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Comment by Kelteseth | Hacker News Reader

> project is dead

That's quite a drastic statement. Maybe the devs find another company that sponsors the development of servo?

I guess anything is possible, but why would anyone other than Mozilla want to develop Servo?

I think any big company who does not like Google's dominance on the web would want to do that. The reason they all switch to a chromium engine is not that they don't care, it's because it was too hard/expensive to develop their own engine. If Servo has any potential in that sense, I don't see why a company like Microsoft would not want to contribute to that.

Microsoft has made two working browser engines: Trident and EdgeHTML. They've killed both in favor of Chromium; I don't see how it would cost them less to develop Servo than to have kept working on EdgeHTML.

I said at the time that Microsoft should have stepped into to sponsor Firefox, and make a firefox-based IE. Surely between the two of them Chrome could get some better competition.

EdgeHTML was a fork of Trident, as much as they liked to trumpet it as a new chapter. A fair bit did change, but it was far from a new browser engine.

(Much longer ago, they were also responsible for Tasman.)

I think MS thinks very differently. Some months ago, one of their PMs said:

"It's time for @mozilla to get down from their philosophical ivory tower. The web is dominated by Chromium, if they really 'cared' about the web, they would be contributing instead of building a parallel universe that's used by less than five percent?" [1]

[1] : https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-guy-mozilla-should-g...

Wow, what a shitty attitude.

Standards bodies are powerless if there's only one implementation.

Beyond shitty. As if hiding behind Chromium will help them. I'm sure GOOG can't think of

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=62rAjp5Nr9g

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2020/02/21/google-wa...

Ways to mess with Chromium Edge. It's not like it's a company full of smart, engineers, capable of skirting around the law.

Ask yourself, why are "web standards" or "standards bodies" good? Why should they have "power"? The W3C held back the web platforms for years.

What's the point of having an extremely complex standard that nobody else will ever implement anyway? Remember, it would take billions of dollars to implement a competitive browser and then you have to give it away for free.

If even a trillion dollar company like Microsoft thinks it's better to team up with a competitor rather than implement HTML all by themselves, it really should make you think.

Consider, there's only one Linux kernel, there's no "Linux standard", just one kernel - and the world runs on it. I don't see people running around complaining about how that's a threat, even though it's much harder to switch operating systems than browsers. Sure, there's POSIX, but that's a tiny subset of Linux features.

I wouldn't call POSIX a tiny subset of Linux features. POSIX makes up the vast majority of the kernel interfaces that applications actually use. Stuff like epoll and io_uring are the exception, not the rule.

That's the view of one random person at Microsoft.

Not thinking about this too deeply, would Chromium become like Linux in this situation? Linux has heavily won the server market but many different flavors of Linux are being deployed still without a single, overwhelming winner. Maybe contributions like Stylo to Chromium could improve the web for a larger audience of people than Firefox could reach in its current state.

How many other companies with the capital to fund such development have a need for a new browser engine and would be willing to fund a team of engineers to work on such an engine vs just using chromium?

Samsung, LG, many Chinese TV and mobile phone manufacturers etc. Samsung was a contributor to the Servo project, but I'm not sure to what extent they were helping.

LG holds the remainder of the Palm WebOS assets, and has been doing decent things with them. So there's at least partially a history of them doing this kind of thing. Maybe there's a slight chance they might have an interest.

WebOS used WebKit last time I checked.

Microsoft might have done. Picking Chromium as the basis for their new Edge a couple of years ago, instead of Mozilla/Servo, was a disappointment at the time and I suspect will look even worse in future retrospectives.

MS also seem to have a lot more interest in Rust than Google do.

Yes, picking something that was useable 3 years ago to build a product released 2 years ago instead of an alternative that isn't close to being done NOW was surely a massive strategic miscalculation.

By "Mozilla/Servo" I meant "the Mozilla Firefox codebase along with Servo as its research testbed", not just Servo itself (which AFAIK was never intended to be a generally-shippable browser). Could have been clearer, yes.

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