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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

#151

Post by dang »

jgraham wrote: post #45
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 :)

Unfortunately the new title seems to be misleading in a different way. There is no "project to replace gecko with servo". There is a project to advance gecko so it is state of the art in browser engines. Much of the current state of the art has been developed in Servo, and the natural way to bring that technology to gecko is to integrate the components from servo directly. This has other nice properties like increasi…

Ok, we've taken another shot at a more accurate title by saying "transitioning" instead of "replacing", as suggested here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13328415. If anyone suggests a better title, we can change it again.

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

#152

Post by dang »

jdmichal wrote: post #132
TeMPOraL wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story changed its title from being about Gecko and Servo to this literally in between me viewing the frontpage and clicking on the comments link. This story here is IMO should be extempt from the "original title" rule - the original title is annoyingly misleading.

Leave the title, append it with "Transitioning from Gecko to Servo".

Ok, we'll use that wording instead. Thanks!

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

#153

Post by mariusz79 »

bzbarsky wrote: post #117
mariusz79 wrote: post #97

Wouldn't it be easier to build a new plane around the new engine, do some flight tests and after it's ready transfer all passengers?

That has two problems: 1) A lot of flight tests can't be done without a large fraction of passengers on the plane. 2) It may make getting to the final end state faster (though maybe not), but it means you don't get any benefits until you make the switch. Doing things incrementally means you start seeing benefits much earlier. Classic throughput/latency tradeoff.

What's better to end up in the final end state later, or lose customers because your software is crashing and is harder to maintain because you're introducing totally new way to do stuff?

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

#154

Post by digi_owl »

ghostly_s wrote: post #145
digi_owl wrote: post #130

I just wish that their UI (UX? ugh...) team was as competent as their engine team appears to be.

What is your complaint, exactly? Considering it includes support for almost total customization of the user interface by third-party code, I think they've done an excellent job with the UX.

I expect that support to vanish under the dual guise of multi-process and "security". Never mind that more and more Firefox have been taking on the appearance of a Chrome clone, rather than offering a distinct look.

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

#155

Post by steveklabnik »

digi_owl wrote: post #154
ghostly_s wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your complaint, exactly? Considering it includes support for almost total customization of the user interface by third-party code, I think they've done an excellent job with the UX.

I expect that support to vanish under the dual guise of multi-process and "security". Never mind that more and more Firefox have been taking on the appearance of a Chrome clone, rather than offering a distinct look.

Have you seen the browser.html project?

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

#156

Post by wmf »

Touche wrote: post #140

> Going forward, it will be much easier and more enjoyable to implement new CSS properties. Which makes it easier for folks in the open source community to contribute. Which makes new things come out faster. I had never really thought of Servo in these terms before, but it makes a lot of sense. Mozilla, being a nonprofit, can't compete with Google / Apple / Microsoft doing things their way . They inherently have a gr…

Mozilla is really just another software company owned by a nonprofit. They have hundreds of millions in revenue and have been "profitable" in many/all years. But they are definitely much smaller than Google/Apple/MS and can't benefit from ecosystem lock-in effects.

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

#157

Post by ComputerGuru »

Cshelton wrote: post #148
ComputerGuru wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Rust should be just as fast as C++ and C. Benchmarks are hard of course because optimizations and such. But if Rust is significantly slower, than it is a bug.

I think you may have misunderstood my comment, as I did not mean to disparage Rust's speed nor imply it was slower than C/C++. Rust, at best, can match C/C++. But Rust cannot be faster than C/C++; therefore, by function of simply being rewritten in rust (and not because it was rewritten), that does not, in and of itself, make the resulting executables faster.

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

#158

Post by Touche »

wmf wrote: post #156
Touche wrote: post #140

> Going forward, it will be much easier and more enjoyable to implement new CSS properties. Which makes it easier for folks in the open source community to contribute. Which makes new things come out faster. I had never really thought of Servo in these terms before, but it makes a lot of sense. Mozilla, being a nonprofit, can't compete with Google / Apple / Microsoft doing things their way . They inherently have a gr…

Mozilla is really just another software company owned by a nonprofit. They have hundreds of millions in revenue and have been "profitable" in many/all years. But they are definitely much smaller than Google/Apple/MS and can't benefit from ecosystem lock-in effects.

Everything's comparative, of course. Mozilla isn't a solo dev's weekend project, but it's also not a top 10 most valuable company in the world, like all of its competitors are.

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

#159

Post by pcwalton »

Touche wrote: post #140

> Going forward, it will be much easier and more enjoyable to implement new CSS properties. Which makes it easier for folks in the open source community to contribute. Which makes new things come out faster. I had never really thought of Servo in these terms before, but it makes a lot of sense. Mozilla, being a nonprofit, can't compete with Google / Apple / Microsoft doing things their way . They inherently have a gr…

I really love seeing new folks get on board with Servo itself, but there's something else that's equally important: the Cargo ecosystem. Servo is built with Cargo and incorporates a lot of code from the Rust community. Likewise, we try to make our standalone Servo pieces available as Cargo packages on crates.io when we can. We take code from the broader Rust community and give back in turn.

In this way, even folks who have no intention of hacking on Servo can effectively end up contributing to the project. And, by the same token, we also in effect contribute to lots of projects in the Rust community.

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