Servo is starting to remind me a little of Minix, where it is an ambitious project attempting to fix underlying architectural problems, but the scale of the project being so large that ecosystem progress outpaces it's ability to adapt. I hope I'm wrong.
Servo’s new home
81–90 of 326 posts
Re: Servo’s new home
#82Earlier 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…
This is also my concern. Everyone's cheering on, but I'm just thinking... What's the mission and end goal now? Previously it was doing research, with the possibility of landing in Firefox. Now that's highly unlikely.
> Servo’s high-level goals remain unchanged: to provide a high-performance, safe rendering engine for embedding in other applications.
This is exactly what I want their goals to be. Embedding Chromium in applications is cumbersome, bloat applications, etc...
In the long run, having more options of web renders to use will help with everything, including browsers. Maybe it won't all be pulled into Firefox, but (ignoring all the other problems with DRM/regulation/anticompetive behavior/etc) it'll at least make it a little easier for other people to build browsers, and it opens the door for us to have more lightweight alternatives to applications like Electron.
Re: Servo’s new home
#83Thank God, I am so happy to hear that Servo isn't being abandoned, and I'm very happy to see the Linux foundation getting involved.
It's still going to be an uphill battle for Servo to really make an impact on the overall browser/web industry/ecosystem, but at least for now this is very positive news.
Re: Servo’s new home
#84We'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!
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…
The latter would be better, imo.
Chromium won because it introduced a sane API before Mozilla's Gecko. That's why you see so many Electron apps. Seriously, we don't need to wrap a whole browser. Just the engine and a debugger would've been fine.
The engine could be distributed as a lib and other frameworks could just bind it. Apps could be distributed without an 150MB behemoth just to have a chat client.
Making the engine also mobile compatible would mean Android and iOS could maybe have the same base. I also look forward to what this means for Linux phones. Custom browsers could be written for those that don't have to use WebKit or try to launch Chromium or Firefox on a mobile device.
Not only for mobile devices, but also displaying things in VR can be made significantly easier if you don't have to write all the UI yourself. Give it an opengl rectangular surface (or vulkan?) and you can then use web technologies to make UIs in VR.
All in all, I'm very for an engine. It would definitely allow a competitor with a good name to enter the market. Developer should be able to reach for something else than WebKit because nobody in their right mind is going to reach for Gecko.
Re: Servo’s new home
#85> or donating to help cover the project’s new CI and hosting costs, Planning to do exactly that tonight. I'm one of those who stopped donating to Mozilla once I realized none of the money donated could ever be used for developing the browser. If anybody else thought like me tonight might be a good time to prove we were principled, not cheap. Edit: one more thing. Hopefully at some time we can now recreate Firefox wit…
> I'm one of those who stopped donating to Mozilla once I realized none of the money donated could ever be used for developing the browser.
I never donated to Mozilla for this precise reason. Now I'm seriously considering it.
Edit: Done
Re: Servo’s new home
#86While this is great news on one hand, on the other hand, how could Mozilla manage to lose its browser engine project ? If a web browser company can't even keep its browser engine project, what is really Mozilla working on these days ?
Re: Servo’s new home
#87We'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!
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…
A third-option that I would like to see is extending the latter to an Electron alternative (aka using Servo as a cross-platform GUI). There's definitely positives to Electron, but it would be nice to see a more performant, less memory hungry, and more battery friendly alternative.
Re: Servo’s new home
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well, to be honest though, a lot of the criticism of Electron stems from the fact that it's more than just a rendering engine.
There are a lot of applications where you'd want to take advantage of a browser view or a renderer or a JS engine, but not the rest of the stack. There are native apps where you might want a well-sandboxed JS engine for extension support, or where you're writing all of your core logic in C/Rust but you want to use HTML/CSS for your interface.
Splitting up those components would be useful in a lot of situations.
Re: Servo’s new home
#89We are seeing the birth of a new browser ( age )
Re: Servo’s new home
#90Earlier 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 clarifying. This is exciting indeed! Are you aware of usage outside of browsers?