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Servo’s new home

blog.servo.org

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Re: Servo’s new home

#101

Post by lastontheboat »

coddle-hark wrote: post #73
Finnucane wrote: post #58

Earlier 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.

Servo currently incorporates a network stack, a JS engine, the DOM, JS APIs, an HTML parser, a CSS styling engine, graphical rendering, media parsing and playback, etc. It is not a browser, since it doesn't impose requirements about how to load specific pages, interact with tabs, expose history or bookmarks, etc.

Re: Servo’s new home

#102

Post by MaxBarraclough »

satyrnein wrote: post #75
baq wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the CEO needs a new house.

She's hardly the most overpaid CEO in tech, but she seems to come up pretty often for some reason.

> for some reason

This isn't a mystery. Mozilla accept donations. It isn't an ordinary for-profit corporation.

Yes, they separate Mozilla Corporation from Mozilla Foundation, but the point stands. If Mozilla are going to claim to make browsers, apps, code and tools that put people before profit, [0] they should expect backlash when they lay off engineers while continuing to overpay their leadership, despite continuing poor outcomes under their stewardship. [1]

[0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/

[1] http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html

Re: Servo’s new home

#103

Post by caniszczyk »

smarx007 wrote: post #69
baq wrote: post #32

With the growing concern about browser monopoly and engine monopoly going against everything the web was intended to be, are you planning on acquiring funding from government grants? EU at least used to give out money to interesting projects, is there hope for servo to get some?

Quite possible. But you need an EU entity for that and it's likely why Eclipse Foundation (Eclipse Foundation != Eclipse IDE for those who are not aware but rather a competitor to Apache and Linux foundations) has moved to Europe: https://newsroom.eclipse.org/news/announcements/open-source-...

Indeed, as an FYI the LF is truly "Foundation as a Service" and has entities in the US, EU, Japan and China. The RISC-V Foundation (hosted by the LF) is even based out of Switzerland.

Re: Servo’s new home

#104

Post by lucideer »

On the surface, this seems like great news.

Does anyone have any insight into what level of influence Linux Foundation's Platinum Corporate Members have over it's priorities and direction?

Beyond the obvious (Google), MS are invested in Blink and Tencent/QQ in Webkit. I guess there's scope for branching out in terms of engine use but... MS have already tried that quite a lot.

I'm not saying that it's necessary for all Foundation Corporate Members to be actively adopting Foundation projects, but more that some may have commercial interest in those projects not competing with their own.

Re: Servo’s new home

#105

Post by lastontheboat »

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?

We had a summer of code student implementing support in Servo: https://blog.servo.org/2020/08/30/gsoc-webgpu/

Re: Servo’s new home

#106

Post by vorpalhex »

coldpie wrote: post #64
unethical_ban wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that is a hugely loaded statement. Even if it is 100% true, the level of derision and bias should make any person not familiar with the situation question everything you say. If you're going to be that biased, at least back it up. And by back it up, I mean at LEAST throwing in some statements of fact, if not URLs.

Every thread tangentially related to Mozilla has a bunch of people who don't understand how non-profits work come in and complain about executive compensation.

I'd say >$2.4M in exec comp[1] isn't just making up for a lack of stock options.

[1] - https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-cuts-70-staff-as-part-of-p...

Re: Servo’s new home

#107

Post by syshum »

ygjb wrote: post #100
LockAndLol wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>> Please rethink the hostility towards donating to Mozilla Foundation

Once Mozilla rethink;s its hostility to its user base maybe the user base will rethink its hostility towards Mozilla

Mozilla left us, we did not leave Mozilla

Re: Servo’s new home

#108

Post by skyfaller »

asajeffrey wrote: post #26
mthoms wrote: post #11

Can Servo be used as an Electron replacement?

Not yet, there is an embedding API, but it's designed for embedding into native apps. Servo uses Spidermonkey rather than v8 as the JS engine, so integrating into the node ecosystem would be tricky. But it would be nice to see a JS-first runtime system built around Servo!

What about Deno, rather than Node? (I know almost nothing about either, sorry if this is a stupid question.)

Re: Servo’s new home

#109

Post by Manishearth »

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…

Servo was never tightly integrated with a sizeable browser project. It shared some components with Firefox, but the only time Servo itself was inside an actual browser release was Firefox Reality for AR. Which still exists, though I'm not sure what the future of development for it will look like.

Re: Servo’s new home

#110

Post by phonon »

arendtio wrote: post #98

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?

Because they wanted to "put a crisper focus on new product development and go to market activities."[1] I'm sure that explains it well...

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Message-...

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