81–90 of 123 posts
For those of you simply dismissing whatever's happening because VR has been hyped before and it didn't pan out this time, I'd highly recommend this post: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3124-give-it-five-minutes
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So is this the end of the attempt to make Servo into a fully web compatible competitor to go up against/replace Gecko, et al? Was that ever the goal, really? It seemed like Servo was a "let's see if we can do it" and now it's changed into a "what's the point of putting all this effort into making one more 2D web renderer when we can be at the forefront of 3D web renderers?" Not passing judgement on anything with the…
We're still working on web compatibility; that's not changing. But I don't think we've ever had a concrete goal to have a standalone Servo browser. Parts of servo in firefox? Sure. Trying out new ideas? Sure. Embedding servo a la electron or WebkitView? Sure. But Servo as a standalone browser has always been a "maybe someday" thing -- we've never worked against it, but I don't recall us ever explicitly targeting it,…
That is, continuing the Quantum work until there is either no C++ code left, or the C++ code left can turned off via config option ("prefer perfect security over perfect compatibility") while still having a browser that works on the vast majority of the web.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So is this the end of the attempt to make Servo into a fully web compatible competitor to go up against/replace Gecko, et al? Was that ever the goal, really? It seemed like Servo was a "let's see if we can do it" and now it's changed into a "what's the point of putting all this effort into making one more 2D web renderer when we can be at the forefront of 3D web renderers?" Not passing judgement on anything with the…
We're still working on web compatibility; that's not changing. But I don't think we've ever had a concrete goal to have a standalone Servo browser. Parts of servo in firefox? Sure. Trying out new ideas? Sure. Embedding servo a la electron or WebkitView? Sure. But Servo as a standalone browser has always been a "maybe someday" thing -- we've never worked against it, but I don't recall us ever explicitly targeting it,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "The only way we can really call today the "early stages" of either of these technologies is by imagining a future where they dominate." I'd suggest domination is not a prerequisite for success. Let's imagine a scenario where only 5% of the world population uses VR or AR on a regular basis. That's still a market of millions of people, but it's not at the level of world domination. Not every new technology has to re…
Maybe. But at this level of hype, I think that sort of niche success means people can't really call what's going on today the "early stages" of anything. Instead today would more be the bubble before the crash. The ViewMaster is a fine example there. It's a neat novelty technology! I loved mine when I was a kid. People still love them today. Is it successful? Sure. Do millions of people own them? Definitely. But in r…
As for investment, you have a point. Perhaps the level of investment will prove to be a mistake, but at this point in time we don't really know how big of a demand there will be for VR and AR. I'd struggle at this stage to predict how it will end up, but what I can say is that I can see evidence supporting the prediction that they'll be mainstream, as well as evidence supporting the prediction that they'll be niche. We probably won't know with any certainty until after the second or third generation of current devices is on the market, as that's the point where they're likely to take off commercially if they're going to. Speculation before that point can be fun, but I don't think it'll change the outcome.
There are some questions around Servo as a result of the announcement, so I just wanted to jump in and talk a bit more about what’s going on. tl;dr - Servo is Mozilla’s vehicle for web engine research, and continues to be a major source of new tech for Firefox. But we’re also adding a more direct path to product for Mixed Reality. Servo has produced lots of great browser tech. We're seeing that tech make its way into…
I distinctly recall Servo presentation in 2012. It started: "web browsers are written in C++. It is bad for humanity." Web browsers are still written in C++. It is still bad for humanity. Emphasis on mixred reality may or may not solve that problem sooner. Sometimes the quickest way can seem roundabout. But I am skeptical.
What I'm reading from the top comment here is that the actual point is to focus Servo on VR and Mixed Reality, because it will pull Servo even more in the direction it was always supposed to go in. That is to create a browser that outperforms everything else by leaps and bound by being able to more easily take advantage of multicore processors. VR and Mixed Reality require 90 fps in order to work properly for users, so this is a very high and a completely hard baseline for Servo to have to hit. So it's about setting a loftier goal and a higher bar to meet in order to make sure Servo reaches it's original goal of great performance by way of parallelism.
There are some questions around Servo as a result of the announcement, so I just wanted to jump in and talk a bit more about what’s going on. tl;dr - Servo is Mozilla’s vehicle for web engine research, and continues to be a major source of new tech for Firefox. But we’re also adding a more direct path to product for Mixed Reality. Servo has produced lots of great browser tech. We're seeing that tech make its way into…
I distinctly recall Servo presentation in 2012. It started: "web browsers are written in C++. It is bad for humanity." Web browsers are still written in C++. It is still bad for humanity. Emphasis on mixred reality may or may not solve that problem sooner. Sometimes the quickest way can seem roundabout. But I am skeptical.
The problem for humanity is not that browsers are written in C++, it's that browsers have lots of security vulnerabilities.
Being written in C++ is not helpful with that, but it's not integral to the problem. It's not impossible to produce C++-code that doesn't have vulnerabilities, it just requires a lot of effort and often years of battle-testing to close all of them.
But Firefox's source code has for the most part had those years of battle-testing. It's probably safer than if you'd completely rewrite it in Rust, at least in the short term.
Where the use of Rust can deflect most vulnerabilities is in new code. And that's what Mixed Reality is. It's gonna need to be in the browser at some point in the near future and it is a big chunk of new code. It also has harsh performance requirements, meaning they'll have to work with parallelism, which is where C++ is particularly error prone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Servo is actually not typically viewed as realistically completable. Even Firefox, which is being developed full-pelt, is behind on web standards (like any other browser is). So, for Servo to catch up to the current state of Firefox and to then also keep pace with new web standards, it would have to be developed much quicker than Firefox is being developed. So, that would require more than double the development capa…
It's helluva more completable then any VR project Mozilla is going to try. It will be another Firefox phone project. And you don't have to repeat 20 years of Firefox to complete Firefox, a lot of it were dead-ends like XUL (themed GTK would do), a lot of it were non-essential features like Pocket and a lot of it were rewrites and mistakes that they won't have to repeat and like you said being written in Rust should s…
Pocket required essentially no work. They bought an existing service and stuck a fancy bookmark for it into Firefox.
And well, I'm mainly just repeating what Mozilla devs have said. They are deeper into the matter than both us, they can better judge just how much work it is. And it's easy to forget just how complex web browsers are. None of the major browsers use a browser engine which's development started in this millenium for exactly this reason.
I'm also not aware of Chrome being less explodable. I'd say, it's more explodable with its malware-filled extension store, default unencrypted sync service and annecdotally a vulnerability like this [1] being left unfixed for years and careless behaviour like this [2].
[1]: https://github.com/anttiviljami/browser-autofill-phishing
[2]: https://www.wired.com/story/chrome-yubikey-phishing-webusb/
Firefox used to have a worse security architecture, but it's essentially equivalent now. The only real difference that I'm aware of, is that Firefox by default groups processes for tabs, meaning if a webpage manages to exploit a major vulnerability in Firefox to gain control of the process it's being executed in, then it has access to 1/4 of your tabs and therefore might potentially be able to steal sensitive data, whereas in Chrome it would then also have to exploit a vulnerability in the OS to do that.
Genuine question: Are there non-toy-related uses for AR/VR that exist? Or is that typical assumption that the applications will emerge only once the technology exists?
Once again Mozilla does its best: derailing good projects in unrelated contexts for unknown (and weakly supported) reasons.
Firefox OS all over again.
There are some questions around Servo as a result of the announcement, so I just wanted to jump in and talk a bit more about what’s going on. tl;dr - Servo is Mozilla’s vehicle for web engine research, and continues to be a major source of new tech for Firefox. But we’re also adding a more direct path to product for Mixed Reality. Servo has produced lots of great browser tech. We're seeing that tech make its way into…
I distinctly recall Servo presentation in 2012. It started: "web browsers are written in C++. It is bad for humanity." Web browsers are still written in C++. It is still bad for humanity. Emphasis on mixred reality may or may not solve that problem sooner. Sometimes the quickest way can seem roundabout. But I am skeptical.
Plenty of warts in C++, but at the end of the day, along with C, it is the systems language that powers 99% of the world's computing infrastructure at any level that's not a CRUD app or a throwaway script.