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Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

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Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#21

Post by avian »

wodenokoto wrote: post #14
FreakyT wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember way before Electron there was XULRunner, and there were a few ridiculously bloated non-Mozilla apps that were based on it. Like Songbird[1] -- anyone remember that? I suppose the idea was largely ahead of its time; in 2006 computers just didn't have enough RAM/CPU to get away with running a full web browser stack for every app like we (sort of) can today. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(softwa…

Back then I was a big fan of the concept and I really enjoyed songbird. I still think that building a html+javascript package, and have the default browser run it chromeless with some expanded privileges (or near chromeless) is a great approach for cross-platform apps, sadly it doesn't seem like anyone is working seriously on such an approach.

HTA (basically a HTML page launched chromelessly with elevated privileges) was a thing back around the Windows 98 era. Everyone I knew at the time universally considered it a horrible and misguided idea by Microsoft. Funny how the history repeats itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_Application

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#24

Post by chairmanwow »

H4CK3RM4N wrote: post #2

I really like this idea of switching over to servo bit by bit. It makes me happy that there might be a real WebKit alternative again.

I'm new to frontend in general and wondering if I could trouble you for some context. Why is Firefox's CSS styling engine not already "in" the browser? To me it seems like Stylo is just a parallelized replacement for the old system, Servo. What am I missing here?

Also, why are you celebrating an alternative for WebKit? Isn't it already supported by most major browsers?

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#25

Post by tolien »

chairmanwow wrote: post #24
H4CK3RM4N wrote: post #2

I really like this idea of switching over to servo bit by bit. It makes me happy that there might be a real WebKit alternative again.

I'm new to frontend in general and wondering if I could trouble you for some context. Why is Firefox's CSS styling engine not already "in" the browser? To me it seems like Stylo is just a parallelized replacement for the old system, Servo. What am I missing here? Also, why are you celebrating an alternative for WebKit? Isn't it already supported by most major browsers?

> Why is Firefox's CSS styling engine not already "in" the browser?

It is, Firefox can do CSS and styles just now. Stylo is a replacement for that.

> To me it seems like Stylo is just a parallelized replacement for the old system, Servo. What am I missing here?

Servo isn’t the old system. Servo is a research project to build a layout engine (analogous to Gecko which Firefox currently uses) in Rust, of which Stylo is a part.

> Also, why are you celebrating an alternative for WebKit? Isn't it already supported by most major browsers?

It sounds like you’re confused about what WebKit is. WebKit and its forks are used by a number of browsers (Chrome, Safari etc.).

EdgeHTML, Gecko and WebKit are, broadly speaking, competitors which attempt to implement certain standards and frequently disagree about how to do so. It’s important that there be alternatives to WebKit with significant market share because otherwise how WebKit implements a feature becomes the de facto reference implementation.

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#26

Post by IamCarbonMan »

chairmanwow wrote: post #24
H4CK3RM4N wrote: post #2

I really like this idea of switching over to servo bit by bit. It makes me happy that there might be a real WebKit alternative again.

I'm new to frontend in general and wondering if I could trouble you for some context. Why is Firefox's CSS styling engine not already "in" the browser? To me it seems like Stylo is just a parallelized replacement for the old system, Servo. What am I missing here? Also, why are you celebrating an alternative for WebKit? Isn't it already supported by most major browsers?

Servo is a complete (although WIP) browser engine in Rust. Stylo is a project to plug the style parts of Servo into Firefox, which currently uses the Gecko browser engine. This is part of Mozilla's ongoing efforts to modernize Firefox by gradually rewriting it in Rust.

WebKit is technically only used by Safari. Chrome uses a WebKit fork called Blink, and MS Edge uses its own engine called Chakra.

I assume the above commenter was expressing relief that someone besides Google is making a fast, modern web browser these days.

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#27

Post by bzbarsky »

IamCarbonMan wrote: post #26
chairmanwow wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm new to frontend in general and wondering if I could trouble you for some context. Why is Firefox's CSS styling engine not already "in" the browser? To me it seems like Stylo is just a parallelized replacement for the old system, Servo. What am I missing here? Also, why are you celebrating an alternative for WebKit? Isn't it already supported by most major browsers?

Servo is a complete (although WIP) browser engine in Rust. Stylo is a project to plug the style parts of Servo into Firefox, which currently uses the Gecko browser engine. This is part of Mozilla's ongoing efforts to modernize Firefox by gradually rewriting it in Rust. WebKit is technically only used by Safari. Chrome uses a WebKit fork called Blink, and MS Edge uses its own engine called Chakra. I assume the above c…

Chakra is just the JS implementation in Edge; it's the equivalent of JavaScriptCore in Safari, V8 in Chrome, or SpiderMonkey in Firefox.

The layout engine bits in Edge are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdgeHTML

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#29

Post by ZenoArrow »

kilian wrote: post #19
wodenokoto wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back then I was a big fan of the concept and I really enjoyed songbird. I still think that building a html+javascript package, and have the default browser run it chromeless with some expanded privileges (or near chromeless) is a great approach for cross-platform apps, sadly it doesn't seem like anyone is working seriously on such an approach.

There's Electrino, which provides the Electron api but runs whatever your OS's built-in rendering engine is: https://github.com/pojala/electrino Still in development and relatively limited, but the idea's there!

There's also Sciter, which is supposedly very mature (even more so than Electron), but as it's closed source and released under a mixed licence (there are free and commercial versions), it's not got much traction outside of commercial apps:

https://sciter.com/

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