Andreas Kling and Chris Wanstrath have joined forces to form a non-profit called Ladybird Browser Initiative to manage the newly forked Ladybird browser. We discuss what it’s going to take to get to alpha, the why behind Ladybird, avoiding incentives other than those of the users, their plans for incremental adoption of Swift as the successor language over C++, and of course what they hope Ladybird can achieve as a truly independent open source browser that’s for the people.

This week we’re talking to Andreas Kling about SerenityOS and Ladybird. Andreas started SerenityOS as a means of therapy. It’s self-described as a love letter to “‘90s user interfaces with a custom Unix-like core.” Andreas previously worked at Nokia and later at Apple on the WebKit team, so he had an itch to do something along the lines of a browser, and that’s where Ladybird came from. We get into the details of compilers, OSs, browsers, web specifications, and the love of making software.