Servo’s new home • Hacker News Board

Re: Servo’s new home

#91

Post by dmitryminkovsky » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

eitland wrote: post #62

> 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 not in a position to donate right now, so thanks a lot for donating to this project.

Though I do wonder how much influence Servo will have on preventing browser monoculture given that as a stand-alone thing it can’t be or isn’t involved in developing standards. Mozilla will still have to play that role. I hope they step up to the plate and stay focused on this most important thing.

Re: Servo’s new home

#92

Post by dannyobrien » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

eitland wrote: post #62

> 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…

Yep, I threw them $10 -- it was pretty easy (there was some strange scrolling problem on the first page, but I just hit the donate button and it went away) https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/servo

Re: Servo’s new home

#93

Post by rstat1 » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

The_Colonel wrote: post #77

rstat1 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 differ…

Not difficult no.

But certainly not anywhere close to the 0 extra effort required by an app developer to support other platforms with Electron as it currently is.

Re: Servo’s new home

#94

Post by randomdata » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 5:41 PM UTC

roadbeats wrote: post #86

While 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 ?

A VPN service, apparently.

https://vpn.mozilla.org

Re: Servo’s new home

#95

Post by fabrice_d » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 5:42 PM UTC

CodesInChaos wrote: post #68

paulrouget wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None at the moment. Help is welcome: https://servo.org/#support-and-donations :)

I have a hard time believing that a project as ambitious as servo can survive without several paid core developers.

Look at the corporate sponsors (that include Samsung and Huawei) - they may provide paid contributors.

Re: Servo’s new home

#96

Post by lastontheboat » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

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?

There is no plan to relicense at this time.

Re: Servo’s new home

#97

Post by fabrice_d » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

roadbeats wrote: post #86

While 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 ?

Mozilla is still obviously working on Gecko, which is the browser engine powering Firefox. You can check the activity here for instance: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev

Re: Servo’s new home

#98

Post by arendtio » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

I am confused. I thought it is the raison d'être of Mozilla to develop a browser. So how does it come that the brand new browser engine they developed is being given away?

I mean, even if they need to cut costs, isn't Servo part of the team they should keep until the end?

Re: Servo’s new home

#99

Post by gigel82 » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 5:45 PM UTC

Haven't heard of Servo before so was excited about the possibility of a lean new engine, but was pretty deflated when the preview build is 200Mb+ on disk (80Mb just for the main exe). It's possible some of it comes from the unoptimized extras like the JS engine, media libraries, etc.

Re: Servo’s new home

#100

Post by ygjb » Tue, Nov 17, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

LockAndLol wrote: post #85

eitland wrote: post #62

> 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

The irony is that from both of these comments it implies you have a concern about the future and the stability of Firefox as both an open source project, and it's role in preventing a browser monoculture.

Setting aside concerns about leadership, because IMO it's time for most of the current leadership to retire and make space for more innovative folks, Mozilla needs two things to preserve Firefox and Gecko, money and relevance. The have had numerous misfires on diversifying revenue, and they have been challenged on how to do that for a long time, but MoCo (Mozilla Corporation) has been profitable for quite some time due to the business deals with Google. That funds Firefox and many other related projects.

The other thing that Mozilla needs is relevance, and over and above the presence of Firefox, MoFo (Mozilla Foundation) has played an activist role across many different initiatives, standards bodies, and lobbying. That requires money, and because of the legal manoeuvring that Mozilla has done in structuring MoFo and MoCo it requires that Mozilla Foundation be largely self-funding.

Donations help with that, and pay for relevance in a way that Firefox alone can't. Please rethink the hostility towards donating to Mozilla Foundation.