In a somewhat unexpected move, Cloudflare has announced its sponsorship of the Ladybird browser, an independent, open-source initiative aimed at developing a modern, standalone web browser engine. It’s a project launched by GitHub’s co-founder and former CEO, Chris Wanstrath, and tech visionary Andreas Kling.
It’s written in C++, and designed to be fast, standards-compliant, and free of external dependencies. Its main selling point? Unlike most alternative browsers today, Ladybird doesn’t sit on top of Chromium or WebKit.
Instead, it’s building a completely new rendering engine from scratch, which is a rare thing in today’s web landscape. For reference, the vast majority of web traffic currently runs through engines developed by either Google (Blink/Chromium), Apple (WebKit), or Mozilla (Gecko).
The sponsorship means the Ladybird team will have more resources to accelerate development. This includes paying developers to work on crucial features, such as JavaScript support, rendering improvements, and compatibility with modern web applications. Just to remind you, last year the project was already funded with $1 million from Wanstrath and his family.
Cloudflare stated that its support is part of a broader initiative to keep the web open, where competition and multiple implementations can drive enhanced security, performance, and innovation. Now, for the second part of the news—yes, there’s more.
Along with backing the Ladybird browser, Cloudflare also chose to sponsor Omarchy—a preconfigured Arch Linux setup that ships with a Hyprland tiling window manager, along with a curated set of defaults and developer tools (Neovim, Docker, Git, etc).
Put simply, this isn’t a separate distro—it’s a tool that runs on Arch and sets up and configures Hyprland for you, so it’s ready to go right out of the box, so you end up with this.
Sure, you could set everything up manually by installing the right packages and tweaking a bunch of dotfiles. But Omarchy saves you the trouble—it simply asks you a few straightforward questions through an easy, menu-driven interface and prepares everything, hiding all complexity under the hood.
Still, it’s hard to understand why Cloudflare chose to back exactly Omarchy. The project is led by someone who hardly needs an introduction—David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails.
Now, don’t get me wrong—Hyprland is just awesome. However, like other tiling Wayland compositors, it’s a niche setup, primarily used by power users and individuals deeply involved in technical workflows.
That said, the only explanation for me is that Cloudflare clearly sees this Arch + Hyprland combo as one of the go-to environments for developers, and that’s why they’re putting their weight behind it. Either way, the move deserves a lot of respect, and it’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out.
For more information, see the official Cloudflare announcement.
