I have felt like a perennial browser refugee for a while. For about 20 years now (since OG Firefox was at peak and Chrome was not yet launched), every new browser promises the same things, gets popular enough, then does a full or partial 180.

While I like the pitch of this browser, I find it a little difficult to take it at the face value, especially given there is no info on the founders, or whether it is run as a company or a non-profit etc.

Perhaps someone in this thread could answer: which company/org structure provides best guarantees against gradual, slow, multi-year rot that seems to take over everything?

I would happily pay a small monthly subscription fee for a browser if it has strong legally protected privacy guarantees.

I feel the same. For now, I've made peace with having to switch to "whatever is the latest maintained fork with privacy defaults" every 6 months. Hopefully Ladybird becomes a usable browser sometime soon.

The hard answer is the project cannot attract the good engineers anymore because it eventually stops being a growth project. Without being a growth project, you don't get investment into what you want to do anymore and there is less potential growth in your career and income.

> which company/org structure provides best guarantees against gradual, slow, multi-year rot that seems to take over everything?

German e.V. [1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_(German...

> which company/org structure provides best guarantees against gradual, slow, multi-year rot that seems to take over everything?

I don't think any such guarantees exist, unfortunately.

You can look into Ulaa browser by Zoho. It fits your description.

In my opinion that's Ladybird at the moment.

It's hard to predict what future generations of developers are doing, but right now Ladybird seems to have the right values embedded into their nonprofit structure.

All the other browser projects have to be enshittified eventually, and therefore have to fulfill other interests than their users' interests to get there.

it’s made by the same person who made cobalt.tools

For what it's worth, I like Orion - built by the same team that built the Kagi search engine. It's a shit browser for developers (inspect panel crashes half the time and other bugs), but I trust it way more than Chrome or even Safari. For development tasks - if I need to, I simply switch to Firefox.