While it's hard to know what comes of it, there is also https://ladybird.org/ to challenge to monopoly of Blink.
Orion adding Windows support (getting WebKit running on Windows again) would be pretty good too.
Really just needs more people (and companies) pushing it forward. Hopefully Kagi will be contributing improvements to the Windows port upstream.
[1] https://iangrunert.com/2024/10/07/every-jit-tier-enabled-jsc...
They are already quite competitive.
For casual web browsing it's plenty fast enough already to do a lot of things, but they're a relatively small team fighting against decades of optimization.
Since a couple weeks ago it became possible to view all major commercial news websites I use in my country.
If it works for most websites and you only have to reach for Chrome sometimes it would still be perfectly usable.
They're ahead of Servo already anyway, and better funded.
Of course, this can be fairly controversial: More app-like capabilities lead to more complex standards and harder-to-secure browsers. There's also overengineering where people use web app techniques to develop web pages. You don't need (much) JS or even any of the new standards for HN, but for something like Google Docs or Figma, it's a different story.
If you use them right.
Which 99% of sites do not.
Imagine being in your annual review and your boss has a chart of your performance compared to your peers and it's just the count of PRs you merged. You begin to protest that merged PRs is not a good metric for contributions, then he switches to the next slide which is just this comment you made on HN...
1) Apple and Firefox have enough resources to implement the most recent web standards. When you see a feature which goes un-implemented for too long, it’s almost surely because nobody was even working on it because of internal resourcing fights.
2) Devs aren’t created equal. It’s possible for a team of 8 people to be 10x more productive than another team of 8.
Or because they are reluctant to implement it for technical reasons? Not every "standard" that gets thrown on the table and implemented by Google is a brilliant idea.
Hell starting out as extracting text, pictures, video for all nightmare sites. Then slowly add whatever features dont actually lead to dark patterns
For writing a game, or Figma replacement, or some cutesy something that runs on your machine without requiring network access, probably. For one of the most impactful applications that downloads untrusted code from the Internet and executes it without any confirmation whatsoever, the language for sure does matter. "Chrome RCE" is a phrase that strikes fear, and it's not a rare occurrence. I'll point out that Google is not lacking some of the most skilled security researchers and tooling in the world, so I wish the Ladybird folks godspeed doing their own "does this build have vulns?" work
Also: Andreas has worked on Webkit/Blink. He knew what he was doing when he started the project, even if it was "just for fun". Linux started under similar circumstances.
Starting a new browser project without a solid security architecture seems just a bad idea to me. It's such a hostile operating environment. Personal computing in the early 90s was a very different place.
As for the rest of your comment... I believe Rust now has MIR-based optimizations, so it's no longer the case that "THE ENTIRE optimization" is due to LLVM. But it's a non-sequitur to say that Rust would be slower without LLVM. Rust doesn't do many optimizations on its own, because it's quite frankly a lot of boring tedium to implement an entire optimizing compiler stack, and if you've got a library you can use to do that, why not? If no such library were available, Rust would merely be implementing all of those optimizations itself, much as V8 implements those optimizations itself.
If you're writing a browser engine in C++, I may not like it, but I can see that you're pragmatic and are focused on the end result rather than the language. If you're writing it in Rust, okay, you maybe have your eyes on that pie in the sky, but you've chosen a language that, at least potentially, has the ability to replace C++ in creating bedrock software.
Any other language and I feel like someone with a lot of political capital at the company just has a personal preference for the language and so, "yeah, we're going to rewrite it all in Swift"[0].
I mean, you're writing a browser. Do you really want to build it in a language that is at the "it's improving" stage of support for the most popular operating systems?
There is no immediate plan to switch to anything so it’s still C++. They may not ever switch. Swift’s cross platform support isn’t there yet and that’s a prerequisite.
Ladybird has an interesting way of documenting web standards in code. They put a link to the reference doc at the top of a function and then each rule in a comment where it is implemented. It's very easy to follow and good quality code. Another project I recall having high quality code was KHTML. Not coincidentally, Andreas Kling worked on that one too.
There are examples here: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird/tree/master/Libr...
Anyway, the point is what they are doing is working well and Swift won't be ready for a while. If it ever happens, it won't be a rewrite. It'll more likely be a situation where it's written in both the same way Linux is both C and rust.
I'd love to know more about this.
Here are some key quotes: "something that matters to us a lot is OO. Web specs & browser internals tend to be highly object-oriented, and life is easier when you can model specs closely in your code."
"So what I’ve done is I’ve asked a bunch of people to “Please implement these things in a couple of different languages. And then we can talk about how that went, what you liked about each language, and which one you would like to work in every day.” And what we ended up with was that people were initially excited to work in Rust, because there’s a lot of hype, and it’s like a popular language… And you would think that it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread… And in many ways it is, if what you want is sliced bread. Or I don’t know where I’m going with that. But it works well for a lot of things."
"But it turns out it’s not ideal for building a browser… Because the browser stack sits on top of this API that was designed in the ’90s, inspired by Java and XML and stuff like that at the time. This ‘90s API, and it set the core of the web stack. And it’s super object-oriented, and it’s just hard to express all that stuff in Rust, because Rust doesn’t lend itself to object-oriented programming. It doesn’t have inheritance, for example, which is a very fundamental building block."
"And so what happened was I asked people to write in Rust, and they were initially excited, and then they came back frustrated. And nobody had a good time working in Rust, as far as I understood, when doing anything but trivial programs that like take an input and transform it into something else. The moment you try to model something, sort of in a browser space, it just became tedious."
"So we looked at some other languages, and the one that everybody has liked so far has been Swift. So it’s a bit of an unlikely candidate, but we decided to look at it, because it is a safe, modern language, that has great object-oriented programming capabilities. I would say it’s even better than C++ in many ways. And it’s a little weird, because it feels like an Apple product almost, but they’ve been making great strides on Linux and Windows. Especially now, the upcoming Swift 6 is looking like it’s going to be a really good release on other platforms as well… So that’s sort of where the ship is pointing right now. We haven’t committed to it, because we’re still figuring out how to do some things, but it’s been really positive, and everybody’s enjoyed working in it, myself included. It’s been fantastic. So that’s sort of what we’re looking at."
That's a rather strange criticism, seeing as the only thing about objects that's slightly involved to express in Rust is implementation inheritance; and even then, it can be phrased in a very reasonable way by using the generic typestate pattern. I.e. expressing a class that can be inherited from as a generic object MyBaseClass<T>, where T holds the "derived" object state (and can itself be generic in turn, thereby extending the type hierarchy) and methods can either be implemented for any MyBaseClass<T> or for some specific MyBaseClass<MyDerivedObject>.
(This aims to do the right thing whenever a method on the base class relies on some method implementation that's defined deeper in the hierarchy, i.e. there is an indirection step, aka open recursion. That's the part that is missing when using simple composition.)
Interesting approach! Have you used this in larger project (i.e. for a larger type hierarchy)?
I suspect it might at least take some getting used to (readability-wise), plus it might lead to additional boilerplate in case some child "classes" only want to override some methods, but not others. (The parent will have to implement some switching logic.)
Overall I agree, though, I can't think of any OOP use case that could not be covered by this.
Ultimately I'm not dissuaded from my original impression.
I worked at a company doing web scraping, and our code sucked and we knew it, and the lead programmer kind of liked Elixir, and we were always going to rewrite in Elixir one day, and he would mention it in interviews and stuff, and put it on job requirements, but really there was almost no Elixir in the company. We came up with all sorts of reasons Elixir would make sense technically, I even offered some myself because I got positive social feedback when I spoke well of Elixir. But now that I'm out of the company, I can see that Elixir is not uniquely suited to solve the problems we had. It was just one guy liked Elixir and so ultimately we all did.
I still predict the same for LadyBird. You can even see in the Tweet I linked that they choose C++ because of one person, so I'm guessing that one person also likes Swift. Time will tell.
"The choice of language was not so much a technical decision, but more one of personal convenience. Andreas was most comfortable with C++ when creating SerenityOS, and now we have almost half a million lines of modern C++ to maintain."
Source: ladybird.org FAQ