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Servo showed there was plenty of room for browser perf beyond optimizing JS engines

Mozilla getting rid of their main product's most relevant R&D makes me fear they'll eventually announce Firefox replacing its internals with chromium

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Can’t say I’m surprised there wasn’t much movement on that project in a coordinated fashion it had all the makings of a project without adequate staffing to complete its vision.

Can you elaborate on this? Because I remember the day Firefox became fast with an incredible amount of fondness, and that moment owed in large part to Servo.

Firefox is faster than it was, but it's still the slowest browser. I've gotten literally 2x benchmark scores from Safari on the same hardware, and the subjective difference is large. Servo propelled FF from "unusable" to "worth the tradeoff" but they didn't have the resources to make it fast.

My experience in daily use of Firefox post-Servo is that all page loads have essentially been instantaneous. This is of course subjective based in part on hardware, so I'm not disputing your assessment.

As far as I'm aware, Servo is at the bleeding edge of performance under the hood. Its hybrid glyph rendering system for example is state-of-the-art.

I'm no browser architect--I don't know how the rendering engines compare, and of course it depends on the site and the extensions used. I did just time some popular websites, and confirmed my impressions. For example, nytimes.com gives

0.5s on Safari with Adguard

1.6s on Chrome with uBlock Origin

2.5s on Firefox with uBlock Origin

which is pretty representative.

Have you tried it without ublock out of curiosity?

Without uBlock it's Chrome 2s, Firefox 3s.

Make sure it is not some extension in the background.

Because Firefox is the fastest on my Windows PC

That was in private windows with no extensions. I tried it on my Windows machine with no extensions too, and it was 1.44 to 1.51, basically margin of error. I know MacOS Firefox has really lagged on performance improvements in the past. It could be a Mac-only issue.

some bits "born for Servo" are integrated into Firefox, but that's far away from "post-Servo"

> Firefox is faster than it was, but it's still the slowest browser.

Please let's not present this as fact only to later find out it might be OS X specific.

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