact… it’s refreshing to not have a web browser that is so obscenely bloated!

What’s really fun, is Andreas filmed himself creating the Ladybird Linux web browser. So not only can you run a brand new browser… you can watch it get made!