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Comment by tn135 | Hacker News Reader

This project has moved real slowly but keep remembering how often Eich referred to this as the most important aspect of Mozilla.

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Moved slowly or is monumental in scope?

Talking is easy, Coding is Hard. Servo is still the most important aspect of Mozilla in terms of Security and Speed, I really think after the full development it will definitely beat the Google Chrome.

Haha. As if there is no development going on in V8. Rewriting anything doesn't mean it will beat it's competitors.

It's doing a completely different thing to why KHTML/WebKit/Blink is good.

I would be unsurprised if Google were quietly doing something similar, of course, particularly with Mozilla having been quite open about this project for several years.

First of, isn't V8 the JavaScript engine of Chrome?

That's a bit apples to oranges comparison, no? One thing Servo didn't touch is JS Virtual machine, it's still SpiderMonkey. Rewriting that AND the layout engine would be suicidal.

And I think they didn't touch it because that's the place where they can't use advantage of parallel execution - javascript's model suppose that user's code is single threaded.

He meant Blink, but he raises a valid point. Development on Blink is just as rapid as it is on Servo if not more so.

Sorry! I meant Blink.

No, rewriting alone doesn't make software great. But you have to realize that all modern browser engines started out before 2000. They were not built with multi-core processors in mind, nor with GPUs, as the web was still mostly text. And it does require rewriting a lot of things to change that architecture out. Google won't be able to compete with that in the long run just by continuously updating their browser engine.

Rewriting anything in a new language is a very time consuming and expensive process. To maintain feature parity with the latest and keeping up with bugs introduced could be very difficult. Google has much more juice to pull something like this off with lots of money. I doubt Mozilla could actually compete in the long run without generating lots of money like Google does.

You make it sound like the Google Chrome developers have completed their development and have gone home. By the time Firefox finishes their new Servo engine Chrome will be on version 65+. So lets see where we stand in terms of security and performance when Firefox actually starts shipping a production version of their new engine instead of calling it right now.

Silver bullets often fail in the world technology. Especially when Chrome has taken up such a huge market share. There might not be any Mozilla if they don't ship it fast enough.

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