I tried Ladybird, the web browser. True to advertisement, it is pre-alpha. Not yet usable for several websites I frequent.
Was highly amusing to see the legacy Google homepage again. Like the good old days!
An interesting thing from the Primeagen's interview with the Ladybird browser leader Andreas Kling was how he expects they'll have to give in to altering their user agent to mimic other web browsers, just like all the other web browsers have over time. I've read about this phenomenon in browser user agents before.
Unrelatedly, I tried out Theo's unduck link tool, and it is pretty nice. As advertised.
These two projects in contrast trigger many potential avenues of thought and discussion. The sprawling, never-ending, enormous effort of producing a fully functional web browser... The contained, tiny, local-first solution to a specific routing problem...
You can churn out so many of these little helper tools so fast and so easily that they have no competitive advantage, and thus no incentive to make and promote them. A browser takes immense amounts of work, and so it is possible to drum up proportional amounts of interest and direct people to using it.
I don't have any well-thought opinions on the state of Mozilla Firefox. If Google is forced to sell Chrome, that will obviously be the biggest news on the tech web. It's not evident that it would be a net positive at first. Depending on the buyer, it could well be a very fast net negative.
The prospect of reverting to a simpler toolset for the web does not seem particularly likely at present.