Ladybird browser - will it fly?

[Moonchild]

Double-whammy, lady AND bird.

[Mæstro]

The generic masculine is traditional and sound. A generic feminine or neuter (which, in the singular, is it) is tolerable for those who genuinely despise the generic masculine on private, sociocultural grounds. All alternatives are ugly, including the generic plural, which reads as literal nonsense and has always been colloquial and substandard. Grammatical gender says nothing about the natural or social properties of any being, for the words are other than the things (Augustine).

[Moonchild]

Off-topic:

Grammatical gender says nothing about the natural or social properties of any being

People simply do not understand this. No matter how many ways you try to explain it to them. Same reason they get upset with terms like "the postman" where "man" has nothing to do with gender. Rather, it's a general term for "being a human person" irrespective of gender.

[suzyne]

Off-topic:

terms like "the postman" where "man" has nothing to do with gender.

I am not convinced that is accurate. When the word postman was invented, women were excluded from the occupation of delivering the mail. In usage postman was literally "that man (i.e. male person) who delivers my letters", not some universal label for a job that anybody could do because it was actually limited to men.

Isn't retrospectively suggesting that postman is using man in the gender-neutral all mankind sense, ignoring and mangling the origin of the word?

Also, thinking about the plural, which is postmen, surely it isn't true to assert that men in English is now also some universal placeholder for all males, females and others?

[Moonchild]

Off-topic:

surely it isn't true to assert that men in English is now also some universal placeholder for all males, females and others?

It is. "men" in that context is defined as "the force of workers available", which does not signify any specific gender, since "workers" can have any gender. "Man" is also as a singular not necessarily male. It is used for any person or worker or vassal; it's even used for all mankind (implied plural) which obviously does not consist of only males. At least as far as all my English dictionaries are concerned.
Compare also e.g. craftsman, handyman, foreman, ... -- you can debate the origin of each role or profession whether they were typically "male jobs" or not, and consider/prefer "alternatives" if "man" triggers people, but it really shouldn't matter if you keep in mind that "man" is just a "human"/person/individual.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

Off-topic:
I find often curious if not amusing these so called "politically correct" issues, specially across languages which have quite different grammars.
I remember a British colleague (wisely) commenting "we do not have gender. we have sex" when talking of grammatical genders of inanimate nouns in French.
There are languages which have two genders (MF) with a specific ending and specific articles, e.g. Italian, other which have three genders (MFN) with endings and no articles (Latin) or with articles and almost no endings (German), others which have almost no endings but an over-emphasis on pronouns (English). For instance an equality initiative of the International Astronomical Union a few years ago, in English was titled "She is an astronomer" and in Italian (where pronouns with verbs are optional) "professione astronoma".
An English mother tongue will have no difficulty in using professor or president for either sex. In Italian the word "presidente" is not gender-marked so one has to use the article ("il presidente | la presidente") but our present prime minister (the official title is "presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri"), female, prefers to be called "il presidente" in the non-marked masculine. Other persons instead prefer to be called with a marked feminine.
English p.c. does funny ungrammatical things with pronouns ("they"), some Italian p.c. advocate funny unphonetical things with endings (using an asterisk or a schwa ә instead of -a -o).
There are languages like German or Greek which have a word for "human being" (Mensch, anthropos) different from the one for "male human being" (Mann, andros), while other use a common unmarked masculine ... let us quote e.g. a (stylish!) authority

11. In this Our Charter references to Our Chancellor are to Our Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and words importing the masculine gender shall include the feminine.

[suzyne]

Off-topic:

Compare also e.g. craftsman

I partially agree with your point about craftsman/craftsmen, but I still think that as an example of postman is problematic. Putting "man" at the end of any word and asserting that it is inclusive of everybody doesn't always work because there is a difference between dictionary definitions and the everyday understanding of and usage of words, and the meaning of man and the way it is used in English has changed over time and can be ambiguous.

For example, craftswoman is not a new word dreamt up by the feminists of the 1960s or 70s, but I imagine it entered the language at some point because the everyday use of craftsman was not enough to include women artisans. Of course, there may be other reasons, but there must have been a reason in the society of the time why the word was invented and needed, and it may have been related to the popular interpretation and meaning of craftsman at the time?

In the context of me distinguishing between formal definitions and everyday usage, I appreciate that this is a little ironic, but this is from the Collins English dictionary, which I find interesting.

[Mæstro]

Off-topic:
You use Collins, too? It is my usual, favourite reference for this language. I include one of its web versions among my search engines and own the 1990 edition in print. I am happy to cite it in discussions online; my habit has indeed endeared it to one of my friends. Meanwhile, everyday usage has torn single languages into hundreds over the millennia. Fixed standards, holding by analogy across languages and offering each its special elegance, appeal to me; traditional grammar offers just this and informs sound usage. Your example illustrates. Forms like Englishwoman date to the Middle Ages. At times and across languages, one sometimes distinguishes women by special suffixes: English -woman and -ess, German -in and so on. It can feel awkward, when one knows the referent to be female, to use a grammatically masculine word, so it is natural enough that feminine suffixes exist.

[Tharthan]

Off-topic:

Same reason they get upset with terms like "the postman" where "man" has nothing to do with gender. Rather, it's a general term for "being a human person" irrespective of gender.

A lot of people are now for some reason utterly ignorant of the fact that the word "man" originally meant "human being," not "a male." The meaning "a male" came later (though, somehow, that has come to be the predominant meaning of the word in all of the Germanic languages—not only English. It is unclear why this occurred.)

For the most part, it used to be common knowledge that the word "man" had two distinct senses, and thus people never objected to words like "man-made," "mankind," or "ombudsman." Nor even (speaking as a Catholic) the portion of the Nicene Creed "...for us men and for our salvation," that is still recited by women and men alike in churches across the English-speaking world to this day.

Linguistic abominations like "fisherperson" or "peoplekind" need to be laughed out the door. Their existence demonstrates a lack of understanding of the English language on the part of some people.

[Sakurya]

I honestly think it might fly one day. Even if it has a long way to conform to all of the specifications there's still hopes in the future being independant of Chromium, Firefox, Safari exc.

It's a hard task to build a web browser from scratch if alone, with a team it will build up organization and working on different parts of the specifications (e.g a web API or a HTML specification), but for now; Ladybird isn't the future. We have to wait and see

[Eduardolucas1]

I think the alternative exists being pale moon and UXP, and that those who choose to restart from scratch, usually (not in all cases) do that due to cultural, petty philosophical differences with the UXP devs (which only shows the general immaturity and solypsism more and more prevalent with people, as political, cultural or philosophical differences do not matter for any engineering project or scientific research. Even communists and conservatives worked together in science) and stubborn arrogance to consider the UXP codebase as insecure without any observable evidence, bug or substantial architectural argument for this, in the same way the wayland team does as bullying with the xorg mantainers.

Well, i hope these people, or, even, those who refused to collaborate with the project, have a very good time trying to rebuild the world again. As far as from i know, ladybird is unable to run discord. pale moon is.