How to Install Landybird Browser on macOS

Ladybird is an early-stage browser project that stands out due to its use of a custom engine, independent from major frameworks like Chromium (Google’s engine for Chrome), WebKit (Apple’s engine for Safari), and Gecko (Mozilla’s engine for Firefox). Unlike other alternative browsers such as Brave (uses Chromium), Orion (uses WebKit), or Librewolf (a skin of Firefox), which depend on web engines developed by large tech companies for their core functionality, Ladybird does not rely on these upstream developments. Instead, Ladybird utilizes its own custom web engine called LibWeb to render webpages, making it truly independent from Google, Apple, and Mozilla.

The status on their project can be found on their webpage and their github.

The browser cannot be downloaded and installed from their homepage yet. The browser breaks viewing so many pages that according to Andreas Kling the Ladybird developers do not feel it useful for non-developer people to play around with the browser to then complain that most webpages don’t work with it. However, they do provide documentation on building the browser from source on their github for developers and tech-enthusiasts to play around with. I used their guide to compile ladybird to see if it worked yet rendering my webpages and some simple sites that I visit often.

To get it working I relied on a guide from Aditya tambi to get it working on my macbook. His approach is recreated below:

Installing Ladybird Browser on macOS

Install XCode and Homebrew

xcode-select --install  

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Install Required Tools With Homebrew

brew install autoconf autoconf-archive automake ccache cmake nasm ninja pkg-config

Clone the LadyBirdBrowser Repository

git clone https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird.git
cd ladybird

Run the Ladybird Browser Through the Included Script

./Meta/ladybird.sh run ladybird

Within the repository you just downloaded there is a bash script that, when used, automatically downloads and compiles the needed dependencies for ladybird and then compiles ladybird to run. This can take a quite long time to do (around 10 minutes or so on my machine). But once it completes it launches the browser in the dock (while also running in terminal as well).

Now you are free to use Ladybird! Don’t exit the process in the terminal once the ladybird browser is running until you want to quit the browser: quitting ladybird in the terminal will also quit the browser

(Optional) Create alias to run Ladybird in the Future

Include this in your config for the shell that you use:

alias ladybird=' cd ~/ladybird && ./Meta/ladybird.sh run ladybird'

If you quit the Ladybird browser or exit the process in the terminal (or if it crashes) you will not be able to relaunch the browser from the application folder. Relaunching the browser requires that you run the script again, but since you have already downloaded the dependencies and compiled the programs it doesn’t take any amount of time for the script to run. I put an alias to the script in my zshrc file to quickly launch the browser, and it looks something like this when I run it:

What Websites Ladbybird Works With

Sites with a lot of dynamic content with videos (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Youtube) will outright crash the browser. Pages that update based on scrolling like the Github home page and the Apple product pages will also crash the browser. The browser crashes displaying the pop-up heavy pages from New York Times or Wall Street Journal.. But the browser, even at this early stage, renders static sites great. Below are some of the sites that it renders mostly correctly

Sites

Ladybird works great rendering my website. The only thing it messes up is some of my css effects for cursor hovering.

Ladybird also works ok rendering duckduckgo or google search results. Ladybird sometimes crashes randomly when using search engines however.

Ladybird works fine rendering Wikipedia pages. Sometimes it renders buttons from the navigation in a weird way.

Ycombinator forum works great. The developers of Ladybird spend some time advertising their browser here and look for feedback: may be one reason why the forum renders so well with the browser.

Browsing Github repositories works fine, the browser only sometime crashes. Trying to sign into Github or going to the homepage of Github will crash the browser.