Servo 2025 Stats | Hacker News Reader

Servo 2025 Stats

blogs.igalia.com

170 pointstodsacerdoti49 comments

Maybe that was explained in Rego's September talk [1] but went over my head, but how does Igalia steer Servo? I can understand that when the project was under Mozilla, there were people primarily from, or tied to Mozilla keeping it afloat. Since Igalia is a _consulting_ agency, I don't suppose they work on code themselves, so what do they do to, well, attract new people and keep existing contributors in the loop?

[1]: https://blogs.igalia.com/mrego/servo-a-new-web-engine-writte...

Igalia is a quite specific "consulting" agency that employs developers and get contracts from client to implement specific features or fix specific bugs, usually around FOSS. They have people who knows how to contribute to Firefox, Chrome, WebKit, Linux, Mesa... It's the go to company if you want to get something done in these projects when not having the resources for that in house.

For example they work for Valve to make the Radeon drivers better and got a grant to get basic MathML support done in the three major web browsers.

Igalia are implementation consultants not management consultants. They are who you get in when you need the expert in some field to fix your problem, usually by writing the code themselves. For example if you're writing driver code and you have problems you call them. Or if your Valve and you are having trouble with the linux graphics stack you might call them[1] etc....

[1]: https://www.igalia.com/2025/11/helpingvalve.html

> Since Igalia is a _consulting_ agency, I don't suppose they work on code themselves

They absolutely do work on the code themselves. They have a small but active team working on it full time. They are a _software_ consulting agency who's primary product is writing code.

Regarding "steering", there is a Technical Steering Commitee who meets monthly (https://github.com/servo/project/tree/main/governance). Several but by no means all members of the comittee are from Igalia.

I wonder, seeing the immense growth in 2023/2024, how that correlates with the ladybird project, which officially started in 2024.

Could Manifest v3 be the reason we have so much fresh air blowing in the browser ecosystem or does it just stem from a general unhappiness of said ecosystem?

I think that Ladybird has driven a lot of the effort, otherwise we'd just see browsers continuing to use Chromium with backports to allow v2 being worked on.

Ladybird was already progressing rapidly within SerenityOS well before it was officially launched, and I think that's given people a new inspiration for how plausible it is to create a browser from scratch. I'm really pleased we're seeing Servo having a resurgence too.

It’s indeed rapidly progressing feature-wise, but I have yet to see an explanation for how they intend to manage security once market adoption happens.

Ladybird is written in C++, which is memory-unsafe by default (unlike Rust, which is memory-safe by default). Firefox and Chrome also use C++, and each of them has 3-4 critical vulnerabilities related to memory safety per year, despite the massive resources Mozilla and Google have invested in security. I don’t understand how the Ladybird team could possibly hope to secure a C++ browser engine, given that even engineering giants have consistently failed to do so.

> Firefox and Chrome also use C++, and each of them has 3-4 critical vulnerabilities related to memory safety per year, despite the massive resources Mozilla and Google have invested in security.

And part of Firefox/Chromes security effort has been to use memory safe languages in critical sections like file format decoders. They're far too deeply invested in C++ to move away entirely in our lifetimes, but they are taking advantage of other languages where they feasibly can, so to write a new browser in pure C++ is a regression from what the big players are already doing.

Ladybird is going to use Swift.

That is very good news!

I've used Swift a bunch for hobby projects, and the two things that suck about it are:

1. XCode

2. Compile times

I would assume if you're coming from C++ or Rust the compile time issues aren't really something you notice anyway :P

You don't strictly have to use Xcode to use swift, there's a good LSP for use in other editors.

That said, if you're using Swift to build an app, you're probably still going to want to use Xcode for building and debugging

Yea, I'm building iOS apps mostly, and some macOS apps, so definitely need to use XCode :/

I have a nice workflow going for the iOS apps I work on where I use neovim for all my editing, and Xcode for building and debugging.

I know that that’s the plan, but I believe it when I see it. Mozilla invented entire language features for Rust based on Servo’s needs. It’s doubtful whether a language like Swift, which is used mostly for high-level UI code, has what it takes to serve as the foundation of a browser engine.

what technical demerits specifically make Swift a doubtfully viable option for a browser?

Swifts most notable use case is certainly making apps but if I recall correctly Apple has converted a good bit of their networking code to Swift.

It may not be the lowest of the low level but it certainly is more flexible than meets the eye

If I remember correctly, the guy behind it used to work at Apple, maybe that has to do something with it?

perhaps they do not think Rust is the best option for Ladybird

I know they have said that. But it feels a bit strange to me to continue to develop in C++ then, if they eventually will have to rewrite everything in Swift. Wouldn't it be better to switch language sooner rather than later in that case?

Or maybe it doesn't have to take so much time to do a rewrite if an AI does it. But then I also wonder why not do it now, rather than wait.

That is the plan, but they are stalled on that effort by difficulties getting Swift's memory model (reference counting) to play nice with Ladybird's (garbage collection)

I think there was some work with the Swift team at Apple to fix this but there haven't been any updates in months

I would love it if you would provide a reference I could go look at

There's a few threads about this in the Swift forums, here's a couple:

https://forums.swift.org/t/ladybird-browser-and-swift-garbag...

https://forums.swift.org/t/ladybird-browser-event-loop-integ...

https://forums.swift.org/t/ladybird-gc-and-imported-class-hi...

Thank you! I look forward to perusing these.

I just checked out Servo, and like all browsers it has a VERY large footprint of dependencies (notably GStreamer/GOject, libpng/jpeg, PCRE). Considering browsers have quite the decent process isolation (the whole browser process vs heavily sandboxed renderer processes), I wonder how tangible the Rust advantage turns out to be.

Browsers have had sandboxing for well over a decade, and the 3-4 catastrophic vulnerabilities per year happen in spite of that.

And most of them are in the browser code itself, not in dependencies. By far the biggest offender tends to be the JavaScript engine.

Are you sure?

I just looked at the top CVEs for chrome in 2025. There are 5 which allow excaping the sandbox, and the top ones seem to be V8 bugs where the JIT is coaxed into generating exploitable code. One seems to be a genuine use-after-free.

So I can echo what you wrote about the JS engine being most exploitable, but how is Rust supposed to help with generating memory-safe JITed code?

Like this: https://github.com/nbp/holyjit

The increased activity came from Igalia who started working on Servo in 2023 with support from the Linux Foundation. Prior to that the project was effectively dead in the water with no sponsored development.

And Igalia is notable for contributing to every major browser engine: https://www.igalia.com/2026/01/05/Doing-Our-Share-for-the-We...

But the question still remains, why did Igalia pick up a dead project?

I doubt you'd invest that kind of money/time into a project without a good reason. I am not saying that ladybird or manifest v3 are the reason, I just notice a lot of new energy in the not-just-chrome category and wonder what the other reasons might be.

Andreas Kling is pretty open about his reasons to have started the ladybird project and I just know Servo from his monthly videos and a few other sidenotes, so I was surprised that it gained so much traction after being basically dead.

> But the question still remains, why did Igalia pick up a dead project?

> I doubt you'd invest that kind of money/time into a project without a good reason.

Igalia is a very peculiar company. I would not rule out "it's a good thing for the commons and we bet we'll get some upside eventually" as the reason.

> But the question still remains, why did Igalia pick up a dead project?

Igalia is generally pro open-source, and Servo certainly aligns with their ethos, but a lot of the money came from Futurewei / Huawei who are interested in Servo because it's not US based, and therefore they are actually able to contribute to it (they are effectively banned from contributing to Chrome/Firefox/Safari due to US sanctions). There is now also funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund who are also interested in a "European browser" (and NLnet, but they fund all sorts of things)

Thanks, that are the insights I was hoping to get.

As I understand it, funding was provided by NLnet[1], a longstanding Dutch non-profit that focuses on supporting open internet technologies. The funding was provided specifically for reviving Servo. By the looks of it, the money itself mostly comes from the EU, which has various grant programmes to fund open access technology, digital sovereignty, etc. Given several Servo contributors worked for Igalia, I expect they submitted a proposal to NLnet for them to fund Servo development, and it was successful.

[1] https://nlnet.nl/project/Servo/

How usable is Servo nowadays? I remember trying it like 3 years ago (exploring it for integration for a dashboard where Chromium was too heavy), and most websites had major rendering or usability problems to the point that I abandoned the idea.

Probably the best way to get a feel short of actually trying it is to read the monthly reports on their blog [1], it still seems to be not ready to be a daily driver but I still follow blogs and videos about Servo and Ladybird because I’m hopeful we will have some more browser engine diversity someday!

1. https://servo.org/blog/

Yes, and if you do want to try it then there are builds available for most platforms: https://servo.org/download

Thanks! I've checked it out, and my quick assessment is that for most static-ish websites I tried, it's not perfect but definitely usable!

Night and day better than 3 years ago. Website like github work properly now. But still a ways to go to catch up with top-tier browsers in both compatibility and performance.

(if testing make sure you enable the "experimental features" using the button in the top-right - the project is far too conservative about this and lots of stuff doesn't work without them)

Exciting times.

Are we at the point yet where someone can use something other than a major headless browser (firefox, chrome) for converting html to PDFs without huge css gotchas?

Is there any comparison/ are we x yet reviewing alternative browser engines being developed? It seems like there's quite a few in active development at this point.

You can edit the query on wpt.fyi to compare web platform test results for Flow, Ladybird and Servo.

This is good to see! Ultimately a FOSS project lives or dies on contributors and contributions from them. Seeing this grow is a sign of health and for servo this is great to see!

Incredible! That contributor stat going to 146 people is super validating for the rust ecosystem. considering servo was the original "rewrite it in rust" project that basically birthed the language. Since memory safety is the bottleneck for every other legacy engine right now, is there any reason for embedded devices to keep using stripped-down webkit instead of switching to servo at this point?

I’m guessing the uncertainty about whether Servo will be meaningfully maintained 5 years from now is the main problem.

> is there any reason for embedded devices to keep using stripped-down webkit instead of switching to servo at this point?

I'd say Servo isn't quite there yet, but give it another year on the current trajectory and it might well be a viable option for a lot of use cases.

if anyone at igalia is reading: there's a typo in a caption: "Evolution of GitHub stars for Servo from start-history.com" should be star-history.

I think it would be completely usable by end of next year? so excited!!

I hope uBlock will support Servo if `webRequestBlocking` is implemented like in Firefox.

As an Australian, I'm disappointed this isn't an article about the amount of fuel, margins, cars, etc at a servo (yanks call them "gas stations").

For anyone else confused (as the linked page doesn't describe it at all:

> Servo aims to empower developers with a lightweight, high-performance alternative for embedding web technologies in applications.

It appears to be a browser engine embeddable in other applications, I assume for delivering content designed to run in a browser for some reason.

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