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!
Servo’s new home
161–170 of 326 posts
Re: Servo’s new home
#162On 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
#163Edit: It's clear to me Servo is vaporware right now. The discussions in this thread and crawling servo.org make that abundantly clear. Original post: As an embedder, I just don't get the point. Servo is a nonstarter. The idea of Servo minus Rust is great, because most embedders don't use Rust. They use C, because C is easy to embed with, and the availability of FFIs across languages that interface with C is tremendou…
Re: Servo’s new home
#164Earlier 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?
Seems just more unlikely. It's one thing for a mozilla team member to say "Hey, let's pull the servo css layout engine into firefox" It's a whole different thing for someone to say "Hey, let's pull the webkit css layout engine into firefox". The servo stuff, while for experimentation, was ultimately geared towards the notion of landing parts of it into firefox. It was built for that. Under an opensource foundation ma…
Re: Servo’s new home
#165Re: Servo’s new home
#166We'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!
Is any software embedding it now?
Re: Servo’s new home
#167Earlier 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…
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 e…
Actually, Electron wraps an entire browser, except for its UI part.
Re: Servo’s new home
#168Awesome news! The world needs another prominent browser engine that browser vendors would want to use, and detaching Servo from Mozilla makes it better positioned for that task IMHO. I'm also very happy that work on Webrender continues. I love what you're doing guys!
Should we start calling it Servo by Linux now?
Re: Servo’s new home
#169Earlier 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…
I'm not going to consider affirming bad leadership by giving them money. Mozilla Corp employees aren't locked into anything (unless they signed really shitty contracts). They can leave and rebuild.
Servo might finally provide the foundation for a browser that really is about privacy and not just a cash-cow for a bloated upper echelon.
Re: Servo’s new home
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/Ru…
DOM is highly intertwined with JavaScript, so that wouldn't be possible.