Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

Post by eddyb » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 4:17 PM UTC

dingaling wrote: post #112

jdub wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servo makes incredibly good use of the GPU. Being able to do that, and iterate so fast on that work, is part of what Rust brings to the table. (I don't think they've swapped out the font renderer and image codecs yet, but there are quite a few bits and pieces they have swapped out as the Rust community delivers more pure Rust libraries.)

> Servo makes incredibly good use of the GPU. Too good, in fact: it won't run on any laptops that I own because their GPUs don't support a sufficient level of OpenGL. One great aspect of Firefox-with-Gecko is that you can throw it onto just about any machine with more than 512MB of RAM and it will provide bootstrap web access ( slow or otherwise ). That's going to be lost when everything is Servoised. I guess it's ba…

Post by mishac » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 4:28 PM UTC

daenney wrote: post #66

adrianmsmith wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by jankotek » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 4:39 PM UTC

Yaggo wrote: post #12

> And Firefox runs on Gecko. Which is old. Like really old. I think it's the oldest rendering engine still in wide use. Gecko may be oldest, but not with wide margin: KHTML (the origin of webkit and blink) was started in 1998, only a year after Gecko. Of course, probably not much (if any?) of the original KHTML source is still present in webkit, and because of the nature of open source development, there is blurry li…

Post by Touche » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 4:49 PM UTC

justinlaster wrote: post #121

hoorayimhelping wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's annoying and unprofessional. Stop trying to be cutesy and present the information in a way that people who are busy can consume quickly and make decisions on. Is this the tone of the whole project? I'd love to contribute, but I don't want to wade through a reddit-comment-thread-level of forced references and memes to do that. I get the reason for doing it, and I like that the internet isn't full of drab corporat…

> I'd love to contribute, but I don't want to wade through a reddit-comment-thread-level of forced references and memes to do that. I'm going to have call you out on this. You have no wishes to contribute. Because asking this question reveals you haven't even bothered to look at the repositories, join IRC channels, or subscribe to the mailing lists. You're here to complain and you're using hypothetical constructive m…

Post by loeg » Thu, Jan 05, 2017, 4:51 PM UTC

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.