A pure AOSP distribution is now lacking a lot of basic apps. Distributions like LineageOS or GrapheneOS fill the gap with their own, but pure AOSP is totally unusable.
I don't believe this is a good solution: users will obviously click on that add-on install dialog box without being better informed and protected against malicious / buggy / attacker controlled web sites.
Hopefully they will move to a better solution that offers some integrity guarantees instead, like https://rwc26.waict.dev/ that they have an early implementation of in nightly builds.
It has build.rs that will run as soon as you compile the dependency. That's not the same thing but pretty close to a post install script: it's very likely to run.
It's very naive to believe the "no influence" part. I will never give to Ladybird given their closeness with fascists. Is that the kind of influence they expect?
You can't compare the choices made to evolve a >20 years old codebase with a brand new one. Firefox also as Rust support for XPCOM components, so you can use and write them in Rust without manual FFI (this comes with some baggage of course).
The Ladybird devs painted themselves in a corner when choosing C++ for a new web browser, with many anti-Rust folks claiming that "modern C++ was safe". Well...
This is a cool project, and to render Simon's blog will likely become the #1 goal of AI produced "web browsers".
But we're very far from a browser here, so that's not that impressive.
Writing a basic renderer is really not that hard, and matches the effort and low LoC from that experiment. This is similar to countless graphical toolkits that have been written since the 70s.
I know Servo has a "no AI contribution" policy, but I still would be more impressed by a Servo fork that gets missing APIs implemented by an AI, with WPT tests passing etc. It's a lot less marketable I guess. Go add something like WebTransport for instance, it's a recent API so the spec should be properly written and there's a good test suite.
Some people are also opposed because of the negative externalities when building and running AI systems (environmental consequences, intellectual property theft), even if they understand that agentic coding "works". This is a valid position.
> I can get the source of the kernel, including all drivers, running on my android phone with a few clicks and build a custom ROM.
No, most drivers are closed source and you can just extract binary blobs for them. They run as daemons that communicate through the binder ipc - Android basically turned the Linux kernel into a microkernel.