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Comment by hamandcheese | Hacker News Reader

Are there any plans for Servo to be a "real" browser, or will it always be more of a R&D playground for Firefox?

I think of Servo as a non-production race car, taking risks and advancing the needle of technology to new unexplored areas. When it pays off, the results are drawn back into the production model.

Servo is still considered a research project, but one of the benefits of sharing WebRender, Stylo, etc between Servo and Firefox is that it is really helping to productionize those systems. That then will make it easier to turn it into a real thing.

Servo should be referred to as a prototype or experimental rendering engine. If you come across anything still calling it a research project, please let me know! I should have purged them all a year ago, but may have missed some.

It's a possible eventual goal but we don't have concrete plans or a timeline.

Stylo and the like let us get improvements out to users well before we need to deal with that.

Also, all the discussion so far seems to focus on desktop firefox, are these improvements coming to firefox for android, or is that a longer term project, perhaps when servo is ready?

Stylo isn’t available on Firefox for Android yet but you can track this bug; they’d like to enable it “sooner rather than later” https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1366049

We're hoping to have stylo in 57, and I would expect it to be on android in the next release (58), but no promises.

Basically we intend for it to work eventually on android, but it didn't get prioritized.

I can turn on `layout.css.servo.enabled`, on Firefox 55 Android (and Desktop). What does it mean? If I understand correctly, Firefox will have this property turned on by default in 57/58 but it's possible to have it early?

No, it won't do anything on 55. Or on 56/57 Android.

Stylo can be disabled at build time, and this was the case for 55 and is still the case for android. We don't remove the associated prefs in that case (about:config doesn't have UX because it's not exactly user facing).

You can go to about:support to see if stylo is actually enabled. There's a "stylo" column. It's not there in 55, but no 55 release has stylo enabled at build time; so if you don't have that column at all, stylo isn't there.

There's more to putting it in the product than just the code, but the style system in Servo does already work on Android. Once 57 ships, I suspect there will be some resources to start doing the remaining product integration work for Firefox on Android.

I have to say, that seems like exactly the right approach and it's seriously impressive to see what you're doing.

I remember the original Mozilla, how it started out as a total rewrite of Navigator. It took years to reach feature parity and Navigator lost all of its market share in that time.

Being able to do refactorings like this, and introduce a whole new language at the same time, is seriously impressive engineering. Bravo.

Ideally it would be both; at a minimum, it should be a full browser engine, suitable for embedding (like WebKit, and unlike Gecko).

I second this for diversity and safety in rendering engines if nothing else. Plus, kiosk-style systems might find good use out of it if it was lean since they can match how they develop their web apps to what Servo supports. Finally, if small and using portable layer on bottom, it could be mixed with self-healing systems like QNX or Minix 3.

Apart from Kiosk-style systems I think it might also work very well in an Electron-like setting. Supposedly, supporting only new development in the standards (i.e. without having workarounds for every quirk browsers have gathered over the years) is relatively easy, so if you could simply limit yourself to modern techniques to build Electron apps that perform better, that would be great.

Absolutely agreed; I'd love to see Servo used as a browser engine for apps. And if you fit within what Servo supports today, you can already do this. I've seen people demonstrate Android applications (written in Rust) that embed Servo.

> I've seen people demonstrate Android applications (written in Rust) that embed Servo.

Do you have a link? I went looking for information about embedding Servo and found nothing.

https://blog.mozvr.com/webvr-daydream-support-lands-in-servo... for one, though that doesn't do a very good job of using Servo as a separate module.

I can't seem to find the original example I'm thinking of that showed how to build an Android application (using cargo-apk) that embedded Servo.

You don't even need the whole web platform to build these sort of UIs -- in theory, you could use the WebRender engine to render CSS-box-like UIs. You could avoid some of the weaknesses of the web platform like the memory-heavy DOM. I think this would be an excellent target for a React Native-like framework for desktop, as it would support the full generality of CSS with excellent performance.

Qt has been doing something this for a long while: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/stylesheet-syntax.html

QML is more comparable to what the grandparent means. Stylesheet support still works on the fairly rigid structure of nested widgets.

Ideally neither.

The article says We’re swapping in parts from our experimental browser Servo but servo.org says Servo is a modern high-performance browser engine. That's quite a difference.

Would be quite happy with servo being an engine and firefox being the browser (love firefox btw), just like how webkit/blink are the engines powering chrome/safari/opera. with bits and pieces of servo landing into firefox (just like how the CSS engine is landing in now).

I could be wrong though.

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