Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Inside a fast CSS engine

hacks.mozilla.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 144 posts

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#121

Post by larsberg »

erickt wrote: post #9
hamandcheese wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any plans for Servo to be a "real" browser, or will it always be more of a R&D playground for Firefox?

Servo is still considered a research project, but one of the benefits of sharing WebRender, Stylo, etc between Servo and Firefox is that it is really helping to productionize those systems. That then will make it easier to turn it into a real thing.

Servo should be referred to as a prototype or experimental rendering engine. If you come across anything still calling it a research project, please let me know! I should have purged them all a year ago, but may have missed some.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#122

Post by nothis »

crescentfresh wrote: post #84

I always wonder, who puts together nifty little blog posts on this kind of thing complete with graphics just for the article? By that I mean, literally what title do they have? Myself and my colleagues would/could write up a technical breakdown of something neat or innovative we might have done to solve some problem at work, but we sure as shit can't make cool little graphics interspersed between opportune paragraphs…

That's honestly one of those big differences between Mozilla and the tons of other idealistic free/open source projects out there. They care about presentation. They care about clarity. They care about layout. They care about style.

IMO understanding how to appeal to non-tech-y users (and that tech-y users don't always want to sift through 5 pages of links to SDK-tarballs when trying to download a software) was how they managed to compete with IE/Microsoft back in the day. They're also one of the few non-profit organizations releasing software that understands user interfaces.

All that stuff going on with FF57 and whatnot must be tough for them but overall, I believe they're a huge success story and more open projects should look up to them for inspiration. If there was an operating system (sorry, Firefox OS didn't count) or office suite developed with a similar attitude, it could really make an impact.

Just compare the download page of Libre Office (https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/) with that of Firefox. I'd link the latter, but it basically just starts to download the file you actually want. It's the little things...

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#123

Post by jameskegel »

linclark wrote: post #97
k__ wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! Did you also do the React Fiber cartoons?

Yes, that was me :) I've created a lot of cartoons around things in the React ecosystem. I've also done cartoons on WebAssembly and SharedArrayBuffer/Atomics.

I knew it!

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#124

Post by irishasaurus »

linclark wrote: post #93
crescentfresh wrote: post #84

I always wonder, who puts together nifty little blog posts on this kind of thing complete with graphics just for the article? By that I mean, literally what title do they have? Myself and my colleagues would/could write up a technical breakdown of something neat or innovative we might have done to solve some problem at work, but we sure as shit can't make cool little graphics interspersed between opportune paragraphs…

No, I created Code Cartoons in my spare time. After I worked at Mozilla for a while, I pitched the idea of me making Code Cartoons explaining the things we were developing in Emerging Technologies. My (current) boss was super into the idea. I talked more about this on a recently recorded Hanselminutes podcast. It should come out soon.

I loved your crash course in memory management. It had a real Randall Munroe vibe to it. Please keep up the good work.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#125

Post by majewsky »

bholley wrote: post #108
pcwalton wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On my Haswell MBP, Stylo can take first pageload styles on Wikipedia pages from 150-200 ms down to 50 ms or so, last I checked.

It's even better now - we get down to about 14ms with various recent improvements in style sharing.

Okay, that's seriously awesome. Nice job!

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#126

Post by taeric »

taeric wrote: post #102
sanxiyn wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't see what problem parent selectors cause. Restyling parent happens anyway without parent selectors (say, by JavaScript), so it is handled. In https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/master/components/style/... , MustCascadeChildren is returned when you... must.

I was basically restating the restriction for the parallel scan. It goes from parent down so that during the scan you don't do something that causes the scan to have to restart. I was also shooting from the hip for things I'm interested in, here. I'm not sure it matters. But, if on scanning, you pick relevant rules to apply based on the path to a node, then I could see some trickiness on having to consider both the t…

Coming back to this before I finally sleep.

I missed your point about selector matching and style application. I think that is ultimately where my hip shot missed on this. (I have never had to reserve the right to be wrong. Just to assume it. :)

I still feel there is some danger there, but I think that is just clinging to an initial shot. I am curious why rust's help was needed to get this, now. A basic thread pool seems like it would have been somewhat easy to wire up in any language.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#127

Post by buovjaga »

nothis wrote: post #122
crescentfresh wrote: post #84

I always wonder, who puts together nifty little blog posts on this kind of thing complete with graphics just for the article? By that I mean, literally what title do they have? Myself and my colleagues would/could write up a technical breakdown of something neat or innovative we might have done to solve some problem at work, but we sure as shit can't make cool little graphics interspersed between opportune paragraphs…

That's honestly one of those big differences between Mozilla and the tons of other idealistic free/open source projects out there. They care about presentation. They care about clarity. They care about layout. They care about style. IMO understanding how to appeal to non-tech-y users (and that tech-y users don't always want to sift through 5 pages of links to SDK-tarballs when trying to download a software) was how t…

> Just compare the download page of Libre Office (https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/) with that of Firefox.

Without the budget of Mozilla, there is no time to put enough thought and effort on presentation. Our volunteers are our money. I wear like five different hats in LibreOffice and do not get paid for any of them. If I focus on web layouts for some weeks, I watch in horror as our unconfirmed bug stats start growing out of control.

The number of people actively thinking about LibreOffice web presentation and layout is zero. If someone wants to start doing it for no compensation whatsoever, feel free to ping me.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#128

Post by enz »

Manishearth wrote: post #57
Brakenshire wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, all the discussion so far seems to focus on desktop firefox, are these improvements coming to firefox for android, or is that a longer term project, perhaps when servo is ready?

We're hoping to have stylo in 57, and I would expect it to be on android in the next release (58), but no promises. Basically we intend for it to work eventually on android, but it didn't get prioritized.

I can turn on `layout.css.servo.enabled`, on Firefox 55 Android (and Desktop). What does it mean? If I understand correctly, Firefox will have this property turned on by default in 57/58 but it's possible to have it early?

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#129

Post by FooBarWidget »

buovjaga wrote: post #127
nothis wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's honestly one of those big differences between Mozilla and the tons of other idealistic free/open source projects out there. They care about presentation. They care about clarity. They care about layout. They care about style. IMO understanding how to appeal to non-tech-y users (and that tech-y users don't always want to sift through 5 pages of links to SDK-tarballs when trying to download a software) was how t…

> Just compare the download page of Libre Office ( https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/ ) with that of Firefox. Without the budget of Mozilla, there is no time to put enough thought and effort on presentation. Our volunteers are our money. I wear like five different hats in LibreOffice and do not get paid for any of them. If I focus on web layouts for some weeks, I watch in horror as our unconfirmed bug sta…

As a fellow open source developer I completely understand you. Thank you for your work on LibreOffice.

Having said that, the grandparent reflects an undeniable truth of our time. User expectations are high, users are "spoiled": they expect it all and they expect it for free. Not commenting on whether that is a good or bad thing, just pointing out that it is true.

Re: Inside a fast CSS engine

#130

Post by Radim »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #129
buovjaga wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just compare the download page of Libre Office ( https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/ ) with that of Firefox. Without the budget of Mozilla, there is no time to put enough thought and effort on presentation. Our volunteers are our money. I wear like five different hats in LibreOffice and do not get paid for any of them. If I focus on web layouts for some weeks, I watch in horror as our unconfirmed bug sta…

As a fellow open source developer I completely understand you. Thank you for your work on LibreOffice. Having said that, the grandparent reflects an undeniable truth of our time. User expectations are high, users are "spoiled": they expect it all and they expect it for free. Not commenting on whether that is a good or bad thing, just pointing out that it is true.

An astute observation -- applies to more than just open source. Doesn't it seems to sum up the western society in general these days, or am I becoming a grumpy old man?

The sense of automatic entitlement, with no expectation of reciprocity or putting in the hard work (in open source or otherwise), appears pervasive.

Post reply on HN