How does ladybird compare to Servo?
Servo wants to build an embeddable engine for controlled sets of HTML/CSS/JS content, with a focus on modularity and parallelism.
Ladybird wants to build a usable browser for the open web, warts and all, with a focus on compatibility and correctness.
I'm a big fan of Servo and I hope they become a huge success! Competition and new ideas in browser engines will benefit all of us! :)
That’s what they pivoted to after being expelled from Mozilla, but that wasn’t the original goal, was it? It’s the safer(?) one they turned to when the job security evaporated.
(Not sure if that changes anything, just feel obligated to point out the retcon here.)
It is just extremely rough. It is in a far less-usable state than Ladybird even is and very prone to crashing.
They always aimed for a better embeddable story than Gecko. That and more parallelism in layout and processing.
> It’s the safer(?) one they turned to when the job security evaporated.
Not safer, more like saner multithreading story. Safe rust isn't so much for security as it is safety in a parallel context.
Re “safe”, I meant that targeting the embedding usecase is safer in a social and project-planning way, as in smaller probability of other people calling them nuts and greater probability of getting something usable in a finite amount of time. Which is fair enough.
You seem to be under some impression that Servo before Mozilla layoff and after Mozilla layoffs are the same? They aren't. I mean, the code is a continuation of effort, but the people who worked on it before and after the Mozilla exodus aren't the same.
Servo originally did have the same goal of better embeddability, but after it's resurrection it's only the same by mostly coincidence. Sponsors (Tizen IIRC) wants a fast embeddable browser. That's about it.
If there is a difference between how specs define something, and how browsers behave (and website expect them to behave), will you choose technical correctness or websites actually functioning?
Technically this has been the big problem of HTML5 vs XHTML, and "technical correctness" lost to actual usability.
Firefox has often been forced to just conform to Chrome behaviour, despite differing specs, or because the spec was rejected/not agreed upon.
and the code (at least a large part of it in the form of Chromium) is Open Source. I don't think it's as bleak as people make it out to be.