Hacker News Reader

Comment by edoceo | Hacker News Reader

Damn. And we lost Servo just when it was getting close to being not shitty. While everything else is moving towards more shitty.

View on HN

Servo was never supposed to be a browser. It was a testbed for new browser tech/components, some of which got ported into Firefox. I had hopes that Servo would also be an embeddable browser engine, but not sure if that was ever a serious goal.

Servo still exists and has been spun out of Mozilla's org (https://github.com/servo/servo/). Certainly development will be slower without a dedicated, paid team behind it, but it's still alive (last merge to master was 9 days ago). And perhaps without Mozilla's direct control, it will actually end up becoming the browser you hoped it would be.

I give Firefox browser engine 5 years top before Mozilla becomes Chromium based. Servo WAS meant to be the future had Mozilla continued to fund its development, there is no way around that fact. Yes, it was experimental, but so where every other browser engines/forks when they started. Mozilla lost a lot of goodwill when they fired Servo team and most of the Rust developers.

Why we need two Chrome's?

I don't think we do, but I think there's value in another large-minority browser that is based on Blink (not Chromium). It should have all the compatibility that Chrome has, but none of the privacy issues. Mozilla could potentially pull that off, but it'd likely mean more or less starting from scratch (not sure how much of the UI they could reuse, if any), so I wouldn't expect that to happen except as a last resort.

I do feel like most of the arguments against Firefox boil down to either website compatibility or performance issues. Using Blink as their rendering engine would kill the first concern completely. I'm not sure if Firefox's current performance issues (real or imagined) are due to the rendering engine or UI, so not sure where that would land.

We lost the servo team, but isn't servo complete enough to simmer in maintenance?

Not nearly complete enough if you want a browser.

MAYBE, if you want a browsing engine / "webview".

That's exactly what Servo was/is, an embeddable browser engine. It was never aiming to build a usable reference servo browser with the engine. The packaged nightly binaries were just to demo the current state of the embeddable engine which is why they were so barebones.

Yes, you're correct, but the ancestor comments kind of implied it being a hope for browsers at large.

Bad phrasing from my part too, sorry.

Ahh, i'm talking about the surviving parts that were adopted by Firefox:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gecko_(software)#Quantum

I remember it clearly because Firefox got a big performance boost in it's renderer when quantum was released, often it's faster than Chrome.

What features would a browser need on top of regular webview APIs?

No, not even close.

Why not, It's in Firefox, I'm literally looking at it right now.

Some parts of Servo are in Firefox, but not the whole thing.

Swapping your VW Beetle's wheels for a Ferrari's doesn't make it a Ferrari! Even if it improves handling (or whatever I'm not a car person, it's just an accessible analogy)

No it isn't. Some parts of Servo were adopted into Firefox, but "Servo" is not in Firefox.

If you compile servo and point it at the homepage of google, I doubt it renders right now. It was constantly broken even when it had a full-time staff.

There is some activity in the donations:

https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/servo

Not sure why you're saying Servo, we still have Firefox.

Firefox only can compete with Chrome/Chromium-based clones only if it has a unique edge (pun intended). Being completely written in Rust is that edge, reducing work required for debugging, while Chromium team would be still busy with memory bugs, etc. Thus the complete port/rewrite is the only future it has. Genius Mozilla management voluntarily gave it up.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com