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Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

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Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#51

Post by ealexhudson »

belorn wrote: post #31
maggit wrote: post #8

The submission title has been changed from "Replacing the Jet Engine While Still Flying" to "Mozilla’s project to replace Gecko with Servo" (at the time of this writing). Some of the other comments are pertaining to the "Jet Engine" title. For anybody that might be confused, like I was :)

Does that mean that the original title was bad, as the HN guidelines states, "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."?

I genuinely don't get all the hoo-haa about titles. In pretty much every comments section I read here, there will be at least one person who complains that the title is "linkbait" or (more often) "clickbait" - even the most boring, anodyne description of the article. They're not allowed to seem interesting in any possible way.

The original title wasn't particularly descriptive. That doesn't mean it was misleading, and actually, I thought it was very apt: they're talking about a technology to swap pieces of Servo in over time, and the jet engine analogy was appropriate (particularly with respect to the complexity). I quite liked it.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#52

Post by Yaggo »

NamTaf wrote: post #38
monk_e_boy wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that an Americanism? Ran is most common in the UK.

I think they omitted 'had' from run. The past tense of run is 'had run', 'was running' or 'ran' depending on how you want to use it after all.

Thanks for correcting, I meant the past tense, not a native English speaker, fixed run -> ran.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#53

Post by theparanoid »

hiiakabs wrote: post #36

I didn't look at the name of the writer when I started reading it but by the way the article is written I was suspecting it was written by a woman. Stupid analogies and fluff, lots of commas... What a loss of time...

She tried a conversational writing style and failed.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#54

Post by ComputerGuru »

osullivj wrote: post #7
mxstbr wrote: post #5

Even though the title might disappoint, it's super interesting to see where Firefox is going. I can't wait for 2017!

Looking forward to it too; this is a big deal because it will put a Rust implementation on many millions of desktops. I'm totally fed up with CPU and memory hogging browser bloat on my laptop. My dev env runs so much better when I kill all Chrome processes. I know that the article is only talking about the render engine, and not JavaScript, which I suspect is the main browser bloat culprit , but I'm still hopeful. Br…

Rust is neither faster nor more efficient than C++.... its benefits lie elsewhere.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#55

Post by losvedir »

Is this an announcement of a change in strategy? I'm a big fan of rust and Servo, but my understanding was that it's still "experimental" and they're learning stuff about concurrent rendering and stuff like that, with no concrete plan to use Servo in Firefox (or make Servo a standalone, supported browser). I know there's a few odds and ends in Firefox that use rust, but I thought the future of Servo was still ambiguous. Am I (was I) wrong about that?

But it sounds like now the official plan is to get Servo into Firefox. Great!

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#56

Post by mozumder »

Wouldn't it be more appropriate to have written rust in a GPU language like OpenGL or OpenCL, since the aim here was to replace the display engine?

Curious as to why use a CPU language for the display engine rewrite? It seems to be wasting the GPU all modern systems now contain..

Also, is it fully replacing the display engine, including the font renderer and image codecs?

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#57

Post by ooqr »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #35
dmytrish wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, "run" is Past Simple here. It took me a few moments to get that though.

Is that an Americanism? Ran is most common in the UK.

Not a chance. This is something we can agree on. :)

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#58

Post by nkristoffersen »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #35
dmytrish wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, "run" is Past Simple here. It took me a few moments to get that though.

Is that an Americanism? Ran is most common in the UK.

Ran is correct. I suspect english is not their first language.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#59

Post by Brakenshire »

losvedir wrote: post #55

Is this an announcement of a change in strategy? I'm a big fan of rust and Servo, but my understanding was that it's still "experimental" and they're learning stuff about concurrent rendering and stuff like that, with no concrete plan to use Servo in Firefox (or make Servo a standalone, supported browser). I know there's a few odds and ends in Firefox that use rust, but I thought the future of Servo was still ambiguo…

It's called Project Quantum, they announced it a few months back, as a formal project to integrate Servo components into Gecko.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#60

Post by libria »

belorn wrote: post #31
maggit wrote: post #8

The submission title has been changed from "Replacing the Jet Engine While Still Flying" to "Mozilla’s project to replace Gecko with Servo" (at the time of this writing). Some of the other comments are pertaining to the "Jet Engine" title. For anybody that might be confused, like I was :)

Does that mean that the original title was bad, as the HN guidelines states, "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."?

Perhaps there was concern the audience would assume Mozilla had pivoted into the aerospace industry.
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