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Mozilla’s Servo Team Joining Mixed Reality

blog.servo.org

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Re: Mozilla’s Servo Team Joining Mixed Reality

#91

Post by drakenot »

Sylos wrote: post #86
sanxiyn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think, that does actually work out. 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 Firef…

So we continue to play wack-a-mole with the C++ codebase rather than develop in a language that makes whole classes of exploits impossible?

Firefox is not safe. It’s been routinely exploited by law enforcement and hackers alike.

Re: Mozilla’s Servo Team Joining Mixed Reality

#93

Post by wpietri »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #84
wpietri wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Regarding justifying the hype, people are always going to hype new tech they're interested in, regardless of its commercial potential (I realise VR is nothing new, but this current generation of devices has already made further inroads into the mainstream compared to their predecessors). I don't think hype requires justification, it's just a reflection of what humans get excited about. To put it another way, imagine…

Excitement is a feeling, which nobody has to justify. Hype is a behavior, and people can and should be held responsible for their behaviors.

Especially so given that hyping something is "to promote or publicize (a product or idea) intensively, often exaggerating its importance or benefits". It's not a neutral act. And in the commercial context, the purpose of hype is generally, in one way or another, to put money in the pockets of the person doing the hyping.

Re: Mozilla’s Servo Team Joining Mixed Reality

#94

Post by RaleyField »

Sylos wrote: post #87
RaleyField wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They already have completed VR projects: https://vr.mozilla.org/ 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 br…

> They are deeper into the matter than both us

Or execs are driving a bus into the wall. It wouldn't be the first time that happened for sure.

> I'm also not aware of Chrome being less explodable.

It used to be. It only took them 10 years to enable sandboxing.

> with its malware-filled extension store

And no rational person installs extensions from it for that reason without first checking who stands behind the extension.

> then it has access to 1/4 of your tabs and therefore might potentially be able to steal sensitive data

So essentially not equivalent.

Re: Mozilla’s Servo Team Joining Mixed Reality

#95

Post by kibwen »

devit wrote: post #82
Manishearth wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

What about the concept of turning Gecko into Servo piece by piece? 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.

Servo components will continue to be uplifted into Gecko (e.g. WebRender and Pathfinder are on track to be in Firefox later this year). But ever since Servo's original announcement people from Mozilla have been explicitly saying that people should not expect Servo to wholesale replace Gecko in Firefox.

Re: Mozilla’s Servo Team Joining Mixed Reality

#96

Post by sp332 »

The amount of negativity in this thread is crazy. With Microsoft pushing VR & AR right into the operating system, and headsets Anyway, I was just wondering if the Servo team had seen the work Elevr had done on basic interaction design? They lost funding last year but I thought they had a ton of work done.

Re: Mozilla’s Servo Team Joining Mixed Reality

#97

Post by thomastjeffery »

sp332 wrote: post #96

The amount of negativity in this thread is crazy. With Microsoft pushing VR & AR right into the operating system, and headsets Anyway, I was just wondering if the Servo team had seen the work Elevr had done on basic interaction design? They lost funding last year but I thought they had a ton of work done.

"Things have changed".

That's being a bit liberal. Sure, [AV]R is going to be important in the next few years, but it certainly won't be mandatory. People will still be using flat monoscopic (not stereoscopic) displays.

The work Mozilla has put into Servo is clearly very useful right now. There is still a lot of work to be done on Servo, and on Rust itself. Are you really that surprised that some of us are wary of splitting that team's priorities to work on something like [AV]R?

Re: Mozilla’s Servo Team Joining Mixed Reality

#98

Post by ZenoArrow »

wpietri wrote: post #93
ZenoArrow wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding justifying the hype, people are always going to hype new tech they're interested in, regardless of its commercial potential (I realise VR is nothing new, but this current generation of devices has already made further inroads into the mainstream compared to their predecessors). I don't think hype requires justification, it's just a reflection of what humans get excited about. To put it another way, imagine…

Excitement is a feeling, which nobody has to justify. Hype is a behavior, and people can and should be held responsible for their behaviors. Especially so given that hyping something is "to promote or publicize (a product or idea) intensively, often exaggerating its importance or benefits". It's not a neutral act. And in the commercial context, the purpose of hype is generally, in one way or another, to put money in…

> "Excitement is a feeling, which nobody has to justify. Hype is a behavior, and people can and should be held responsible for their behaviors."

Depends who's doing the hyping. If it's a potential consumer, then hype is derived from excitement, and the same rules that apply to the justification of excitement would apply to the justification for hype. On the other hand, if it's a company hyping their products, then they may not be led by their feelings, but I don't see the harm in it either. What do you lose out on if a company is hyping their products?

Re: Mozilla’s Servo Team Joining Mixed Reality

#99

Post by 13years »

sp332 wrote: post #96

The amount of negativity in this thread is crazy. With Microsoft pushing VR & AR right into the operating system, and headsets Anyway, I was just wondering if the Servo team had seen the work Elevr had done on basic interaction design? They lost funding last year but I thought they had a ton of work done.

> you'd think people might get the hint that things have changed

Or not. The amount of hype and investment isn't a reliable measure of future success. We've been here before. The moment when mass adoption is just around the corner.

Some things are conceptually exciting, but disappointing in practice.

Re: Mozilla’s Servo Team Joining Mixed Reality

#100

Post by nartam11 »

roymurdock wrote: post #16
88e282102ae2e5b wrote: post #3

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?

Check out PTC Thingworx Studio. Many industrial companies are pursuing similar technologies - AR to visualize data streaming off machines in a factory or industrial setting

Theres a free 90 trial for ThingWorx Studio! https://studio.thingworx.com/ Disclaimer I work on the ThingWorx product
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