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Servo’s new home

blog.servo.org

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Re: Servo’s new home

#141

Post by stuaxo »

coldtea wrote: post #130
tyre wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is some cost/effort to building a better browser engine. They might believe that the same cost/effort would better benefit the business if put elsewhere. You see this at companies when engineering teams get it into their heads that they need to rewrite in a new framework. There's a trade-off between that work and building new features for customers. The benefits might be worth it in the long term! They also mig…

> There is some cost/effort to building a better browser engine. They might believe that the same cost/effort would better benefit the business if put elsewhere. Yes, because all those years the Mozilla executive team has proved that they have a good grasp of where the cost/effort optimum lies... /s

From the outside it seems like eating the seeds for next years harvest.

Re: Servo’s new home

#142

Post by stuaxo »

phonon wrote: post #110
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-...

I'm guessing that the "new products" are not the browser.

Re: Servo’s new home

#143

Post by Manishearth »

wmf wrote: post #34

Is anyone paying Servo developers now? This is the real issue.

Many of us are looking for (or have found) dayjobs, but it's possible some folks may be open to contracting work on servo/etc. But nobody is being paid to work on servo right now.

Re: Servo’s new home

#144

Post by stuaxo »

gilrain wrote: post #119
Shared404 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that Servo was more experimental research, with an eye towards possibly being integrated at some point.

Except multiple parts of it had already been integrated into Firefox, providing its most recent performance gains (Webrender, Stylo).

Yes, they were developed in Servo first, then brought over when mature.

I wonder if this is the end of that model, or more an effort to get external people to contribute more to Servo.

Re: Servo’s new home

#145

Post by DominoTree »

eznzt wrote: post #135
jfk13 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really so unlikely? Firefox integrates all kinds of components from elsewhere; why shouldn't it continue adopting parts of Servo where appropriate?

So the Servo developers will now work for free but Mozilla will start to leech from it? That would be uncool.

It's an open-source project - a lot of us have already been working for free :)

Re: Servo’s new home

#146

Post by andrewmcwatters »

spankalee wrote: post #132
chubot wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone tried Cobalt? It looks like something based on it could be an alternative to Electron. https://cobalt.foo/ It's meant for embedded but that probably just means it's easy to build and uses low memory. A high-performance, small-footprint platform that implements a subset of HTML5/CSS/JS to run applications, including the YouTube TV app.

Cobalt lags on modern web APIs pretty badly. I wouldn't recommend it.

Cobalt is definitely not for someone like you.

Re: Servo’s new home

#147

Post by stuaxo »

JohnBooty wrote: post #116
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?

I most definitely agree. All I can think is that they took a look at Servo and decided it was cool tech but was really nowhere near delivering things they needed for Firefox aside from Stylo which it had already delivered.

But the things being delivered by it were mostly being developed by Mozilla devs.

Re: Servo’s new home

#148

Post by Manishearth »

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…

The Linux Foundation is basically a catch-all foundation for smaller open source projects, this is not "Linux owns a browser engine".

The "Linux" there is more of an indicator of its origins than its purpose.

Re: Servo’s new home

#149

Post by Manishearth »

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?

The wgpu crate is being developed by Firefox engineers for Firefox. As lastontheboat said we had a student integrate it into Servo this year.

Re: Servo’s new home

#150

Post by mlindner »

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?

A lot of people misunderstand what Servo was. It was for developing components that could be integrated into a browser. Firefox integrated most of those and continues to develop more code in Rust. Servo lost it's use.
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