Current blockers to swift usage are found here: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/issues/933 Rising tide lifts all boats, by trying to use Swift seriously, they're finding and helping fix bugs in the compiler

The browser was not started with the idea of taking over the main focus of development, it was just another part of an already pretty large hobby OS project

Fine. With decades and decades of memory safety lessons in the books, it's hard to imagine how C++ was the language of choice when starting new operating system from scratch in 2018.

It really isn't that hard to imagine someone starting a fun hobby project in the language they enjoyed and were the most comfortable with.

Dunno. It really is. Debugging memory corruption bugs in complex one-memory-space systems is very much not fun.

Nothing a little printf (or dbgln as it is known as in Serenity-Ladybird land) can't fix

The core Swift Lang has is being made more independent of Apple, and can be compiled for an increasing number of platforms thanks to the LLVM-based compiler

Extremely saddened. I quite liked the site, I hoped it could stay afloat

Ladybird is for the modern web, not so the late 90s, early 00s anymore. I don't see a worry of integrating domain-specific third party libraries, we were able to drop thousands of lines of non-Web code that people would otherwise have to maintain.

I'm guessing 2026 was chosen as people would be quickly discouraged by its slow rendering performance right now. The average person would just see it as just a slower browser rather than a serious contender.

It was AI-generated

It already loads most websites pretty well (The JS engine is nearly complete!). Currently the big tasks are implementing the remaining web APIs and improving performance, stability, and security, so IMO 2026 is a good target for the first Alpha-test releases.