This Month in Ladybird - April 2026
5 hours ago
- #Browser Development
- #Performance Optimization
- #Open Source
- April 2024 saw 333 PRs merged from 35 contributors, with 7 first-time contributors.
- New sponsors include the Human Rights Foundation ($50,000) and Jakub Stęplowski ($1,000).
- Inline PDF viewer implemented using pdf.js for rendering PDFs directly in the browser.
- Browsing history and address bar autocomplete enhanced with SQLite-backed HistoryStore.
- Speculative and incremental HTML parsing introduced to improve page load performance.
- Off-thread JavaScript compilation moves bytecode generation to background threads.
- Per-Navigable rasterization allows iframes to render independently on separate threads.
- JavaScript engine optimizations include faster JS-to-JS calls and O(1) bytecode register allocation.
- GTK4/libadwaita frontend added for Linux, inspired by GNOME Web.
- Bookmarks management UI introduced with import/export and context menu support.
- Cache and CacheStorage implemented with in-memory store for all nine methods.
- CSS improvements: image-set(), anchor positioning, color interpolation, and RTL list markers.
- Networking enhancements: non-blocking DNS lookups and O(1) response data consumption.
- Style invalidation optimized for :has() selectors, reducing recomputation times.
- Linux GPU painting via dmabuf avoids GPU-to-CPU readbacks.
- mimalloc adopted as the main allocator for both C++ and Rust code.
- Site compatibility improved for Reddit, YouTube, GitHub, and others.
- Web Platform Tests score increased to 2,067,263, including test262 import.
- Other changes: Rust now mandatory, stack-zeroing for GC, and cross-process BroadcastChannel.
- Credits to all contributors, especially first-timers and security fix providers.