Live data from Hacker News

Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

blog.servo.org

81–90 of 117 posts

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#81

I just tried it out. It froze when looking at a reddit comments page, it froze when I tried to use the URL bar. Pretty exciting nonetheless.

The URL bar does seem buggy and incomplete. I don't think it even supports copy/paste yet. It also won't let me type " https://..."

There's a fix already for text input on Windows, it just didn't land in the current nightly

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#82
post #46

I'm really hopeful for this. The world needs a new browser engine, there is dwindling competition in this space and time and time again I find myself dissatisfied with browser offerings. I've tried every obscure browser out there, and many of them are great at specific things but nearly all of them lack a few key features or present an experience that frequently crashes. I think the Servo project is the biggest chanc…

> The world needs a new browser engine > As a non-dev I expect you are just responding to the inherent lack of performance that the javascript + html + css bundle shamelessly provides, which Servo will do nothing to sort out. Webassembly on the other hand is the first step to bringing superior performance to all browsers.

Improving HTML + CSS performance is absolutely one of the goals of Servo. Here's a video from pcwalton demonstrating reflow (HTML), repainting, and CSS animations on the GPU in Servo: https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/#... (much of this code is being uplifted to Firefox as WebRender). It's true that Servo won't have any effect on Javascript performance, but WASM won't have any effect on HTML or CSS performance.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The world needs a new browser engine > As a non-dev I expect you are just responding to the inherent lack of performance that the javascript + html + css bundle shamelessly provides, which Servo will do nothing to sort out. Webassembly on the other hand is the first step to bringing superior performance to all browsers.

Servo doesn't really do anything for JavaScript (which is pretty much as fast as it's going to get, thanks to all the hard work of the V8, Spidermonkey, and SquirrelFish teams). But speeding CSS up is kind of the whole point of Servo.

And not just "CSS" but the whole DOM itself, which is more often than not what most people "perceive" as the slowness with web apps (and the entire reason why virtual-DOMs have caught on)

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#84
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The world needs a new browser engine > As a non-dev I expect you are just responding to the inherent lack of performance that the javascript + html + css bundle shamelessly provides, which Servo will do nothing to sort out. Webassembly on the other hand is the first step to bringing superior performance to all browsers.

Improving HTML + CSS performance is absolutely one of the goals of Servo. Here's a video from pcwalton demonstrating reflow (HTML), repainting, and CSS animations on the GPU in Servo: https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/#... (much of this code is being uplifted to Firefox as WebRender). It's true that Servo won't have any effect on Javascript performance, but WASM won't have any effect on HTML…

I understand that, but the idea that HTML + CSS can only be sped up by some hugely parallel structure requiring a whole new programming language and browser engine is really quite shocking. I think once webassembly is established and in use, we will start to see steps in the direction of replacing HTML + CSS altogether, with something that has performance in mind.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#85
post #46

I'm really hopeful for this. The world needs a new browser engine, there is dwindling competition in this space and time and time again I find myself dissatisfied with browser offerings. I've tried every obscure browser out there, and many of them are great at specific things but nearly all of them lack a few key features or present an experience that frequently crashes. I think the Servo project is the biggest chanc…

> The world needs a new browser engine > As a non-dev I expect you are just responding to the inherent lack of performance that the javascript + html + css bundle shamelessly provides, which Servo will do nothing to sort out. Webassembly on the other hand is the first step to bringing superior performance to all browsers.

Would web assembly help out with desktop web applications running on stuff like electron?

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servo doesn't really do anything for JavaScript (which is pretty much as fast as it's going to get, thanks to all the hard work of the V8, Spidermonkey, and SquirrelFish teams). But speeding CSS up is kind of the whole point of Servo.

And not just "CSS" but the whole DOM itself, which is more often than not what most people "perceive" as the slowness with web apps (and the entire reason why virtual-DOMs have caught on)

One of the things Servo gives us is the ability to experiment with new models for scripts to interact with a page. Imagine an IPC-based API exposed to WASM for instance.

The concurrency story could also expand on the limited capabilities of web workers support for shared memory.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#87
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Improving HTML + CSS performance is absolutely one of the goals of Servo. Here's a video from pcwalton demonstrating reflow (HTML), repainting, and CSS animations on the GPU in Servo: https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/#... (much of this code is being uplifted to Firefox as WebRender). It's true that Servo won't have any effect on Javascript performance, but WASM won't have any effect on HTML…

I understand that, but the idea that HTML + CSS can only be sped up by some hugely parallel structure requiring a whole new programming language and browser engine is really quite shocking. I think once webassembly is established and in use, we will start to see steps in the direction of replacing HTML + CSS altogether, with something that has performance in mind.

A new programming language is not required, it's just a bonus to help developers handling safety and concurrency.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#88
post #46

I'm really hopeful for this. The world needs a new browser engine, there is dwindling competition in this space and time and time again I find myself dissatisfied with browser offerings. I've tried every obscure browser out there, and many of them are great at specific things but nearly all of them lack a few key features or present an experience that frequently crashes. I think the Servo project is the biggest chanc…

> The world needs a new browser engine > As a non-dev I expect you are just responding to the inherent lack of performance that the javascript + html + css bundle shamelessly provides, which Servo will do nothing to sort out. Webassembly on the other hand is the first step to bringing superior performance to all browsers.

More that half the browsers I experience crash or freeze on a constant basis, and yet Chrome seems to handle it in significantly more cases.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> So please, do whatever you can to use the OS's native text rendering. That seems odd and would mean different quality on different platforms. Yes, if native is better than built-in then I agree. But what if their GL based text rendering is just fine, shouldn't they use it everywhere because it's portable?

The user doesn't care whether the text rendering of one app is consistent with the same app on a different platform, the user cares whether the rendering is consistent with the other apps he uses on the same platform.

I, for one, care mostly about absolute quality. If the rendering is better than native then that's splendid.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#90
post #56

Just so you Servo folks know, we appreciate the plan of shipping components incrementally in Firefox, and realize the necessity, and how big a project building a whole browser is… …and yet… …I think you know we're all waiting for Servo itself to be usable as our main browser :-) Good luck!

Servo doesn't even support SVG yet, and I can remember how long it took Firefox to get SVG animation once plain SVG was in there. One can hope things will go faster this time around ;-)

I was an early adopter of tech like XML and SVG. Even did a website in XForms. There was a lot of talk about making browsers support all of it. In the time since SVG was standardized, I think I've run into just one... maybe a few... media that I was sure was SVG. Everything else was a different tech.

I'm not worried about whether Servo supports SVG.

Post reply on HN