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Servo’s new home

blog.servo.org

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Re: Servo’s new home

#71

Post by The_Colonel »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #60
vorpalhex wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla has decided to move to a different mission less about improving the web and more about enacting things that make them money, so they can continue to pay a large CEO salary and push policy objectives against free speech. Unfortunately Mozilla seemed to go from "awesome" to really disappointing in a very short time window.

Mozilla currently cares more about surviving than its main mission. And yes, it can't accomplish its mission if it dies, but don't they understand? If Mozilla falls, another will take its place. The way to kill Mozilla is from the inside: to quash its soul.

> If Mozilla falls, another will take its place.

Yes, another chrome skin perhaps?

Re: Servo’s new home

#72

Post by tannhaeuser »

akiselev wrote: post #59
throwaway894345 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With respect to the latter, I agree that it seems unlikely that the project would attract users. Maybe it’s my own ignorance, but I don’t know what kind of apps (besides web browsers) would want just the web rendering engine and not various other components in a web browser. What are the responsibilities of a “web rendering engine” anyway? How tightly coupled is it to the DOM? Does it “own” the DOM, or is that owned…

You send Servo raw display lists, which is a format tailored specifically to represent the DOM but it acts like a generic slicing compositor in practice. It's not coupled in the classical sense - the display lists represent shapes, colors, stacks, rounded borders, etc.. It's more like Skia and can be used to develop GUI frameworks (which is exciting because Servo is Rust and Rust's GUI story is still in its early sta…

Thanks for that explanation. From the website, it wasn't quite clear to me (and still isn't tbh) whether servo is merely a rendering or also a CSS layout (+ parsing etc) engine.

Re: Servo’s new home

#73

Post by coddle-hark »

Finnucane wrote: post #58
black_puppydog wrote: post #55

I'm happy to hear servo is going to continue to exist. Please forgive the beginner's question: my understanding is that servo is "just" an engine, which needs to be wrapped into a browser to really become usable. I've just tried (not for the first time, btw) your tech demo, which I think illustrates this perfectly. The rendering was lightning fast, but it's not a full browser. You state that your goals are "to provid…

Presumably any app that wants this kind of rendering could make use of it, not just browsers--consider all the apps that now use Electron for this.

Electron (WebKit) is much more than a rendering engine though. Sure, you could use Servo in a desktop app, but you’d have to also bundle all the other browser components (a JS engine, for example) individually. You’re basically building a browser at that point.

Re: Servo’s new home

#74

Post by mrec »

edoceo wrote: post #56
brian_herman__ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://azul.rs/ Maybe?

Neat! Thanks for this!

I'm not sure azul is being actively developed any more; the repo looks a bit tumbleweedy.

The best place if you want to keep tabs on this area is probably https://www.areweguiyet.com/

Re: Servo’s new home

#76

Post by [deleted] »

erickt wrote: post #9
lastontheboat wrote: post #2

We've been cagey about this over the months since the Servo team at Mozilla was disbanded, since there were various moving pieces that needed to fall into place. We're excited about the possibility for Servo to continue growing and evolving in its new home, though!

This is great news! I'm glad Servo found a place to land. Are you planning on sticking with the MPL-2.0 license, or are you also considering relicensing as well?

[deleted]

Re: Servo’s new home

#77

Post by The_Colonel »

rstat1 wrote: post #70
the_other wrote: post #13

On the face of it, this sounds great! I hope it leads to bold new things. It also produces an interesting coherence: Google + MS -> Blink Apple -> Webkit Linux -> Servo All the main OSs now have their own web rendering engine. The 00s saw anti-trust against MS for this practice (ok, for the rigid way MS forced their engine onto their users)... but today the market has coalesced around the same core idea, cementing th…

So feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong. I thought the biggest draw to Electron was that it was a single stable platform that worked and looked the same everywhere. I feel like (based on that) any attempts to move to OS bundled web engines would completely miss the point of why Electron is popular.

I think the biggest advantage of Electron is that you can write one code and it will run on all major desktop platforms AND web. There isn't really any other good solution for this.

> I feel like (based on that) any attempts to move to OS bundled web engines would completely miss the point of why Electron is popular.

If the web platform is modern enough (chrome, firefox and mayybe safari) then supporting these different platforms is not that difficult.

Re: Servo’s new home

#78

Post by munificent »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #60
vorpalhex wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla has decided to move to a different mission less about improving the web and more about enacting things that make them money, so they can continue to pay a large CEO salary and push policy objectives against free speech. Unfortunately Mozilla seemed to go from "awesome" to really disappointing in a very short time window.

Mozilla currently cares more about surviving than its main mission. And yes, it can't accomplish its mission if it dies, but don't they understand? If Mozilla falls, another will take its place. The way to kill Mozilla is from the inside: to quash its soul.

> Mozilla currently cares more about surviving than its main mission.

In the open market, any organization that doesn't cares more about its survival than its mission will eventually be replaced by one that does. This is fundamental to the definition of "survival".

> If Mozilla falls, another will take its place.

The one that will take its place will be an organization that prioritizes survival, not its mission.

Re: Servo’s new home

#79

Post by bsimpson »

an_opabinia wrote: post #57
simias wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the plan exactly? Will there be a Servo browser that integrates the servo rendering engine with some open source components (for instance from Firefox, WebKit or Chromium) that will let us use the engine stand-alone, or is it "just" going to be an engine for embedding in third-party programs? The former seems like it would be a huge amount of work, but if it's the latter I fear for the long term survival of th…

It’s tough. People really do want Flash, it’s just Google Chrome now. The bigger question is when will Mobile Safari retire its WebKit fork? What role will Servo play in that inevitable end point?

Apple founded WebKit, so I doubt it will retire its repository.

Are you asking for iOS and macOS Safari to converge, or for Apple to ship straight from the open-source HEAD?

Re: Servo’s new home

#80

Post by mrec »

sweetlucipher wrote: post #48

Is WebGPU part of Servo? I know the guys at Mozilla were developing WebGPU API in Rust. Looking to see where it's going (I assume Firefox has to use it too. Chrome already has experimental support) Any idea?

No, separate project, although both Servo and Gecko (the C++ Firefox codebase) are aiming to use it.

This diagram [1] kvark posted the other day might help. (I think dotted-outline boxes indicate external components, but couldn't swear to it.)

[1] https://gfx-rs.github.io/2020/11/16/big-picture.html

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