This month in Servo: tabbed browsing, Windows buffs, devtools, and more | Hacker News Reader

This month in Servo: tabbed browsing, Windows buffs, devtools, and more

servo.org

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I'm surprised by how little funding they're getting. Are those just from 3rd party individuals excluding big orgs?

Given how vocal a lot of people are about the web browsers being owned by Google through chrom(ium)e would think more people/companies would be interested in seeing a contender happen faster.

There's probably some kind of tragedy of the commons, where nobody thinks they should be the one funding this stuff.

I also believe there's the impression that making a brand new browser with an engine written from scratch is not realistic, so why found one? Fortunately Ladybird might have changed things on this front.

Well, this managed to make me feel enough shame to throw $5 a month at them

Shame can be a very positive emotion like this :)

It is usually a signal that there is something we would like to change.

> There's probably some kind of tragedy of the commons

I think you mean the free rider problem. In the tragedy of the commons, a shared resources is depleted. In the free rider problem, it's only that users benefit without contributing. In both cases, the resource is non-excludable (it's public or common in a sense) but in the case of the free rider problem, the resource is non-rivalrous, meaning that consumption by one user does not reduce its availability to another. People using Servo but not contributing it does not exhaust any shared resource that we have access to (i.e. Servo itself). The resources used for its production (and any potential resources that could be) are all private, not common or public.

I guess nobody's really using it yet though since it's not really usable so it's not really formally the free rider problem yet either. It's just that nobody's really funding it.

> where nobody thinks they should be the one funding this stuff.

I wonder if it's not more like people just assume someone else is contributing or maybe they don't even know they can or don't believe they can have an impact because they don't know the details. It seems like there could be a lot of reasons and I'm not sure how to find out why they aren't getting what they need.

> I also believe there's the impression that making a brand new browser with an engine written from scratch is not realistic, so why found one? Fortunately Ladybird might have changed things on this front.

I think there are better ways to think than that. We should do what we can, even if we fail.

Empty barrels make the most noise. It’s cheap to be vocal about a topic, whereas donating time or money to the cause is not.

> Empty barrels make the most noise.

I'd never heard this figure of speech before, and I really like it.

I think that a lot of the vocal people are not the ones with the big money. Or even organizations with that kind of money.

And some of the organizations that do have that kind of money have thrown in the towel. Like Microsoft, who switched Edge to chromium a few years ago.

I also think that many people who are vocal about it rather donate to something like Firefox (although it is quite difficult to actually donate to specifically fund firefox development....) because that is an established alternative for Chromium.

Yeah... it's kinda sad. Even if only HN would donate 5USD a month they would probably get to the goal...

It seems though that most of the people here only complain about terrible state of the web without doing anything about it...

Post up some strong numbers people!

The HN community could easily pass the 100k mark in a day.

There’s a genuinely new browser to be excited about.

Let’s get it done

And please do that by showing support and donation. Even if every active HN active user donates 10$, it will be huge

Where is the dotation page on the site? I couldn't find it on the site's main navigation

Edit: https://servo.org/sponsorship/

Found it. Sorry, would've been nicer to have it right up the top under "contributing" or something.

Edit 2: I think I'm just stupid. It's under "About"

It’s interesting to see servo keeps living. Thumbs up.

Agreed, they still have a long road to travel before they are a true alternative to other browsers and engines. But I think it is good that there are genuine efforts in developing alternative browsers and engines.

Ladybird browser is even further away from a mature product, but also an example of a project I am glad to see existing.

I’m not sure if Ladybird is further away. Ladybird is seemingly targeting pretty relevant standard pieces and seems very far along in comparison from being a mature project.

No, they are pretty far away as far I understand it. Based on various tests available to see how far along a browser is with specific standards.

Also makes sense as Ladybird is a much younger project, even with the hiatus in development with Servo.

I’m exclusively referring to my personal experience of playing with these. Ladybird can render (with errors) quite a few sites including Wikipedia where Servo fails catastrophically.

It feels like Ladybird is going to reach "the last 10% of work takes 90% of the work"

> Thumbs up.

… and donate :)

I pulled last changes to see the new tabs and surprised by RTL support because few weeks ago not supported

I see there PR merged: https://github.com/servo/servo/pull/33148

Wasn't Servo abandoned?

It was abandoned by Mozilla but Linux Foundation took over according to Wikipedia.

That's great news!

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