I tried Servo

https://www.spacebar.news/servo-undercover-web-browser-engine/

by robtherobber • 12 months ago

356 246 12 months ago

spacebar.news

jqpabc1235• 12 months ago

It's still baffling to me that Mozilla threw out Firefox's technical future

Very little about Mozilla makes sense --- until you follow the money.

olalonde3• 12 months ago

What do you mean? Doesn't most of Mozilla's revenue come from Firefox?

ObscureScience2• 12 months ago

How do you think Firefox is making money, since it has no payed features? Hint: it has Google search as the default search engine.

atoav• 12 months ago

Nope it comes from Google.

sirwhinesalot2• 12 months ago

Mozilla is basically paid by Google to have a multi-platform non-Blink browser around they can point to when accused of being a monopoly.

Having a quality browser is not required, merely it existing. So why waste money on novel web engine experiments when you can have AI conferences in Zambia?

nextaccountic• 12 months ago

I think people are implying that Google told Mozilla to drop Servo, to make sure Firefox wouldn't leapfrog Chrome. And since Google funds Mozilla almost entirely, Mozilla had to comply.

Almost no technical aspect of Firefox have anything to do with how much money Google pays them.

camdroidw• 12 months ago

It's wrong to name names without prood but after a point you start doubting your understanding of the world and at this point I'm beginning to suspect Mitchell Baker is a plant

bobajeff2• 12 months ago

I think without Mitchell Baker there would probably not have been a Mozilla. I'm fuzzy on the history but I believe she was the lawyer who originally set up the organization.

Gualdrapo• 12 months ago

I still strongly believe Servo can be a real counterpoint to Chrome/Chromium's hegemony in the long haul. Not sure why Mozilla ditched it nor why The Linux Foundation gives little to no support at all to it.

johnisgood3• 12 months ago

Because Mozilla benefits from Google's donations (the majority comes from Google), and being a counterpoint to Google's Chrome is bad for Google, which means less or no donations to Mozilla. Google holds the key here. They have leverage over Mozilla.

f311a2• 12 months ago

WebKit is a nice competitor, too. Look at Orion browser, it's a pretty decent competitor. Although they only target macOS, WebKit can be used on Windows and Linux, too.

ac29• 12 months ago

nor why The Linux Foundation gives little to no support at all to it

The Linux Foundation is mostly a dumping ground for dead and dying projects. Particularly they seem to specialize in abandoned commercial open source projects.

I dont think the Foundation provides much, if any, developer funding for these projects. They list $193M in "project support" expenses but host over 1000 projects.

StopDisinfo910• 12 months ago

The string of departures and how people communicated around them let me think it’s something a lot less nefarious: Mozilla looked like an extremely political company at the time.

Servo was extremely good at communication with their very frequent news letter and Rust had a lot of wind in its sails, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ruffled the wrong feathers. Mozilla is very much still managed by what remains of its old guards - by that I mean what hasn’t been poached - especially at the top.

That would be pure incompetence from the top management but not malice.

xpe2• 12 months ago

A lot of things look like incompetence at a distance, but get really fascinating up close. Does anyone know care to share what they know about the particular personalities, drives, and visions?

jqpabc1235• 12 months ago

That would be pure incompetence from the top

For which they are compensated very well.

It just doesn't make sense does it?

bornfreddy3• 12 months ago

The way this world is going, you shouldn't attribute to incompetence what can be attributed to malice.

xpe2• 12 months ago

The end of Pocket is just another sad example.

As an April fools joke, Mozilla should announce that they are discontinuing Firefox in order to focus on their core business, which is a beautiful abstraction: the Platonic ideal of discontinuing popular products.

paulryanrogers• 12 months ago

Strange. I remember reading nothing but complaints about Pocket when they bought and integrated it. I guess it grew on people.

coredog64• 12 months ago

That they're being bought by Google so that they can focus on the Platonic ideal of discontinuing popular products.

Certhas4• 12 months ago

I think Mozilla makes a lot of sense if you consider the following long term strategic goal: Become independent of Google money. None Google income has grown to 150M$ in 2023, up from 80M$ the year before. Mozilla has used dramatically more of the Google money to build up assets than it spends on advocacy or other projects that irl some people so. In 2023 they had 1B$ in investments. Net assets have been going up by 100M+ per year.

They are not yet in striking distance to truly become independent, but they are making significant steps in that direction. The share of Google money in their revenue went from 90% in 2020 to 75% in 2023.

I don't think following the money actually shows what you think it does.

As a postscript:

Damned if they do, damned if they don't. There were plenty of people at the time arguing that Firefox maintaining one independent browser engine was idiotic and they should just switch to Chromium like everyone else. People like to lambast Mozilla over relatively minor advocacy spending stuff and cry that it should just focus on Firefox, but insist it should have obviously continued with Servo. Even though Servo probably wouldn't have made a substantial difference to Firefox post Quantum for a very long time.

skinkestek2• 12 months ago

The majority of Mozilla’s revenue came through Firefox—their flagship product and by far their most recognized project.

And yet, somehow, they still struggle to secure adequate funding for Firefox itself, while millions are allocated to executive salaries and various advocacy initiatives.

lesuorac2• 12 months ago

At what point could FireFox had just invested the money from Google into the SP500 and then just ran the company off of passive income?

Like for 150M$ I bet you could fund browser development for at least a decade and that was just 1 year of income. (of course also burn the entire $150M).

cropcirclbureau• 12 months ago

Every day I login into Hacker News. Every day, I see Mozilla FUD.

ObscureScience2• 12 months ago

While it's hard to know what comes of it, there is also https://ladybird.org/ to challenge to monopoly of Blink.

willi59549879• 12 months ago

I hope it succeeds. Now they allow direct donations, so people who want it to succeed can help. I am sure these donations go directly into the development of the browser unlike with mozilla.

robin_reala• 12 months ago

Worth pointing out that you can also sponsor Servo development: https://github.com/sponsors/servo

YmiYugy3• 12 months ago

I just don't get the point of ladybird. They have full time engineers and are soliciting donations, so it's clearly more than a hobby project. Maybe my assumptions are off, but I just can't imagine they could ever become competitive in terms of features, security and performance with the big engines. Blink is setting the pace, Webkit is barely able to keep up and Gecko is slowly falling behind. All of these teams are orders of magnitudes larger than the Ladybird team. If you think that Blinks dominance is a thread to the web it's not enough to have an alternative engine you need enough adoption of that engine so web devs make sure their site is compatible with that engine. Most of this also applies to Servo, but at least their technical project goals (embeddable, modular, parallel, memory safe) sound at least moderately compelling. Maybe Ladybird has similar goals, but at least their website doesn't really state any technical goals.

f311a2• 12 months ago

What's wrong with Webkit? It's super fast. I tested Orion browser recently.

sirwhinesalot2• 12 months ago

Not being funded by Google money is a pretty big deal. Some of the developers are former webkit devs so they have a good foundation to start from. It remains to be seen if they can pull it off.

Orion adding Windows support (getting WebKit running on Windows again) would be pretty good too.

badsectoracula2• 12 months ago

Larger teams do not necessarily mean you get stuff faster. If anything after some point, a large team can be hard to get things moving and have tons of issues with communication.

throw839340949r• 12 months ago

Ladybird has better results in web rendering tests than Servo, and slowly is gaining on Firefox.

They are already quite competitive.

xdfgh11122• 12 months ago

It is donation funded with no reliance on outside parties. They don't have to inject ads into pages like brave did or sell out to Google compromising their independence on web standards.

They're ahead of Servo already anyway, and better funded.

keysdev• 12 months ago

It was the similar sentiment with 0xide.

materielle• 12 months ago

I think there are two things to keep in mind.

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.

paddim83• 12 months ago

Well Andreas Kling has worked on Safari and WebKit and (obviously) has talked to a lot of browser people. He knows what he is doing, and he frequently says that no one that has actually worked on a browser thinks it's impossible to create a new one, even with a small team (...of highly motivated and skilled people).

beefnugs• 12 months ago

I think the browser attempts are all wrong trying to "cover all edge cases" they should focus on being able to transform any and all dark patterns down into something simpler.

Hell starting out as extracting text, pictures, video for all nightmare sites. Then slowly add whatever features dont actually lead to dark patterns

gaazoh• 12 months ago

If anything, Ladybird is an independent implementation of the web standards, and the devs have identified and helped solving quite a few bugs and and ambiguities in the standards, which benefits everyone, from browser devs including the big guns to web developpers and users.

Buttons8405• 12 months ago

Looks interesting, but they're going to try writing it in Swift?

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?

[0] https://x.com/awesomekling/status/1822236888188498031

jm43• 12 months ago

You should look into why they chose it and what their implementation plan is. They evaluated multiple languages, including rust. There were some specific issues with rust that made it unsuitable for them. Swift was a bit of a dark horse candidate that the developers ended liking.

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.

jonkoops• 12 months ago

I have to be honest that I don't really understand the appeal of Ladybird from a purely technical perspective. It is written in C++, just like all the existing engines (yes there is some Swift, but it is negligible), so what benefit does it provide over Gecko or Blink? With Servo, I can see there is a distinct technical design around security and parallelism.

BrawnyBadger53• 12 months ago

There is more to a project this massive than its choice of language. For me though it's mostly about breaking from the monopoly and putting a check on Google's influence over browser space.

rollcat7• 12 months ago

Many many factors to consider. Simplistic take: KHTML was picked up by Apple because of its clean design and codebase; there's an extra 30 years of accumulated improvements in C++; you don't write stuff in Rust 1.0 either.

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.

Perz1val2• 12 months ago

Rust does not produce magic in the assembly code. It does not even produce faster assembly code. Rust toolchain on it's own does not even produce assembly code. It just passes that to LLVM that does THE ENTIRE optimization. Without LLVM (written in C++) doing the heavy lifting, Rust is probably slower than V8 (written in C++) running JavaScript. There's no technical marver in Servo compared to Ladybird. I don't understand the yapping how a language makes projects good/bad, despite it being proven completely false again and again. The appeal is in independence and politics around the project.

sdcoffey• 12 months ago

All-time opener

kookamamie3• 12 months ago

The Dogemania test ran at a smooth 60 FPS on my M4 Pro MacBook Pro until reaching around 400 images

I ran Dogemania on Chrome until 1400 images at steady 60 FPS at which point I got bored and closed the tab.

specproc• 12 months ago

Wow, just did this myself. The difference between Firefox and Chromium was depressing.

I'm getting >100 FPS almost consistently all the way up to 1,000 in Chromium, FF barely made it above 500 before dropping below 60.

Probably not a completely fair test, I've no extensions etc. on Chromium and only use it for the odd stubborn website, but that was quite a lesson in their comparative performance.

empath752• 12 months ago

Chrome has thousands of developers working it. That is a lot of man hours for small optimizations.

lvass• 12 months ago

For me it was stable 120fps on firefox at 2200 and 60fps at 3200, using 200W in my RX 6750XT.

Chromium hit below 60fps at around 4000 and below 30fps at 6000 but used my integrated intel GPU all the time.

bravesoul2• 12 months ago

If dogemania keeps the images still after animation isn't it embarrassingly optimizable? Why cant an Amiga do infinity of these?

kookamamie3• 12 months ago

It did! Infinite bobs.

nicoburns11• 12 months ago

The current roadmap lists Shadow DOM and CSS Grid as priorities

I've been working on the CSS Grid support. About to land "named grid lines and areas" support which should make a bunch more websites layout correctly.

I'm biased because it's my project, but IMO the approach Servo is using for CSS Grid is pretty cool in that the actual implementation is in an external library (Taffy [0]) that can be used standalone and is widely used accross the Rust UI ecosystem, including in the Blitz [1] web engine (which also uses Taffy for Flexbox and Block layout), the Zed [2] text editor, and the Bevy [3] game engine.

I'm hopeful that this approach of breaking down a web engine into independently usable modules with public APIs (which builds upon Servo's earlier work on modular libraries such as Stylo and html5ever) will make it easier for people to get involved in web engine development (as they can understand each piece in isolation), and make it easier for people to create new web engines in future (as they won't have to start completely from scratch).

[0] https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy [1]: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz [2]: https://zed.dev [3]: https://bevy.org/

fouronnes32• 12 months ago

Does having experience implementing a web browser engine feature change the way you write HTML or CSS in any way? Do you still google "css grid cheatsheet" three times a week like the rest of us?

rockwotj• 12 months ago

To me, this is like asking if having built a sql engine if you write SQL differently.

I think the answer is yes. Having a strong understanding of the underlying engine helps you debug and optimize more quickly

Needing reference stuff never changes unless it’s so frequently used.

nicoburns11• 12 months ago

Does having experience implementing a web browser engine feature change the way you write HTML or CSS in any way?

I think I'm more concious of what's performant in CSS. In particular, both Flexbox and CSS Grid like to remeasure things a lot by default, but this can be disabled with a couple of tricks:

- For Flexbox, always set `flex-basis: 0` and `min-width: 0`/`min-height: 0` if you can without affecting the layout. This allows the algorithm to skip measuring the "intrisic" (content-based) size.

- For CSS Grid, the analogous trick is to use `minmax(0, 1fr)` rather than just `1fr`.

(I also have a proposal for a new unit that would make it easier to get this performance by default, but I haven't managed to get any traction from the standards people or mainstream browsers yet - probably I need to implement it and write it up first).

Do you still google "css grid cheatsheet" three times a week like the rest of us?

Actually no. The process of reading the spec umpteen times because your implementation still doesn't pass the tests after the first N times really ingrains the precise meanings of the properties into your brain

piker• 12 months ago

Do you not worry that instead it will lead to feature bloat and fragmentation? If you’re going to strike at Google, you need laser focus.

nicoburns11• 12 months ago

Not really. Everything has a spec, so it's pretty clear what's in scope and what isn't. Also, we don't have time for bloat with our team size. We have to be laser focussed on what actually makes a difference to real websites. It's Chrome that has bloat!

Also the specs don't change much (there are additions, but almost always backwards-compatible), so once written the code shouldn't need too much maintenance.

I see it as writing a piece of foundational infrastructure. You can write your own HTTP library. But you don't need to: there are high-quality libraries readily available (e.g. curl or hyper). Similarly for HTML parsers or 2D graphics rendering. Nobody's done that for web layout yet (except arguably React Native's Yoga [0], but that's much less ambitious in terms of how much of the spec it attempts to support), so everybody has to write their own. But it's possible so we're doing it.

[0]: github.com/facebook/yoga/

afavour• 12 months ago

Shadow DOM and CSS Grid don't strike me as bloat or fragmentation in any way? CSS Grid in particular is table stakes that would be part of any laser focus.

goku126• 12 months ago

(Taffy [0]) that can be used standalone and is widely used accross the Rust UI ecosystem, including in the Blitz [1] web engine (which also uses Taffy for Flexbox and Block layout)

This is the first time I hear about Blitz. Looks equally interesting and ambitious. It is probably the real undercover web engine. Servo was widely known around when Rust debuted.

echelon4• 12 months ago

Questions for the Rust UX experts:

Is Dioxus (or Leptos) much more performant than Tauri/Electron?

I want to (1) build blindingly fast, low-latency, super performant UX for users, which precludes Tauri/Electron (something I'm currently using and unhappy about), but I also want to (2) maintain developer velocity, (3) have access to nice UX primitives and widgets, and (4) have it look nice and modern.

Javascript/browser-oriented frameworks make requirements 2-4 easy, and it has the side benefit of also making hiring easy (not a requirement per se). But the results feel so bloated and anti-Desktop/native. It gobbles up RAM and renders slowly, even when best practices are used. It's the very definition of a double-edged sword.

Are these four requirements simply impossible to satisfy together for native Rust UX toolkits right now?

Rust's egui looks amazing, but I doubt you'd be able to build a very complicated UX with it. Or if you could, it might take you half a year to deliver.

Iced also looks cool, but looks less featureful.

Are there any "non-browser" Rust UX toolkits that aren't dated GTK/KDE frameworks, but that can build graphically-oriented (not just text/button widget) programs?

If I were building a "slimmed down photoshop", are there any Rust GUI toolkits to reach for? Or if I were incorporating a Bevy or 3D render pane?

nicoburns11• 12 months ago

this is the first time I hear about Blitz. Looks equally interesting and ambitious. It is probably the real undercover web engine

It's certainly a newer and lesser-known engine. It's mostly been me working on it for the past year or so (with a couple of other occasional contributors). But I do have funding to work on it full time through DioxusLabs (who are building Dioxus Native - a Flutter / React Native competitor on top of it) and NLnet (who are a non-profit interested in the alternative web browser use case).

We're trying to really push on the modular side of things to create a web engine that's flexible / hackable and can be moulded for a variety of use cases.

We'd love more contributors, so if anyone is interested in getting involved then drop by our GitHub (https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz/) or Discord (https://discord.gg/AnNPqT95pu - #native channel)

wodenokoto• 12 months ago

Wasn’t rust and servo co-developed?

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 12 months ago

breaking down a web engine into independently usable modules with public APIs

I love that. Years ago I looked at WebRTC and asked myself, why does it seem like making a crummy Skype knockoff is either 50 lines of JavaScript or a nightmarish week of trying to get half of Chromium to compile in your C++ project?

I think there is a WebRTC Rust crate finally, which is good. Web apps shouldn't be the only beneficiaries of all this investment

gr__or• 12 months ago

That's so fun to hear, I've been using taffy for layouting my little rusty eink calendar

zellyn• 12 months ago

the MacRumors home page crashed after some scrolling

I know there’s a ton going on, with GPUs and rendering and all kinds of things, but I guess because Rust’s memory safety and “no null pointers!” are so constantly hyped (especially in conversations about Go), that I’m always surprised when you fire up a Rust app and do something and it crashes out…

[To be clear, I’m a big fan of modern sum types, and like to imagine an alternate reality where Go had them from the start…]

IshKebab• 12 months ago

When they say "it crashed" they probably mean it panicked or just failed to render; not a segfault.

Most languages have a way of saying "I haven't handled this case yet; just exit the program if you get here".

jpc03• 12 months ago

Rust also doesn’t consider DOS a failure condition.

Reading an invalid index, thats a panic.

empath752• 12 months ago

It can also get oomkilled

oaiey• 12 months ago

Describing Servo as "new" is a stretch ;)

timbit42• 12 months ago

It started later than the other engines and it seems to have a number of great ideas the other engines haven't adopted yet.

AdmiralAsshat• 12 months ago

I feel like Mozilla is going to join the annals of history with the likes of Xerox in the category of "Companies that created the technology of the future and casually tossed it to the wayside for competitors to scoop up" with Rust and Servo.

It's mind-boggling that for a company so often seemingly playing catch-up with Google, Mozilla actually leapfrogged Google in the browser development space for a time, and then...decided it wasn't worth pursuing any further.

nicce3• 12 months ago

It is difficult to get people to pay for it. People happily pay for 10€ beer but asked ”friends” about how to bypass WhatsApp’s 0,99 lifetime licenses.

skinkestek2• 12 months ago

Some did. Some like me lined up eagerly to pay the $1 yearly license and would have been happy to pay for my family too.

yjftsjthsd-h3• 12 months ago

And it's impossible to get people to pay for it when you give them no way to pay for it.

uncircle• 12 months ago

I've heard the same thing about monetising search engines. Kagi didn't get the memo, and last I've heard they're turning a profit.

Sure, only nerds would pay for it, but not all products have to capture 100% market share.

bowsamic2• 12 months ago

People happily pay for 10€ beer

I would not be happy to pay that much for a beer

calibas• 12 months ago

It's mind-boggling that for a company so often seemingly playing catch-up with Google, Mozilla actually leapfrogged Google in the browser development space for a time, and then...decided it wasn't worth pursuing any further.

Google has been Mozilla's main source of revenue since around 2006. For Mozilla to exist, all they have to do is keep Google happy.

It's kind of a nice deal for Mozilla, despite being a huge conflict of interest.

rollcat7• 12 months ago

And it's an even better deal for Google. "But look, Chrome is not a monopoly."

If I was Google, I'd do something to set Mozilla back on that track. But oh well, Google these days is even more dysfunctional. They're about to lose search.

godshatter• 12 months ago

If Mozilla decides to dump Gecko, then it's time for a hard fork and an abandonment of Mozilla. Maybe it's time now.

edit: I mean dumping Gecko for Chromium, not Servo.

goku126• 12 months ago

Honestly, dumping gecko would be a suicide for Firefox. Much of Firefox's minuscule userbase consists of knowledgeable nerds who are holdouts from the Blink monoculture.

criticalfault4• 12 months ago

This is only fair.

Mozilla doesn't deserve to survive. New players deserve our support, like servo and ladybird.

Even with an enormous budget from Google (500M, I think per year) they managed to ruin everything, including Firefox, the thing bringing them those 500M.

To me it looks as if Baker is an undercover person put there to sabotage Mozilla. Tldr: funded by Google, made absolutely everything in her power to run it into the ground

mariusor• 12 months ago

Unlike historical examples like Stephen Elop that moved from Microsoft to Nokia and buried their mobile division only to return to Microsoft, Mitchell Baker was with Mozilla since the start.

bornfreddy3• 12 months ago

Yup, wouldn't be the first one [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop

jazzypants• 12 months ago

I'm not sure about that. Baker was one of the first Netscape employees, she literally helped found the Mozilla foundation, and she served as the first president of it.

I'm not saying she has done a good job, but a lot of the early Netscape people like Brendan Eich have done nothing but sing her praises.

dimal• 12 months ago

Mozilla is over. They put all their eggs in the Google basket, and soon they’ll lose that. They have no viable path forward.

Servo and Ladybird are the future. I’m astounded by how quickly Ladybird is proceeding, with far fewer people than Mozilla. It’s been inspiring to see what that project is doing.

GuB-42• 12 months ago

Mozilla is nothing like Xerox, if anything Google is the new Xerox: they have way too much money so they throw it at R&D side projects without a business plan.

The big one for Google is transformer models, they basically invented LLMs only to play catchup with OpenAI later.

Mozilla successes have always been focused on the web browser, from the very beginning. Even the name reflects that: "Mozilla" stands for "Mosaic killer", Mosaic was the leading web browser at the time. They beat Mosaic with Netscape, they beat IE with Firefox, beating Chrome was their mission, and Rust and Servo were their weapons. It is sad that they dropped the ball.

Like Xerox (and Google), Mozilla tried doing some side projects, but unlike Xerox, they didn't have money to burn from their quasi-monopolies, and I can't think of anything particularly innovative coming from Mozilla that isn't a browser. I don't consider Rust to be a side project, it is a programming language for writing a browser, that it is useful for projects other than a web browser is a happy side effect.

bee_rider• 12 months ago

[…] and I can't think of anything particularly innovative coming from Mozilla that isn't a browser. I don't consider Rust to be a side project, it is a programming language for writing a browser, that it is useful for projects other than a web browser is a happy side effect.

I’m sure Rust started out as something intended to help with their browser work. But it became a general purpose programming language pretty early, right? I think it is… working pretty hard to find a reason to not include Rust as a innovative, non-browser piece of tech.

Anyway, I don’t really think it detracts from your broader point to count Rust as a separate thing from the browser.

dralley2• 12 months ago

Servo would not have been some dramatic revolution in browser technology. It would have done the same thing browser engines currently do, but maybe a little faster and with a couple less security issues per year.

It's dishonest to compare that to "the technology of the future", especially when nobody chooses their browser based on whether a page loads in 82ms or 70ms. They mostly choose browsers based on familiarity and marketing and what's preinstalled. Chrome is fast enough for most people that they're not gonna switch just because their dweeb nephew mentioned some other browser might be marginally faster.

And they didn't toss Rust aside either. New bits of Firefox continue to be written in Rust to this day. That was actually the primary reason Servo was dropped - the bits of the browser engine that could be replaced with Servo bits easily had already been replaced. Rewriting Gecko slowly was deemed more practical than committing to 5+ years of parallel development and hoping that by the end it would be possible to replace millions of lines of Gecko code in one fell swoop.

ninetyninenine3• 12 months ago

I feel guis have taken a wrong turn. We need a simple composable language. I want entire theorems built from the least amount of axioms possible.

HTML and css is not it. The sheer complexity is what causes all the bs.

dmytrish• 12 months ago

Show us the way!

ninetyninenine3• 12 months ago

Form a design team to reduce the amount of primitives in html such that I can do everything that html + css does but with the minimum amount of primitives.

bataleon• 12 months ago

Please bring this to iOS. WebKit is broken.

samtheprogram• 12 months ago

If you think WebKit is broken, you should actually download a build of Servo and try it out.

postalrat• 12 months ago

I thought it was more like: rust made for the web browser Servo.

rrgok• 12 months ago

This is a danger to the open web in more ways than one. If there is only one functioning implementation of a standard, the implementation becomes the standard.

I still don't understand why this is a problem. As long as the engine implementing the spec - governed by committee formed by entities other than Google itself - is open source. The problem and the waste of resource is how we are behaving now.

The browser engine should become as the Linux Kernel: one engine and different distros.

mrob2• 12 months ago

I disagree. The more browser engines in use the less damage any one security exploit can do. This matters even with memory safe languages, because logic errors can be just as damaging, e.g. the Log4j exploit.

charcircuit3• 12 months ago

Bugs are proportional to lines of code. More browser implementations with result in many more bugs. All the effort of reimplementing multiple times would be better put towards security a single browser engine if security is what you are trying to go after. Also you don't need a single exploit due to defense in depth of browser engines. You have to chain multiple exploits together.

merelysounds• 12 months ago

In theory yes. In practice, only when the interests of the sole maintainer are aligned with the interests of the users; since these can change, it’s best to avoid a monopoly.

Case in point, recent manifest v2 deprecation is generally disliked by the community and no long term blink based alternative exists (that I know of).

charcircuit3• 12 months ago

is generally disliked by the community

It is disliked by a vocal minority, and of that minority even fewer actually have their own opinion based off the current version of mv3 as opposed to mindlessly parroting others. If it was a true issue then others would be maintaining mv2 support long term. In regards to monopolies in terms of control what is important is the product, browser, market share itself as opposed to that of the browser engine.

rollcat7• 12 months ago

The browser engine should become as the Linux Kernel: one engine and different distros.

Try spending a month with a BSD - personally, I recommend OpenBSD, or (yes) macOS. Alternatively, try ZFS where you've previously used mdadm+lvm+luks+etc.

The difference is like sitting in a chair that has all of its screws tightened. You only notice how bad was your previous chair once you feel there's no wobbling.

RGBCube• 12 months ago

That's more of a distro thing than "Linux being a few screws loose".

I vastly prefer the OpenBSD kernel too, but if you use a distro that does things properly such as NixOS, the BSDs are the ones that feel wonky.

uyzstvqs• 12 months ago

Google is killing Manifest V2, and AFAIK all downstream Chromium-based browsers (Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, Opera, etc) will eventually be affected. That should say enough about why having multiple browser engines is a good thing.

notnullorvoid• 12 months ago

Standards already skew heavily to what Google or Google connected individuals want. If everything was Chromium based the situation would be even worse.

Maybe worse is what we need to realize that many of the W3C and WHATWG standards are past the point of saving, and those organisation are no longer a good avenue for further advancement of the web.

pornel• 12 months ago

Even with the best intentions, the implementation is going to have bugs and quirks that weren't meant to be the standard.

When there's no second implementation to compare against, then everything "works". The implementation becomes the spec.

This may seem wonderful at first, but in the long run it makes pages accidentally depend on the bugs, and the bugs become a part of the spec.

This is why Microsoft has a dozen different button styles, and sediment layers of control panels all the way back to 1990. Eventually every bug became a feature, and they can't touch old code, only pile up new stuff around it.

When you have multiple independent implementations, it's very unlikely that all of them will have the same exact bug. The spec is the subset that most implementations agree on, and that's much easier to maintain long term, plus you have a proof that the spec can be reimplemented.

Bug-compatibility very often exposes unintended implementation details, and makes it hard even for the same browser to optimize its own code in the future (e.g. if pages rely on order of items you had in some hashmap, now you can't change the hashmap, can't change the hash function, can't store items in a different data structure without at least maintaining the old hashmap at the same time).

charcircuit3• 12 months ago

Is that so bad though? It's essentially what's already the case and as you said the developers already have an incentive to avoid making such bugs. Most developers are only going to target a single browser engine anyways, so bug or not any divergence can cause end users problems.

Rakshith• 12 months ago

its really sad to see what mozilla turned into. a competitive browser company to activism. no wonder its core product started to wane

1vuio0pswjnm72• 12 months ago

"Most sites have at least a few rendering bugs, and a few are completely broken. Google search results have many overlapping elements, and the MacRumors home page crashed after some scrolling. Sites like Wikipedia, CNN Lite, my personal site, and text-only NPR worked perfectly."

Like many HN readers, I have read countless accounts of web browsers and web browsing over the years.

Unfortunately, I cannot recall even one that took an account such as this one and concluded something like, "We need to modify the Google and MacRumors pages so they work with Servo." Unfortunately, the conclusion is usually something like, "We need to fix Servo so it works like Chromium/Chrome."

The reason I believe this is unfortunate is that (a) it ultimately places control in an ad services company and (b) it creates the wrong incentives for people who create web pages. Pages could be modified to conform to what Wikipedia, CNN Lite, the author's personal site and text-only NPR have done. This is not difficult. In fact, it is easier than modifying Servo to do what Chromium/Chrome is doing.

IMO, the "standard" web browser should not be effectively defined by an ad services company (including its business partner, Mozilla) nor should the standard for a web page be defined by the "most popular" web browser, To me "popular" and "standard" are not necessarily the same. Web _pages_ (cf. web _browsers_) should work with unpopular browsers and popular browsers alike, According to OP, Wikipedia, CNN Lite, the author's personal site, and text-only NPR may meet the standard.

In sum, fix web pages not web browsers.

As a hobbyist, I still compile and experiment with w3c's original libww library and utilities. Below is short script I use to compile static binaries. With a TLS forward proxy these utilities, with few modifications, if any, can still work very well for me for retrieving web pages on today's web. (I am only interested in learning www history and optimising text retrieval, not graphics.) This library is generally "ancient" on the www timescale and yet it still works 30 years later. That's useful for www users like me, but maybe not for the online ad services companies and sponsored web browsers optimised for data collection and surveillance. Internet is supposed to be a public resource not a private one, i.e., highest priority of www pages and www browsers should be to serve www users not online ad service providers.

   # previous: download and compile w3c-libwww-5.4.2
   pwd|grep "w3c-libwww-"||exec echo wrong directory
   export x=$(pwd)
   export examples=$x/Library/Examples
   export linemode=$x/LineMode/src
   export commandline=$x/ComLine/src
   export robot=$x/Robot/src
   y="
   libwwwinit.a   libwwwapp.a    libwwwhtml.a 
   libwwwtelnet.a libwwwnews.a   libwwwhttp.a 
   libwwwmime.a   libwwwgopher.a libwwwftp.a 
   libwwwdir.a    libwwwcache.a  libwwwstream.a 
   libwwwfile.a   libwwwmux.a    libwwwtrans.a 
   libwwwcore.a   libwwwutils.a 
   $x/modules/md5/.libs/libmd5.a -lm"
   cd $x/Library/src/.libs
   for z in 
   head libapp_1 libapp_2 libapp_3 libapp_4 init chunk 
   chunkbody LoadToFile postform multichunk put post 
   trace range tzcheck mget isredirected listen 
   eventloop memput getheaders showlinks showtags 
   showtext tiny upgrade cookie
   do
   gcc -s -static -O2 -Wall -o $examples/$z $examples/$z.o $y
   done
   gcc -static -s -O2 -Wall -o $linemode/www 
   $linemode/www-HTBrowse.o $linemode/www-GridText.o 
   $linemode/www-ConView.o $linemode/www-GridStyle.o 
   $linemode/www-DefaultStyles.o 
   $x/PICS-client/src/.libs/libpics.a $y
   gcc -static -s -O2 -Wall -o $robot/webbot 
   $robot/webbot-HTRobot.o $robot/webbot-RobotMain.o 
   $robot/webbot-RobotTxt.o $robot/webbot-HTQueue.o $y
   gcc -static -s -O2 -Wall -o $commandline/w3c 
   $commandline/w3c-HTLine.o $y
   # next: symlink binaries to a folder in $PATH 
   # or export PATH=$PATH:$examples:$commandline:$robot:$linemode

1vuio0pswjnm72• 12 months ago

(Back slashes were accidentally omitted)

   # previous: download and compile w3c-libwww-5.4.2
   pwd|grep "w3c-libwww-"||exec echo wrong directory
   export x=$(pwd)
   export examples=$x/Library/Examples
   export linemode=$x/LineMode/src
   export commandline=$x/ComLine/src
   export robot=$x/Robot/src
   y="
   libwwwinit.a   libwwwapp.a    libwwwhtml.a \
   libwwwtelnet.a libwwwnews.a   libwwwhttp.a \
   libwwwmime.a   libwwwgopher.a libwwwftp.a \
   libwwwdir.a    libwwwcache.a  libwwwstream.a \
   libwwwfile.a   libwwwmux.a    libwwwtrans.a \
   libwwwcore.a   libwwwutils.a \
   $x/modules/md5/.libs/libmd5.a -lm"
   cd $x/Library/src/.libs
   for z in \
   head libapp_1 libapp_2 libapp_3 libapp_4 init chunk \
   chunkbody LoadToFile postform multichunk put post \
   trace range tzcheck mget isredirected listen \
   eventloop memput getheaders showlinks showtags \
   showtext tiny upgrade cookie
   do
   gcc -s -static -O2 -Wall -o $examples/$z $examples/$z.o $y
   done
   gcc -static -s -O2 -Wall -o $linemode/www \
   $linemode/www-HTBrowse.o $linemode/www-GridText.o \
   $linemode/www-ConView.o $linemode/www-GridStyle.o \
   $linemode/www-DefaultStyles.o \
   $x/PICS-client/src/.libs/libpics.a $y
   gcc -static -s -O2 -Wall -o $robot/webbot \
   $robot/webbot-HTRobot.o $robot/webbot-RobotMain.o \
   $robot/webbot-RobotTxt.o $robot/webbot-HTQueue.o $y
   gcc -static -s -O2 -Wall -o $commandline/w3c \
   $commandline/w3c-HTLine.o $y
   # next: symlink binaries to a folder in $PATH 
   # or export PATH=$PATH:$examples:$commandline:$robot:$linemode

Also typo: libww should be libwww

Degenerative• 12 months ago

I'm hearing Servo got rebooted because Valve giving $ to Igalia to reboot Servo project. Can anyone confirm this?

jdongsu• 12 months ago

I’m afraid Servo is to be another Hurd.

I tried Servo

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