Independent means:
- We implement the web platform standards ourselves
- We don't take money from anyone with strings attached
There are very few Windows developers contributing to the project. As such, maintaining a native Windows port would be a lot of effort that distracts from building out the web platform standards in a reasonable amount of time.
After we have a solid foundation, we may consider a Windows port, but it's not a priority. In the meantime, Windows developers can use other tools such as WSL2 to work on Ladybird.
Eventually, probably, if there's a Web Spec for it!
Maybe someday. Maybe never. If you want to see something happen, you can do it yourself!
Simple, my friend! Just refer to the build instructions.
If it builds on CI, it should build for you too. You may need to rebuild the toolchain. If that doesn't help, try it with a clean repo.
If you can't figure out what to do, ask in the #build-problems
channel on Discord.
For full details, see the Ladybird: A new cross-platform browser project announcement from 12 September 2022.
Here’s a very short summary: Work on what eventually became Ladybird started on 15 June 2019, as LibHTML — the beginnings of an HTML viewer for SerenityOS — with a commit titled “LibHTML: Start working on a simple HTML library”, and with this commit description:
I'd like to have rich text, and we might as well use HTML for that. :^)
LibHTML eventually became LibWeb — which in turn eventually grew into being the core part of the browser engine and browser to which, on 4 July 2022, the name Ladybird was given.