Servo 2023 Roadmap | Hacker News Reader

Servo 2023 Roadmap

servo.org

129 pointsbpierre42 comments

Of all the baffling decisions Mozilla made over the past few years, abandoning Servo is the most incomprehensible one. Servo was a critical open source project, and had the potential to decide whether the "open web" will still be a thing 10 years from now. Unless continuing to work on Servo was literally threatening Mozilla's existence, cancelling it doesn't make any sense from a long-term perspective.

Seeing this announcement, I'm cautiously optimistic about Servo's future, but it's hard to imagine it ever again picking up the momentum it once had. And considering that the web platform is becoming ever more complex, any hope of disrupting the browser engine oligopoly is probably lost by now.

If someone wanted to sneaklily ruin open source project and make sure it will never recover marketshare, Mozilla's decisionmaking would be basically instruction manual.

Really makes you wonder, doesn't it?

Intelligence agencies have budgets measured in the tens of billions of dollars, and an obvious interest in all security-critical software being controlled by "friendly" corporate entities.

So, which one is the "conspiracy theory": That Firefox and similar software is being actively sabotaged by three-letter agencies, or that those agencies have nothing to do with Firefox's downfall despite that downfall furthering their goals? Somehow, the second option seems even less likely than the first.

> Intelligence agencies

No need to think about intelligence agencies, classic corporate greed is more than enough.

Even without bribes Google did put a lot of money in mozilla, it takes very little to give hints like "do this or the money goes away".

And then there's always classic incompetence, that can be indistinguishable from malice.

> Even without bribes Google did put a lot of money in mozilla, it takes very little to give hints like "do this or the money goes away".

That could backfire pretty badly for Google though, if it became public. Not to mention, keeping a viable competitor is actually in Google's interest, because it helps them avoid antitrust action. Also, Mozilla has alternatives to Google for funding, such as Bing, which IIRC they had a lucrative deal with in the past.

They need a minimum viable competitor. Big enough to stop significant claims of monopoly, but no bigger.

Well, it most likely is too small for that now.

Google pays mozilla so a huge monopoly lawsuit can be prevented. It is as critical to google as is to mozilla.

These conteos are baseless.

Mozilla insidiously turned from a tech org to a social justice org, which really made me sad. There's room in the world for both, but that particular co-opting was rather hard to watch.

I feel at this point the organization runs on 90% counting on misleading donors, much like Wikipedia.

So they should have financed two independent browser engines as an already thin team, when not even Microsoft could manage a single engine?

I am honestly baffled why open source projects are held to such Herculean standards.

When you make all of your money from a browser, yes, you should focus all of your money there.

Whether or not to finance two engines is up to the org, who have a proven track record of doing the worst possible thing, so why not.

Edge's engine was okay at the end, they just decided that strategically it wasn't worth it.

As components of servo became ready they were brought into Firefox, so this was the Firefox slowly getting rewritten with rust, a better multi threading and memory safety story.

Edge was amazing - its epub reader was super-fantabulous to the extent that it became my regular ebook reader. But Microsoft's boring CEO decided it was not a strategic use of developer effort and killed it.

Edge should have been a cross platform browser from the start and it would have been a serious competitor to Chrome.

Mozilla-the-organisation became another victim of the social justice revolution when they ousted Brendan Eich and gave full reign to Mitchell Baker who - apart from increasing her own salary to unprecedented and certainly undeserved heights - steered the organisation away from its main goal of developing web technology towards social justice goals. She needs to be ousted before it is too late - if it isn't too late already.

> and had the potential to decide whether the "open web" will still be a thing 10 years from now.

Not even close, but it's nice wishful thinking. The last thing that is holding back the tide of a Chrome-only web at this point is, ironically, Safari, especially since it is forced on iOS platforms. And you have people on this website and many others who actively want that to go away for various reasons!

But Servo was never going to create the kind of platform leverage necessary to determine the future of "an open web" in any way like that, unless you think Google or Apple was going to adopt it. They weren't -- even ignoring the politics, multiple implementations are part of the deal with the Web, so for Google and Apple leveraging their existing verticals helps make the pill easier to swallow. The only viable alternative outcome, which is "Servo wholesale replaces parts of Gecko", would have left Mozilla in more or less the same spot they're in right now, with some shored up technical polish. That doesn't change anything in the grand scheme, though, no matter how much people here want to think otherwise. They would have remained where they are and continued to be just as marginal as you think they are now -- or whatever you think now, it would have been just as true.

People on here constantly cry about Mozilla because they have their bizarre weird bones to pick (social justice blah blah, taking away unsigned extensions is a war crime, version number inflation -- it's all the same stupid forum bullshit that existed on Slashdot in 2004), whatever, but it doesn't really matter. The reality is nothing Mozilla has done in the past 15 years mattered as much as Google aggressively pushing Chrome did, by leveraging their existing moat on the web. Google might even pay for that in court at some point down the line, but as it stands right now, Mozilla could have funded 10 Servo-like projects and done everything every Hacker News poster wanted, and it wouldn't have made even the slightest change in this outcome.

That said, Servo is still a very welcome project for many other reasons, so I'm glad to see it being picked back up. But don't kid yourself. Some technical spit-shine was never going to be the deciding keystone of the "open web" and its politics. That's just putting the cart before the horse.

Who is funding the new work? https://servo.org/blog/2023/01/16/servo-2023/ "Servo to Advance in 2023"

Good to see it happening. Even if it doesn't directly get used as a major browser, being open source it might find new uses elsewhere.

Igalia is funding it by providing 4 employees:

https://people.igalia.com/mrego/servo/igalia-servo-tsc-2022/

The Servo Parallel Browser Engine Project

    Servo is a prototype web browser engine written in the Rust language. It is currently developed on 64-bit macOS, 64-bit Linux, 64-bit Windows, and Android.

    Servo welcomes contribution from everyone.

https://github.com/servo/servo

Is Servo still under Mozilla, or has it been reborn as an independent project?

It’s independent, I believe.

A bit lazy to search right now and provide links, but Mozilla laid off most of the Servo team members a few years ago. So it’s not really been under Mozilla for all practical purposes. My understanding is that some of that work was, and continues to be, integrated into Gecko. But the momentum of replacing Gecko (a huge endeavor in itself) has been lost.

https://servo.org/blog/2020/11/17/servo-home/

The Servo Project is excited to announce that it has found a new home with the Linux Foundation.

It's not under Mozilla. You can see in their charter: https://servo.org/governance/charter/

> the Servo open source project, which has been established as Servo Project a Series of LF Projects, LLC (the "Project"). LF Projects, LLC ("LF Projects") is a Delaware series limited liability company.

LF Projects holds the registered trademark for Servo® (https://lfprojects.org/policies/trademark-policy/)

LF Projects is an affiliate of the Linux Foundation.

So, it's maybe-independent as one of a "Series of LF Projects". LF Projects holds the trademark directly and is an affiliate of the Linux Foundation and whatever that means (does the Linux Foundation control LF Projects?). While it looks like LF Projects doesn't control the "Servo Project a Series of LF Projects, LLC" directly, its charter says they need to comply with the policies of LF Projects which seems like it effectively gives them control of Servo (since they could simply change their policy to say that).

It's definitely independent of Mozilla. Whether it's truly independent is up for debate, but I think for practical terms it's independent. I don't think LF Projects or the Linux Foundation are looking to flex power in a weird way. They're just trying to provide a home for it.

I just wanna say, I dislike the trend of software projects taking generic names from the electronic world. Sometimes makes it confusing to search. Other than that good luck with your project!

As opposed to the uniquely-software name "Gecko". :)

If you search for "gecko engine", the combination is unusual enough to make the first hit correct.

If you search for "servo engine", the DDG's SERP is full of servo motor hits, fairly legitimate.

I dislike the inclination to use jolly word play like that, instead of giving things distinct, unique names, like Kodak, Google, or Linux.

"Servo browser engine" should fix that for you.

chatgpt wants to name it 'BlazeFx'

This is great.

There are many places where embedding makes sense that don't even need the browser to be 100% compliant, vendors may also pay for some feature to be finished.

Whatever way this goes, to claw back uses from Chrome, Firefox with Servo must support the Chrome Embedded Framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework

That's a pretty heavy ask. The CEF is very closely tied to the internals of chromium. That said, it would be beneficial if they had a similar framework that could be used as an alternative.

Why must Firefox support CEF? To encourage more Firefox forks?

In general, providing embedding support helps your web runtime being used more widely.

In the case of CEF, it's a quite old and not very modern embedding API, so I would tread lightly. On Android Gecko is easy to embed using the GeckoView component, but I have no idea if it's successfully used in non-Mozilla projects.

I thought the whole point was to be an alternative to CEF?

As a robot developer, I get confused about the name. It would be great with calling it something like Stegosaurus or Golem, but I think it doesn't seem helpful to use a tech term with a clear meaning to name something else totally different also in tech field. Really catching irrelevant attention.

This seems like a weird complaint about an 11 year old project.

the claim may be as old

But isn't Golem kind of a synonym for Robot? Every choice has problems!

Golem is more of a magically-powered robot-like thing. Not something that comes up often in real life.

FWIW, the name “Servo” is a reference to the robot Tom Servo on Mystery Science Theater 3000.

As a Hebrew speaking palaeontologist, I would get confused about “golem” or “Stegosaurus”.

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