Comment by gibibit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gibibit | Hacker News Reader

I am excited for any path that gets us toward a faster, leaner, cleaner web browser. It is insane that we have to dedicate multiple gigabytes of RAM, have CPUs 1000x faster than we had back with Netscape Navigator, and still the browser performs poorly, and constantly has security vulnerabilities.

I hope Ladybird and Servo succeed. I tried Servo a couple of years ago and it was quite useless, unable to do anything, so I'll have to check back and see how it's doing sometime and see if it's improved.

UPDATE: just tried the latest Servo build on macOS. About 100 MB download, not bad. Started fast. Kind of works. Fast but not very smooth, lots of repaint flashing etc. And text fields and text selection on the web page work poorly or not at all.

I guess they're focusing on interesting internal stuff rather than the basics of loading a webpage and allow you to highlight text and copy it, or click in a text field and edit the text. I wonder whether it will graduate to a real browser sometime.

> It is insane that we have to dedicate multiple gigabytes of RAM, have CPUs 1000x faster than we had back with Netscape Navigator

Webpages are applications. Browsers are application runtimes. The main culprit driving high memory usage is not the runtime, but the application.

That's not really correct. Compare the basic interactive page resource usage to a similar interface made with qt or even .net - it's the runtime that makes the massive difference.

>I wonder whether it will graduate to a real browser sometime.

It won't. Someone will have to build a browser around it as Servo itself is not a browser.

What you downloaded from their page is "just" a thin wrapper around Servo. Only serves demo purposes.

There is already a web browser based on Servo engine - Verso (https://github.com/versotile-org/verso).

I think it's just progression of tech. Today's web pages aren't the same as the ones on netscape. Same with a flagship phone from 10 years ago with 1GB of RAM pales in comparison.

I did see a Macintosh load up Google one time, that was surreal, anachronistic, it took a long time it was a video on YT.

If you want a lightweight web browser, try: Pale Moon, Basilisk or SeaMonkey.

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