Rusty revenant Servo returns to render once more
theregister.com
theregister.com
The talk: https://www.youtube.com/live/e3Y1C695CIw?si=dD8_tbyEezwei8As...
I did embed a link to it, but it looks like the start time is lost. I will try to get that put back in.
> Initial commit
> @brson - committed Mar 29, 2012 - 0 parents commit 4825529 - Showing 1 changed file with 1,522 additions and 0 deletions.
https://github.com/jdm/servo/commit/48255297b8958fa559d11704...
http://venge.net/graydon/talks/intro-talk-2.pdf
The Wikipedia article about Rust says:
"Mozilla began sponsoring the project in 2009 as a part of the ongoing development of an experimental browser engine called Servo [..]"
How does Gecko (the engine used in Firefox) fare on being embedded? I thought it wasn't as easy or simple, and hence one of the reasons why Chromium dominated in things like Electron.
I can't square these two statements in the article:
> Servo has been around for about a decade, so as experimental software projects go, it's a mature one.
> It still can't pass the Web Standards Project ACID tests, which way back in 2008 WebKit was the first browser to successfully handle, so there's clearly some way to go yet.
I thought the goal of Servo, while it was incubated and paid for by Mozilla, was to absorb parts of it into Firefox over several years (or across decades) since this is a humongous undertaking. It's still painful to see Mozilla's revenues (mostly from Google) and how keeping Servo around could've helped in making a better browser, sooner (compared to current Firefox development).
As a Rust dev, and nerd generally, I love the idea of servo and if I were more excited about browsers and the web would even love to contribute to it. But unfortunately stuff like this isn't what makes or breaks project success in the short or even medium term.
I use Firefox as my main browser everywhere now, but I didn't make the jump on any technical merits in rendering. Most days I barely notice which browser I'm on. I use Firefox because of the principles it represents and Google finally crossed the final lines with me, ethically.
I don't know what the future holds for Firefox and Mozilla but I don't think it's fundamentally strongly altered by the success of servo.
In any case, as a software engineering community we need to find ways to fund big picture projects like Servo etc. without having them tied to the fortunes and whims of various corporations. We lucked out with Linux filling a niche where it could explode in popularity and be securely funded for dev, but that hasn't been the case with lots of other things.
Most people don't choose a browser based on principles or mission. Even if Firefox captured 100% of the market that did, it would barely move the needle in browser share.
Most people choose browsers based on fairly straightforward things, such as the default (many people never change this, which is why changing the default browser via bundled downloads has remained such an effective marketing strategy for decades), performance, the feeling of performance (which is different from actual performance), whether the websites they're visiting are supported, etc.
When Chrome came on the scene it was a huge improvement, and Google seemed mostly-benevolent then, and the core of it was open source. And I worked in that codebase and met some of the people involved, and they were all good very smart(er-than-me) people that I met. The core engineering project itself has good foundations.
The problem is those folks gotta get paid. And so ultimately in the long run, Chrome has become the problem we always dreaded it would become.
Which is why, yeah, "we" (for some definition of we) need to come up with a way that these kinds of projects can get paid for outside of places like Google etc.
Mozilla almost feels like that, but from talking to the people I know who worked there... it's not.
I don't think people in general realise how big a jump it was. Process isolation demonstrated that a browser with a single event loop is not a given, and the idea of completely separating page loads from page renders was, for want of a better term, a true paradigm shift.
V8 showed that JavaScript didn't have to be disgustingly slow. I still remember the "Chrome Comic" booklet. Google made a big deal out of having hired some of the best compiler optimisation experts money could buy and pointed them towards a goal. V8 came out with two decades of hard-core, bleeding edge research behind it.
It took Mozilla nearly a decade to catch up with multi-process Firefox (ironically, the project was called "Electron"). Chrome had the benefit of being a pure greenfield project. Firefox had to retrofit a completely different processing and rendering architecture that broke pretty much all previous assumptions.
I recall writing a note to an internal Nokia-infused thread that "Chrome's process isolation is an idea too good not to steal". At the time I didn't know just how damn hard that would be to pull off without introducing multiple flag days. In the end Mozilla managed with one.
Mozilla/Firefox had the extensions ecosystem that produced a bunch of interesting tools, which eventually crystallized as Firebug:
I haven't checked for a while, but it's pretty painful, especially because Mozilla kept changing their mind about how they wanted it to be embedded.
Then Electron came along around 2013. You get a backend using NodeJS (same V8!) and you don't need to learn XUL, XPCOM etc.
I'm watching the speech to see if they have a stable, easy to compile release, with a documented embedding interface. That's all they actually need to make servo usable, but up to the last time I looked, they didn't plan on doing it.
Also known as CSS.
I can only tell you that it is not what this is about, inasmuch as I was at the talk and there was not a single mention of Firefox Reality or Wolvic in the talk.
Wolvic might use Servo – but I think if it did they would mention it, right?
The talk didn't and the word "Wolvic" does not occur anywhere on https://servo.org
So I am guessing not, no.
Igalia has -- or rather is because it's a co-op -- about 100 developers. They are not all working on the same thing.
Wolvic currently uses GeckoView. That said, as part of our experimentation in 2021, we showed a version of Firefox Reality backed with WPE WebKit through an experimental abstraction layer. Igalia has since developed a a robust abstration layer which will allow it to be somewhat more decoupled from the underlying engine, thus allowing different engine backends. We are currently in the process of integrating a Chromium backend.
Hopefully one day we’ll have a fast and light web browser again :(
> Mozilla realized it was actually doing something useful and that such things would upset its unofficial corporate overlords, so it shut everything down.
I don't think that is the case, no. If you have any kind of evidence, I would be very, very interested to see it.
> Hopefully one day we’ll have a fast and light web browser again :(
There are fast, light browsers around. I like NetSurf, which originated on RISC OS but now runs on lots of things. There's also Dillo.
But they are small, fast and light because they don't do Javascript, and that makes them useless for a lot of stuff.
I welcome suggestions on how to improve that situation. I do not think that Gemini is an answer.
Midori used to be small, light and fast, but not any more. It's another Blink browser now, AFAIK.
Epiphany is still quite snappy, and it's the only WebKit browser for Linux AFAIK. (This also means it's a fully native browser for Linux on Arm, because there's no Chrome for ordinary Arm Linux, or for Windows on Arm64. There is a native Arm64 Windows Firefox but it's well hidden. Chromium exists of course but it is quite limited.)
Epiphany is also the best browser on Haiku.
It now uses the QtWebEngine, which is chromium based:
Both are looking for funding and sponsors.