Makes me wonder what's going to happen to Presto now that the Chinese bought Opera ASA...
Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
61–70 of 219 posts
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#62Makes me wonder what's going to happen to Presto now that the Chinese bought Opera ASA...
Presto was only still being used in Opera Mini, it had been swapped out for Blink in the desktop and full-fat mobile versions.
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#63I 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...
I don't know how to say this in a civil way, so I won't: Please take your sexist bullshit somewhere else if you can't behave like an adult.
You did know, but didn't want, actually. Now we have this thread appeared from nowhere. But main point, besides what catched your eye, is that an article is written with pretty lame stylistic and is hard to read and get seriously.
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#64Wouldn'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?
> 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?
That's not the aim of Rust. Rust, according to its own website is:
> Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a charity with hundreds of millions in revenue and employing over 1000 people I'd call Firefox and Mozilla pretty successful.
It has enjoyed success during its lifetime, but the userbase has looked like an upside-down hockey stick for some years now. I would say that having your userbase drop from a dominant majority of the market to well below 10% of the market is indicative of failure.
Firefox was never a dominant majority. It peaked at ~25-30% pre-Chrome (when it was the only major competitor to IE).
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#66This seems apt: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... Mozilla spending time on this suggests Mozilla doesn't know what to spend time on.
Ironically Mozilla is the best counter-example to that Joel on Software article. The article specifically mentions that Netscape shouldn't try and re-write their browser. But if they hadn't done that, we wouldn't have Firefox. We'd still have an incremental improvement over Netscape 4.7. For those who can't remember Netscape 4.7, let me remind you, it wasn't very good at the end. If they hadn't rewritten it, causing…
Then again, Gecko itself started under Netscape, they just released it under an open license after the Mozilla thing was started. So in a sense it's still an incremental improvement over Netscape 4.7, at least when it comes to the rendering engine.
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#67Is 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.
Ah, great. Must have missed that announcement. Thanks! I noticed the blog post using that term but didn't realize it was from an old announcement.
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's not going to change that. No matter how efficient you make the JS engine, crappy JS will still steal all your ressouces.
Yes. However, a crappy, leaky, JS engine running crappy JS code will steal all resources even quicker. I hope a JS engine built with Rust smart ptrs will be less leaky than one built in C/C++. In my experience, hand rolled memory pooling systems can be very leaky.
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
While literally true, Rust's benefits make it easier to write safe, parallel code, which often directly translate into greater speed and efficiency.
Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, an…
There is a real concern among a number of users here, including me, that HN might turn into reddit if we aren't careful.
That said in this case I agree with you.
I also think we are mostly fine for now but I still hesitate to upvote funny comments.