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Comment by dale_glass | Hacker News Reader

That sounds like an amazing failure of imagination to me. I see at least 3 excellent angles.

1. Chrome beat Firefox in the stability/security area. Its usage of multiple processes, sandboxing, etc is excellent, while Firefox failed to adapt. Servo seems to have an excellent potential for coming up on top there, being both more secure, and having higher performance.

2. There are actually markets interested in security. Think say, banking, military, industry, IOT. There are various laws coming requiring companies to take security seriously. Servo has a lot of potential there too. There's potential for both projects that have security as a selling point, and regulatory compliance.

3. Embedding. Like I said, using a web engine as a component seems to have been forgotten in modern times. Surely that can be sold to somebody, because there are plenty use cases for embedding web engines in stuff.

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>1. Chrome beat Firefox in the stability/security area. Its usage of multiple processes, sandboxing, etc is excellent, while Firefox failed to adapt. Servo seems to have an excellent potential for coming up on top there, being both more secure, and having higher performance.

They did adapt, and the HN types got mad at them for breaking the old-style extensions, which were effectively incompatible with multiple processes, sandboxing, performance, etc. And were totally incompatible with Servo at a fundamental level.

>2. There are actually markets interested in security. Think say, banking, military, industry, IOT.

Those industries are infamous for doing things like having applications that only support IE9 in Windows XP. Security may matter to them in theory but in practice it is clearly far lower on the priority list than stability and supporting one golden path. Getting them to adopt something novel and experimental for use cases they want to be thoroughly boring and unchanging for 15 years is never ever going to happen.

As someone that compiled and ran Servo and submitted a couple of patches, it had a long way to go (years of development) before it would have been production ready in its entirety.

While this is great brainstorming, that doesn't mean it's a viable business plan. Having a large highly qualified dev-team working on experimental stuff for now over a decade and no likelihood of completion anytime soon and without a business plan is pretty tricky, even for a non-profit.

In general, for research of that type (of scale) it doesn't strike me as generally very viable to rely on commercial support, and such a niche technicality is surely not going to collect enough donations to run on that alone. If we want to fund this because it's an interesting option for the future in the long term, governments are going to need to chip in - and it looks like that's at least partly at play here (or even primarily), i.e.: system working as designed.

> 3. Embedding. Like I said, using a web engine as a component seems to have been forgotten in modern times. Surely that can be sold to somebody, because there are plenty use cases for embedding web engines in stuff.

It's not forgotten. Microsoft has WebView2 which uses the same engine as MS Edge and it can be included in your .net applications.

If OTOH you want an ActiveX then you can buy AntView, which wraps WebView2 in an ActiveX control.

Disclaimer: AntView is a control sold by my company.

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