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Servo’s new home

blog.servo.org

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Re: Servo’s new home

#181

Post by andrewmcwatters »

ddevault wrote: post #173
Manishearth wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We spent a significant amount of effort in the last year and a half working on a redesigned modular/parallel layout subsystem. The VR focus was because it was a good way to get servo out to end users early without needing to be fully web compat -- WebXR doesn't require complex layout. We didn't drop our focus on full web compat during this, but full web compat has always been a more long term goal given how complex t…

WebXR is also completely inane. What users are you "shipping" to? A tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a percent of internet users? You have a massive effort ahead of you, and you won't get there by chasing distractions. You need to have a singular focus if you're going to accomplish this goal.

They're not interested in "[providing] an independent, modular, embeddable web engine," they're interested in writing software in Rust and having their name associated with a Mozilla/Linux Foundation project. Go look at their governance.[1]

Their webpage tells you what they really care about, and it isn't embedding.

[1]: https://servo.org/governance/tsc/readme/

Re: Servo’s new home

#182

Post by kodablah »

danShumway wrote: post #82
sergiomattei wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (ignorin…

This is a big one for me. I have to use CEF because it's the only easily embeddable engine for me.

Re: Servo’s new home

#183

Post by gigel82 »

SimonSapin wrote: post #140
gigel82 wrote: post #99

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.

I don’t recall that disk size was ever something we’ve optimized or tracked. Why is it important?

Other resources' usage (memory, I/O) tends to scale up with size on disk. And empirically, the more code you have, the slower your program runs.

Lots of folks in this thread brought up Electron and Servo being a potential replacement for it, but the preview build is already larger than Electron today.

Re: Servo’s new home

#184

Post by andrewmcwatters »

lastontheboat wrote: post #163
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #152

Edit: 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…

Servo already has a C embedding API in https://github.com/servo/servo/tree/master/ports/libsimplese... .

That's not an embedding API. It's definitely Rust exposed to C, but there's nothing meaningful there as an embedder to get started.

Reading code isn't reading documentation. The fact that someone on HN had to search for it and paste it here tells me enough about where they emphasize their time.

Re: Servo’s new home

#185

Post by BearOso »

runarberg wrote: post #63
vorpalhex wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla has decided to move to a different mission less about improving the web and more about enacting things that make them money, so they can continue to pay a large CEO salary and push policy objectives against free speech. Unfortunately Mozilla seemed to go from "awesome" to really disappointing in a very short time window.

> pay a large CEO salary Sure, I’ll buy that. > push policy objectives against free speech Can people please stop this latent homophobia? Mozilla fired a person who donated money to a deplorable cause. You can try to hide behind free speech, but we all know what this is about.

> Can people please stop this latent homophobia? Mozilla fired a person who donated money to a deplorable cause. You can try to hide behind free speech, but we all know what this is about.

He quit. And I don’t agree with it, but I wouldn’t exactly call his cause deplorable. People with those views can believe they’re being completely ethical. That was also in 2008, a different political climate, and nobody allowed him to learn from it or to restitute.

Of course, I agree that wasn’t their downfall—it was simply misdirected goals and funding.

Re: Servo’s new home

#186

Post by tannhaeuser »

Is there a chance the Servo code base could be used to develop a new browser? You know, like phoenix rising from the ashes much like FF rose from the Netscape code base (wasn't FF even called phoenix at some point)? Because that's certainly something to get HNers behind.

Re: Servo’s new home

#187

Post by shi314 »

coldpie wrote: post #114
vorpalhex wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The absolute number doesn't matter. Non-profits participate in the same labor market as for-profit companies. You have to compare it to executive salaries for other similarly sized companies in their market segment to make the argument that she is overpaid. Otherwise you're just arguing against income inequality, which is not a problem exclusive to Mozilla, and crippling Mozilla's ability to participate in that labor…

Does Mozilla compete with for profit companies for C suite market? Which technology intensive company hire a CEO who is lawyer by profession and hasn't had any redeeming resume for management and technology. If you look at firefox's market share, the only growth it had was when she was not a CEO. Seriously, Mozilla is not competing with for profit companies in C suite labor market.

Re: Servo’s new home

#188

Post by Ygg2 »

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!

Could Servo use v8 as the JS engine?

Re: Servo’s new home

#189

Post by andrewmcwatters »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #186

Is there a chance the Servo code base could be used to develop a new browser? You know, like phoenix rising from the ashes much like FF rose from the Netscape code base (wasn't FF even called phoenix at some point)? Because that's certainly something to get HNers behind.

Of course, but they won't be working on it.
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