Ladybird brower edge closer to Alpha with AI-driven security fixes, auto-updating ad filters, and better performance

Trying to build a web browser from scratch without just cloning Chrome or Safari? That’s already a bold move. But none of that is stopping Ladybird from making real progress as it aims to ship its alpha version by the end of the year.

A lot of the hard work has been happening behind the scenes. August’s update made solid progress on the essentials, including session restore and video playback. This month, the September update is taking on some of the toughest behind-the-scenes challenges yet.

Security got a serious workout this past month. The developers joined forces with Trail of Bits for a week and basically unleashed a bunch of OpenAI models to go bug-hunting and try to break into the browser.

They really went all in. Like the team said, “We’d never had Ladybird scrutinized at that intensity before.” The automated tests actually found full exploit chains and left the developers with a big pile of security fixes to work through, so now they’re isolating untrusted web processes and locking down the helper sandboxes.

This follows Ladybird’s earlier pause on public contributions on GitHub, so the core team could clean up the codebase and rewrite sensitive parts in Rust without sifting through a flood of outside pull requests.

Apart from that, the team has also spent a lot of time trying to tackle battery and memory hogs. Anyone who keeps dozens of browser tabs open knows how news sites can chew through system resources. Ladybird found that background tabs on sites like El Pais were ballooning up to 15GB of RAM after sitting open for twenty hours because old pages never got cleared out of memory.

They tracked down those leaks and killed off runaway timer loops that were secretly making your laptop fans spin up even when nothing was happening. That should make a real difference in day-to-day use, especially with the recent under-the-hood changes that made page rendering 12 times faster than before.

They’ve also been ticking off some everyday quality-of-life stuff. The built-in content blocker can now grab filter lists like EasyList and keep them updated automatically in the background, so you don’t have to mess with it yourself.

Now there’s a proper graphical crash reporter, native dark mode for those stubborn white sites, and hardware-accelerated video decoding on Mac. All of this builds on earlier wins like adding private windows and multi-profile support.

No wonder the project got so much buzz when DHH gave Ladybird a shoutout on Lex Fridman’s podcast a few weeks ago. Rebuilding a whole browser engine from scratch is a huge challenge, but the team is knocking down the obstacles one by one.

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