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Comment by ionelaipatioaei | Hacker News Reader

I think Ladybird will beat Servo at making an usable and good product, Mozilla might have more resources but that's not the only thing that you need if you want to build great software.

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> Mozilla might have more resources but that's not the only thing that you need if you want to build great software.

Servo is no longer a Mozilla project, and hasn't been since 2020. It's now developed by Igalia, Huawei, and a collection of volunteers.

Servo's value is that it's written in Rust.

Ladybird is C++ and that still has the same issues as every other engine.

I suspect Ladybird will/has already leapfrogged Servo in performance and usage due to the Ladybird team and its momentum. Mozilla isn't doing anything with Servo anymore.

But I also don't really see a compelling reason for Ladybird's existence - we already have Chromium, Blink, Gecko, etc. It's hard for me to imagine a world where Ladybird is a healthy contender for marketshare.

The only real novel thing to do in this space is "rewrite it in Rust".

> The only real novel thing to do in this space is "rewrite it in Rust".

Ironically Chromium is now starting to include quite a bit of Rust. And of course Firefox has for some time.

They are planning to use swift in the future. Last point: https://ladybird.org/#faq

I think that was being blocked by Swift features/libraries not being consistent across platforms, in that Swift for Linux/etc is missing stuff you'd get in macOS.

I don't see that changing any time soon. If Apple truly wanted Swift adoption to be cross platform, they have the resources to do it, but they didn't do it.

No, pretty sure that's all basically fixed in Swift 6 (Sep 2024), I think it's more just the immaturity of the C++ interop in being able to bridge Swift to complex C++ code.

That's a key feature of what Apple want Swift for (to gradually replace their C++ projects with Swift) but it's still pretty new. It'll take a while to mature.

That feels like the wrong language to bet the farm on.

Swift is horrible to develop in cross-platform. The language ergonomics are great, but the support just isn't there.

Also - swift is great for lots of applications, but a browser? Why use a garbage collected language for something that needs to be smooth? Unpredictable GC pause jitter is not something you want when smooth scrolling and rendering. Granted Javascript already negates that experience a little bit, but why introduce even more unpredictability?

I get the feeling the leadership loves Mac/Apple, which makes sense in light of their recent iOS announcement. Maybe they're prioritizing that world.

Aren't Chromium and Blink basically the same thing? And Gecko isn't embeddable.

> And Gecko isn't embeddable.

This is "In Review"[1], whatever that means.

[1] https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/ability-to-embed-gecko-...

Mozilla has been working on embedding Gecko since 2005. In practical terms, it can't be done.

I'd be glad to be proven wrong.

There are: GeckoView and Gecko Embedded, so it's doable.

Which roughly nobody uses.

But it's doable.

Blink is the backing engine of Chromium.

And therefore Chromium isn't a browser engine and shouldn't be listed there.

I've compared Servo with Ladybird and the latter uses 3x more RAM for the same website: https://fosstodon.org/@niutech/114139305720083599

So Servo is more lightweight than Ladybird.

Agreed. Servo is emphatically not anything resembling a priority at Mozilla and hasn't been for a long while.

Mozilla gave up on it a while ago.

It somehow survived after years with little progress and has relatively recently gathered speed again under new stewardship.

Servo is not part of Mozilla any more.

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