Mozilla and Samsung Collaborate on Next Generation Web Browser Engine

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2013/04/03/mozilla-and-samsung-collaborate-on-next-generation-web-browser-engine/

by dave1010uk • 13 years ago

368 140 13 years ago

blog.mozilla.org

dave1010uk2• 13 years ago

While this mentions Android, I think the biggest winners in this could be Mozilla and Samsung's own mobile OS's: Firefox OS and Tizen respectively. I'm hoping that if they're collaborating on Servo then the 2 platforms will hopefully become fairly interoperable (in terms of app portability).

Some further details about Servo and Rust can be found here: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/research/projects/

vitno2• 13 years ago

what apps? :D

The whole idea behind firefox OS is the "open web", all "apps" are standards-compliant javascript. App portability shouldn't be much of a problem.

MatthewPhillips3• 13 years ago

That's not true, both Firefox OS and Tizen use many not-yet-standard APIs. Luckily they are collaborating on many of these APIs and they will be interoperable.

ajross• 13 years ago

A browser engine is an awfully portable thing. For a consumer, switching between them (e.g. from Firefox to Safari, whatever) is just a question of minor UI skinning. I don't see that it "benefits" any OS in particular. Assuming it's universally better, Android and Tizen would need to port from WebKit and Firefox from Gecko. If it confers a true competitive advantage, they'll all do it. If not, some probably won't.

For myself, I'm skeptical. There's really nothing "wrong enough" with Gecko or WebKit that I can see another option really being that much better. Developers love to rewrite stuff (obviously both Gecko and WebKit are already effectively rewrites of pre-existing technologies), but the market has a long history of not being nearly as enthused. But I'm willing to be proven wrong.

coldtea2• 13 years ago

>Developers love to rewrite stuff (obviously both Gecko and WebKit are already effectively rewrites of pre-existing technologies), but the market has a long history of not being nearly as enthused.

Actually your examples nullify your argument.

Mozilla would be dead today without Gecko, ie with the old Netscape code piled.

KHTML would have gone nowhere much if it wasn't for the Webkit rewrite.

So in both cases, it was the rewrites that made those engines break out.

nsmartt3• 13 years ago

Until recently, Servo has been labeled as an experiment, and they've claimed that it isn't intended to replace Gecko. I'm skeptical about this claim, but it does suggests that replacing Gecko isn't its primary objective. If nothing else, the insights gained from developing Servo will provide insight into future development of Gecko.

MatthewPhillips3• 13 years ago

This will be a big win for faster web apps. DOM performance is the biggest blocker to having a smooth experience in the browser nowadays, not JavaScript speed.

neoeldex• 13 years ago

IMO not the performance of DOM but the DOM itself is the biggest blocker to a good experience (user and dev)

coldtea2• 13 years ago

In what sense? And what do you propose replaces it?

surrealize• 13 years ago

Servo is a "high-risk research project"[1], so I've been wondering what would happen if it doesn't pan out. Rust would still be interesting even without Servo, but would mozilla still invest in Rust if they stopped working on Servo?

So it's nice to see some non-mozilla involvement and momentum in Rust/Servo. Maybe that means that an investment in learning/using Rust is that much less risky :)

[1] http://www.mail-archive.com/dev-servo@lists.mozilla.org/msg0...

the_mitsuhiko• 13 years ago

Rust is interesting enough that I'm pretty sure it will do with or without Servo.

nsmartt3• 13 years ago

I can't see Mozilla abandoning Rust. If nothing else, it's valuable as a learning experience for all involved.

saraid2162• 13 years ago

Being described as a "learning experience" usually indicates that a project was just scrapped.

paulirish• 13 years ago

"I think it's premature to start making a roadmap that makes Servo a competitive product in N years; apart from anything else, such a roadmap is going to be pure fantasy" -- also from that post, from just 6 weeks ago. Curious.

That said, having an ARM backend to Rust on Android phones means big things for the potential of mobile web performance. I'm hopeful!

bzbarsky2• 13 years ago

A few things:

1) There is no uniform agreement about the state of Servo. Some are more optimistic than others.

2) There is a number of unknown unknowns here; that's what makes it a research project and makes it hard to roadmap. For example doing parallel layout of CSS involving floats is an actual research topic people are currently publishing papers on...

paddy_m2• 13 years ago

This is really exciting. I'm glad to see rust being used for serious apps. This is actually the first new browser engine that I know of being written in the past 10 years.

Good for Mozilla for attempting hard problems in innovative ways.

hobbyist• 13 years ago

I am not well-versed in the browser designs, could you highlight what hard problems are you referring to?

kibwen2• 13 years ago

Check out the high-level overview of Servo's design:

https://github.com/mozilla/servo/wiki/Design

The goal is extremely pervasive concurrency in aspects that no modern engine has yet begun to approach (and likely could not approach without enormous effort and/or a full-on rewrite).

shadowmint• 13 years ago

Are you kidding?

HTML is a massive spec even before you step in and implement the HTML5 javascript APIs.

Then you also have to make sure that your rendering engine behaves in a sane way, supports all the obscure CSS rules from the spec and from webkit...

There's a reason Opera stopped playing this game; it's hard work.

Offler• 13 years ago

Presumably to squeeze out maximum performance from multi-core machines. Current engines are all single thread per page instance.

paddy_m2• 13 years ago

Creating a new language that handles concurrency and pointer bugs in a systematic way that is also fast is amazing. Writing a new browser engine in said language is very ambitious and important.

tantalor2• 13 years ago

Chromium is 5 years old. WebKit is 7 years old. Do they count?

KHTML is a bit older (14 years).

metageek• 13 years ago

paddy_m said browser engine, so Chromium doesn't count. And WebKit wasn't actually new; it was based on KHTML.

zoul• 13 years ago

The point probably is that these rendering engines share a number of the basic assumptions that the new project could challenge (like concurrency mentioned elsewhere in this thread).

bzbarsky2• 13 years ago

WebKit was open-sourced in 2005, almost 8 years ago.

But WebKit development started in 2001, about 12 years ago.

Safari, using WebKit, was released in Jan 2003, over 10 years ago.

So no, WebKit doesn't count as a browser engine started within the last 10 years. ;)

pjmlp• 13 years ago

Nice to see Rust gaining traction.

We need to have more safe alternatives for systems programming.

msutherl• 13 years ago

It's awesome that language design is being promoted as a significant part of this project. Good design from the ground up.

leeoniya2• 13 years ago

Samsung is really making good use of the hacker community. They hired Cyanogenmod lead dev last year to collab on Android, too.

smacktoward• 13 years ago

It was back in 2011. And he's already moved on: http://www.theverge.com/2013/3/25/4144226/steve-cyanogen-kon...

leeoniya2• 13 years ago

wow, funny coincidence that news just broke a few days ago. good to know.

g8oz• 13 years ago

Also Rasterman from the Enlightenment project

fafner• 13 years ago

Not only Rasterman. They seem to have hired a lot of Enlightenment developers.

Avshalom• 13 years ago

It's worht pointing out that in addition to any actual software Samsung might get from this, compared to a global advertising campaign this is a bargain in the form of dev goodwill->dev mindshare->general mindshare.

I'm frequently reminded of the spokesperson for the old US Army game pointing out that the 40 million dev cost was ~ one 30 second spot during the superbowl.

_pmf_• 13 years ago

What's in this madness for Samsung?

dave1010uk2• 13 years ago

My guess is it may reduce their dependence on WebKit, which is mostly "controlled" (for want of a better word) by Apple and Google, their main competitors.

icambron• 13 years ago

"Driven" would be my choice of words there.

sanxiyn4• 13 years ago

I think this is the best guess.

Samuel_Michon6• 13 years ago

Quite right. Like Apple is trying to become less dependent on Samsung, Samsung is trying to become less dependent on Google.

fudged712• 13 years ago

Reduced dependence on Google browsers for their phones.

They have been providing their own proprietary redundant solutions that overlap Google's software territory on mobile, for their own devices. This is just another step. And it gives them the opportunity to integrate with Mozilla to perhaps have a phone using their OS instead of Android in the far future.

ksec• 13 years ago

I am actually surprise this pieces was written by Brendan, given the way Mozilla has been moving lately with asm.js, PDF.js and Shumway which is like Flash.js; It wouldn't be surprise if their Next Goal were to built the Entire ( or Most of ) Browser with Javascript.

I am surprised that Samsung decide to help. Which basically reads to me as relationship with Google is going pretty bad or they are simply hedging their bet.

It was only earlier today I posted that Yahoo should also have a few engineers helping Mozilla to develop Servo.

And i really really hope Servo is licensed like Rust, Dual MIT + Apache 2.0

kibwen2• 13 years ago

Here's the ticket regarding Servo's license, be sure to weigh in if you feel strongly about it:

https://github.com/mozilla/servo/issues/45

ConstantineXVI• 13 years ago

Google pays Mozilla to push Google Search, not to develop a browser (which Google can do just fine on their own). It doesn't really mean much that they're teaming with Samsung for Servo, other than Samsung's taken an interest in using Servo for their own products.

Note it's not mentioned exactly which division of Samsung they're working with; they may want Servo for Tizen, their Smart TVs, to ensure it plays nice with Exynos, or none of the above.

[EDIT: the post explicitly mentions porting Rust and Servo to Android and ARM; which rather strongly suggests the mobile group. Interesting, as FirefoxOS and Tizen are more or less aimed at the same markets]

bsimpson• 13 years ago

But it does say that Samsung is responsible for Servo for Android.

sanxiyn4• 13 years ago

I think it is "none of the above". Servo, right now, is cloudcuckooland stuff; this suggests it is a long bet research, not tied to any particular product division. Samsung probably has Tizen, Smart TV, Exynos in mind, so you could equall say "all of the above", but I think "none of the above" is more accurate description.

masklinn• 13 years ago

> It wouldn't be surprise if their Next Goal were to built the Entire ( or Most of ) Browser with Javascript.

Firefox is that already, the UI is XUL (that's one of the reasons why things like Firebug could exist as a plugin, when Chrome and Safari plugins are essentially glorified greasemonkey scripts). But you still need the core engine to run that javascript (and a bunch of other stuff) somehow, and one of the ideas behind Servo is that you could do so with much more concurrency and reactivity than is currently done.

fzzzy2• 13 years ago

Also, the browser app on Firefox OS is entirely javascript/html/css. No XUL in sight.

gluxon• 13 years ago

Yes, the UI is using web technologies, but core components are not. I would steer far away from writing a JavaScript interpreter in JavaScript... no.

alcuadrado• 13 years ago

The first paragraph is hilarious!

mtgx• 13 years ago

To people wondering why Samsung would join this, I think Samsung is a big believer in the HSA Foundation [1] for heterogeneous computing, and they were one of the first partners in this along with AMD and ARM.

Samsung seems to believe in having the best performing devices and components, so it's not that surprising that they want to be at the forefront of the heterogeneous computing movement.

They also probably see themselves as a competitor against Intel, with both the ARM ISA that they support and the foundry that they own. In the next few years there will be a battle between HSA and Intel's Phi co-processor idea, and I think Samsung is one of the many who wants HSA to succeed (using computing power from all sorts of processors vs using only CPU's for everything).

http://hsafoundation.com

sanxiyn4• 13 years ago

This is a great story, but probably not the case. I would be surprised if the part of Samsung responsible for HSA is even aware of Rust, let alone Samsung is working on Rust. The semiconductor division is pretty independent of other divisions.

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

In particular the System LSI group.

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/aboutus...

cromwellian2• 13 years ago

I'm no lover of C++, but I'm skeptical that it's really that much more difficult to achieve this design in C++. The parallelism shown is still fairly coarse grained and amenable to traditional techniques. It may be more convenient or less bug prone with Rust, but I read as more substantial, the redesign and rewrite from the ground up. If the redesign was using C/C++, they'd likely get the same benefits, just with uglier code.

Isn't it more likely that lessons learned in Servo will simply be back-ported to C++ in Firefox?

sanxiyn4• 13 years ago

Yes, I think that is more likely.

smosher2• 13 years ago

You can write equivalent programs in C++, but if you learned Rust well I am not sure you'd want to.

The parallelism shown is still fairly coarse grained and amenable to traditional techniques. [...] If the redesign was using C/C++, they'd likely get the same benefits, just with uglier code.

I should hope so, Rust's parallelism is nothing new after all! (Okay, I know, you probably mean by writing programs using explicit mutexes and all that.) I really want to talk about the second part of the quote: what exactly are those benefits? I think you've excluded safety for some reason.

If Servo offers competitive performance I think it's most likely the whole engine will simply replace Gecko. I mean why would you spend the time and money to go from the safer to the less-safe code when you can use what you've got?

cromwellian2• 13 years ago

There's obviously benefits in using better languages for safety and error checking, it's one of the reasons why I like Closure Annotations/GWT/Dart over raw Javascript because of my experience on large projects and relatively simplistic bugs silently propagating through.

The traditional response to these kind of language imperfections is "better tests, better practices". Otherwise as, Unit Tests solve all problems. For C++, someone would say to use some set of abstractions or static analysis tools that confers additional safety that isn't available in the out-of-the-box language.

Language level support tends to encourage more consistent usage of something than just depending on vigilance.

My metapoint though, is that large code bases are hard to displace, especially if the enduser benefits can be achieved through iteration. Rewriting Gecko from scratch in Rust is a tall order, considering how long it took Gecko and WebKit to get to where they are now. It seems much more likely that WebKit/Gecko can be refactored to get most of the benefits in a much shorter period of time than a rewrite.

dragonwriter• 13 years ago

> Isn't it more likely that lessons learned in Servo will simply be back-ported to C++ in Firefox?

Usually, with high-risk long-term research projects, its fairly likely that the main benefit will be providing knowledge that can be applied to more conservative projects or to later high-risk, long-term projects.

OTOH, those insights often come from getting out of conservative boxes and trying something radical and new, and C++ is as much as part of the "box" Servo is trying to get out of as is the existing code base of particular browser engines.

pcwalton2• 13 years ago

> If the redesign was using C/C++, they'd likely get the same benefits, just with uglier code.

Not with memory safety. Adding memory safety to C++ is incredibly difficult without sacrificing performance—think iterator invalidation.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

This is a great announcement and adds some much needed support to Servo/Rust. I've been pretty impressed with Samsung too. Clearly they want to have their own seat at the table and they are executing quite well on that desire.

fudged712• 13 years ago

I'm not confident that Samsung is interested in developing the Android platform, though. They seem to be working on a proprietary ecosystem to separate themselves from the rest of the Android ecosystem. In fact, this is probably one of their motivations: to have control over a leading browser that isn't Chrome so that they can integrate it into their phones as default instead of Google's solution.

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

Actually if Samsung wants to be a player I really think they can't afford to be tied to Android long term. Too much control at Google and Google is another player and nominally an 'opponent' at some point. Of course their is "Android" and there is the stuff that Google puts around it. Watching the Chinese companies add value to the OS install has been instructive as well.

What Android has done has shown the component manufacturers some ways to expand their markets outside "known" players. Part of the challenge of making a phone is getting the chip vendors willing to sign off on giving you software to run their chips (weird I know).

pkulak2• 13 years ago

They are probably hoping this will be the basis for their Tizen browser.

contingencies• 13 years ago

Having spent a week at Samsung Headquarters a couple of years back I can assure you that they are extremely platform-neutral. With the scale at which they operate and the pace at which the industry moves, they would be crazy not to... missing a single 6-month window for global product delivery on a new OS platform against their major competitors (nearby Taiwanese HTC, arch-rival fellow-Korean LG, up and coming mainland Chinese companies, etc.) could be equivalent to many hundreds of millions of dollars of lost revenue.

At the time I visited, circa 2.5 years back, they had (usually physically disparate) skyscrapers within their HQ complex for at least three or four different mobile platforms (Bada, Android, Windows Mobile, and something else I can't recall). Right now I'd assume they have some resources on FirefoxOS and Ubuntu, plus Android, maybe some other systems.

ancarda• 13 years ago

Any idea when Servo might make it into Firefox desktop builds?

Ygg2• 13 years ago

A rough guesstimate would be five to ten years. Don't hold your breath either way. Right now Rust is not very optimized and still in flux, while Servo is pretty much a black box for me.

jusben1369• 13 years ago

"X is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way. This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that can fully utilize the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web."

Probably says more about how long I've been around but I think I've read a mostly similar paragraph 5 to 6 times over the last decade.

SoftwareMaven• 13 years ago

And, in the past decade, we've seen the web browsers make significant leaps in security and capabilities. I'm happy to have more of the same.

raldi• 13 years ago

Mozilla, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and I think one of the IE's too. And now this. So yeah, 5-6 is a good estimate.

Edit: Also the original Netscape.

fzzzy2• 13 years ago

None of those were from the ground up. Mozilla was based on the netscape codebase, firefox was based on the mozilla codebase, safari was based on the khtml codebase, and chrome was based on the webkit codebase. IE I'm not sure about, but it seems unlikely that they started from the ground up, surely newer ie uses code from older releases.

adamisen• 13 years ago

If Google is paying Apple $1B/yr to be the default search engine on iOS, it stands to reason that Samsung could negotiate similar per device rates. That seems like enough potential upside for this to be a no-brainer to me.

Mozilla and Samsung Collaborate on Next Generation Web Browser Engine

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