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Comment by AstralStorm | Hacker News Reader

Can you name other browser engines in play? I'm waiting.

While neither Mozilla nor Firefox are not indispensable, Gecko is.

We literally have three working rendering engines: Chromium/V3, Gecko/Spidermonkey and ... Long nothing ... WebKit/KHTML?

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Ladybird and Servo are coming up, but I suppose you're covering that with "working".

Servo is still going? Thought it was pretty much on life support after being abandoned by Mozilla.

Servo as a fully-featured web browser does indeed not seem to exist anymore but some of its components such as Webrender still do and are actively maintained.

servo was never a fully featured web browser and was never proposed to be iirc. It was proposed as experimental from the start. The most we got at the time was browser.html

Back in... 2018? there was a Servo binary you could download that had an address bar and could be used to browse the web. That actually started to get stripped down over time, the later binaries had less and less functionality, until now I don't even think there are any. Servo spearheaded a lot of projects, like bindings to macOS frameworks from Rust, that would have been used to create a more comprehensive browser, but then got torn down once the larger thing was canceled in favor of certain components, like webrender.

I don't know when exactly it was canceled - maybe around the time Firefox Quantum shipped.

Note that I never said it was ever not experimental. Just that it would have been more until it was canceled.

servoshell exists today. Their focus has definitely been in the rendering etc and not in developing browser UI, but that's understandable.

https://book.servo.org/running-servoshell.html

Yes, it was revived by Igalia, and has good momentum. Check https://servo.org

What’s the problem with WebKit?

Nothing is wrong with WebKit, but it's not really a separate rendering engine, and the discussion is about separate rendering engines. Chromium's heritage derives from WebKit.

> Can you name other browser engines in play?

WebKit. Also, the only thing keeping Chromium a Google monopoly is Europe, China and India’s concession.

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