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Comment by thrdbndndn | Hacker News Reader

Can someone elaborate the relationship between Servo and Firefox? When it firstly came I thought it's going to be the next engine used in Firefox (replacing Gecko), but it apparently was not the case.

I then heard that servo would be part of Firefox, replacing certain components (layout rendering?), but this repo seems to imply that Servo is a standalone engine.

Edit: found a reddit post [1], which cleared up what Firefox wanted/got from Servo project.

But it's now even more confusing that what the purpose of current Servo project has. If building a full browser engine from scratch is deemed to hard even with Mozilla's financial support (according to this post), now without, it's hard to imagine anything substantive would be done with this project in future.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/yvd1f0/whats_the_s...

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My understanding is that it was going to be the new core of Firefox, until the mass Mozilla layoff of 2020 where the Servo team was completely gutted.

This is incorrect. Servo was a test bed for new architectural changes within Firefox. Some of them made their way into Firefox, like Stylo and WebRender.

I don't think that was the plan from the start. There definitely was talk that it would eventually replace Gecko, not just be used for parts.

Other comments give more detail, but some of the good ideas made it into Firefox. A similar thing happened at Google when Omega seemed like it might replace Borg. Borg adopted the best ideas and Omega got cancelled.

Sometimes it's easier to retrofit the novel ideas from a research system into the production system than it is to make the research system into the production system, and that's OK.

Which is totally fine I think, but I guess there really isn't much future for the current Servo project, right?

Servo had a period where it had no active backing, but now it's part of the Linux Foundation and seems to have more buzz around it. I know Tauri (UI toolkit for Rust and other languages) are looking at ways to use Servo as the backend for developing UIs in Rust, kind of like a more lightweight electron.

It seems they're even making some progress on that https://servo.org/blog/2024/01/19/embedding-update/

> even with Mozilla's financial support

I wonder how much was spent on browser engine versus determining what sneaker designers has to say about colors on the modern web, and other such things

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/stories/joy-of-color/

> If building a full browser engine from scratch is deemed to hard even with Mozilla's financial support

Maybe that is long term goal, but it seems to me that they are currently working on embedding - so it can be used in applications, that do not need full-featured engine.

The purpose of servo (and therefore the purpose of Rust) is to drive the development of Rust's LSP, obviously

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