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Servo Nightly Builds Available

blog.servo.org

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Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#121

Post by larsberg »

gsnedders wrote: post #92
pilif wrote: post #81

It's amazing to see actual effort taking place to build a new browser engine from scratch. I would say that since the late 90ies, there hasn't been a single new engine being made. Everything we have now is a development based on KHTML, Gecko, Presto or Trident. By now, HTML and the standards surrounding it have become so big that starting from a blank slate nowadays is next to impossible. The existing engines have it…

> By now, HTML and the standards surrounding it have become so big that starting from a blank slate nowadays is next to impossible. It's a two sided coin: HTML now defines a lot of the basic web platform parts in enough detail that you can just implement the spec and have a web browser that works , whereas in the 90s (and most of the 00s) browsers spent huge amounts of resources on reverse-engineering each other. Pre…

> you can just implement the spec and have a web browser that works

Don't forget the amazing work being done at http://testthewebforward.org/ with the Web Platform Tests and your own work on the CSSWG tests! Beyond the specs, having a cross-browser set of tests that have especially good coverage on newer specs has been a huge leg-up for Servo!

It not only helps us ensure interop for those features that are tested, but (puts on former dev manager hat) it really helps quantify how many work items are left until a feature is closer to completion. I especially notice it when there are areas like CSS 2.1 where the tests are less comprehensive and it's harder to quantify what our progress/status is.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#122

Post by capnrefsmmat »

kibwen wrote: post #86
epidemian wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kudos on this milestone! A very general question: what's the high-level plan for Servo regarding Firefox? I see a lot of requests/issues dealing with stuff that doesn't seem related to a layout engine. Is the plan to have browser.html as a temporary incubator for Servo and eventually migrate it to replace FF's layout engine, or is it to "grow" an entire new browser around this new engine?

browser.html is just the browser chrome (er, not to be confused with the browser Chrome), it's an independent Mozilla project to create a frontend entirely in web technologies, which, since these are all standardized, should theoretically work with any browser engine, not just Servo. As for Firefox, later on this year we should see the integration of Servo's style engine ("Stylo") into Gecko, and going forward we sho…

What exactly does "style engine" encompass? Just CSS parsing and style properties, or layout stuff, or something in between?

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#123

Post by ybx »

rat87 wrote: post #89
_pmf_ wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edge is a new engine, too.

doesn't seem like it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Edge#EdgeHTML > EdgeHTML is a proprietary layout engine developed for Edge. It is a fork of Trident that has removed all legacy code of older versions of Internet Explorer and rewritten the majority of its source code with web standards and interoperability with other modern browsers in mind.

Sounds like it's based on Trident to me

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#124

Post by ZenoArrow »

hitlin37 wrote: post #103
mintplant wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Embedded in the sense that you embed a browser in another application Yes, this is it.

ah....the description is ambiguous then. Embed a browser in another application isn't very clear either. Is Servo like framework where devs can build apps on top (something on electron line). Or is it really about embedding browser inside your application. That one can do today with QT framework where you can embed a browser inside your application. But QT itself moved from Qt WebKit to Qt WebEngine. So, 'embed a bro…

> "Embed a browser in another application isn't very clear either. Is Servo like framework where devs can build apps on top (something on electron line)."

"Embed a browser in another application" is perfectly clear. Servo is designed so that it can be linked with other applications, and displayed within windows that the host application controls.

WebKit is also embeddable in this way, but other browser engines are not as mature in this area. There was talk of Servo using the same API that WebKit uses for embedding, probably to help developers transition from WebKit to Servo:

https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Version-0.1#embedding

"The proposed plan is to use WebKit's API as a template or copy it completely."

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#125

Post by kerker123 »

_pmf_ wrote: post #85
pilif wrote: post #81

It's amazing to see actual effort taking place to build a new browser engine from scratch. I would say that since the late 90ies, there hasn't been a single new engine being made. Everything we have now is a development based on KHTML, Gecko, Presto or Trident. By now, HTML and the standards surrounding it have become so big that starting from a blank slate nowadays is next to impossible. The existing engines have it…

Edge is a new engine, too.

sss

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#126

Post by larsberg »

iamcreasy wrote: post #48
pcwalton wrote: post #2

Happy to answer questions (when I wake up; getting this ready has been a lot of work, needless to say) :) It goes without saying, but as this is the very first nightly (not by any means a full-fledged release), expect severe bugs, crashes, and missing functionality. Many of your favorite sites will be broken. Don't expect to use this as your everyday browser. We'd love feedback on what issues folks hit the most, so w…

Kudos on reaching milestone. Can't wait to try it out. When is the Windows build will be available? Days? Week(s)?

We're hoping for days, but it needs a lot more testing. We're (unfortunately, due to some font-related issues) still building Windows with the mingw toolchain, which makes build & packaging more complicated.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#127

Post by Manishearth »

larsberg wrote: post #121
gsnedders wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By now, HTML and the standards surrounding it have become so big that starting from a blank slate nowadays is next to impossible. It's a two sided coin: HTML now defines a lot of the basic web platform parts in enough detail that you can just implement the spec and have a web browser that works , whereas in the 90s (and most of the 00s) browsers spent huge amounts of resources on reverse-engineering each other. Pre…

> you can just implement the spec and have a web browser that works Don't forget the amazing work being done at http://testthewebforward.org/ with the Web Platform Tests and your own work on the CSSWG tests! Beyond the specs, having a cross-browser set of tests that have especially good coverage on newer specs has been a huge leg-up for Servo! It not only helps us ensure interop for those features that are tested, bu…

So much this.

These tests are super useful. They don't just test for the spec, they also test for known behavior, which makes it possible to find spec bugs.

Plus they contain a very good framework which we can easily add our own tests into, instead of rewriting an HTTP testing server and whatnot.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#128

Post by lisivka »

po1nter wrote: post #68
pcwalton wrote: post #2

Happy to answer questions (when I wake up; getting this ready has been a lot of work, needless to say) :) It goes without saying, but as this is the very first nightly (not by any means a full-fledged release), expect severe bugs, crashes, and missing functionality. Many of your favorite sites will be broken. Don't expect to use this as your everyday browser. We'd love feedback on what issues folks hit the most, so w…

Do you have an ETA for when the Windows version might be available for us to try?

Why not to try Linux? It's free. It's made by developers and for developers. Try Fedora Linux.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#129

Post by yoklov »

lmm wrote: post #84
pekk wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> expect severe bugs, crashes, and missing functionality. I really don't mean this in a snarky way: wasn't this kind of thing supposed to be obviated by the switch to Rust? It often seems that every other post about Rust on HN says that if it compiles, it works.

In pure Rust that never uses "unsafe", maybe. (Though even then, you only get memory safety; it's still possible to e.g. go into an infinite loop and use all CPU and/or memory).

It's also still possible to panic.
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