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Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
21–30 of 93 posts
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#22Servo is a web rendering engine written in Rust, with WebGL and WebGPU support, and adaptable to desktop, mobile, and embedded applications.
It is embeddable, independent, memory-safe, modularand parallel web rendering engine.
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#23Somehow I thought that Servo was already incorporated into Firefox.
Is there a way to render some HTML in Rust into an image, without loading a whole browser? It doesn't have to support a lot of HTML or CSS.
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#24I'm very excited about Servo. Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it. Not only the idea of an engine with great security and performance is an excellent one, but I also love the idea of a web engine as a component. This for some reason seems to have disappeared in modern times. IE used to have an ActiveX control back in the Windows 9x days. You could embed a web engine anywhere you wanted. KHTML also worked li…
Possibly memory safe (possibly. Helix, for example, recently had a build that was crashing due to memory safety problems) doesn’t explicitly mean “great security”.
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it The fact that mozilla wasn’t interested in that really tells a lot about their priorities
Or they (Firefox folks) learned what happens when you (Netscape) try a major greenfield rewrite (Netscape v5) so ambitious that it becomes the example of why one should never rewrite. And instead just back ported the lessons learned to make Firefox/Gecko better years earlier than a rewrite could.
That's why Servo exists in the first place. That's exactly the reason why always has been intended as a research engine, with an explicit focus on high modularity, and easy portability of single components, several of which were then incorporated into Firefox.
Especially the latter wasn't some kind of salvage, trying to squeeze value out of some theoretical project. It was an explicit goal from the beginning.
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#26What's this "Legacy Layout" they're using as a comparison? The previous iteration of Servo? Looks like some of the code is still used by both, as the curves sometimes (but not always) go up and down at the same time...
Legacy Layout refers to the original system, Layout 2013. There was a second system started, Layout 2020, to address challenges with implementing parts of the CSS spec which didn't cleanly map to Layout 2013's architecture.
There's a good report in the Servo wiki from this year (authored by a group of Igalians) summarizing the differences between the two and why the decision was made to move forward with Layout 2020.
https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Servo-Layout-Engines-Rep...
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#27I'm very excited about Servo. Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it. Not only the idea of an engine with great security and performance is an excellent one, but I also love the idea of a web engine as a component. This for some reason seems to have disappeared in modern times. IE used to have an ActiveX control back in the Windows 9x days. You could embed a web engine anywhere you wanted. KHTML also worked li…
> I'm very excited about Servo. Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it. This doesn’t feel like an accurate statement. It’s probably better described that Mozilla funded it as a research project, realized that it was going to cost a lot more money and time to bring it fully to the market and decided to save the money (and distributed that money to execs and others in ways that were not inline with their project…
If you offered me a lot of money and unlimited timeline I'd have done it as well, and I don't know what Servo is.
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#28I'm very excited about Servo. Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it. Not only the idea of an engine with great security and performance is an excellent one, but I also love the idea of a web engine as a component. This for some reason seems to have disappeared in modern times. IE used to have an ActiveX control back in the Windows 9x days. You could embed a web engine anywhere you wanted. KHTML also worked li…
WebKit is still very embedding-friendly, though building it on Windows is messy. Works great under macOS and Linux though.
We absolutely need more embeddable web engines though. Gecko is nice but it being permanently joined at the hip with XULRunner is killing it.
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#29Somehow I thought that Servo was already incorporated into Firefox. Is there a way to render some HTML in Rust into an image, without loading a whole browser? It doesn't have to support a lot of HTML or CSS.
The closest thing currently is probably https://github.com/trimental/inlyne which differs in two ways: it only support markdown not arbitrary HTML, and it renders to screen rather to an image. But it's a good start.
IMO the main blocker for web rendering in Rust right now is better text layout, and in particular support for embedding non-text content within text ala `display: inline-block`. If/when that is implemented I think we'll be able to do a decent job of rendering basic web pages.
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#30See also Ladybird for another from-scratch browser being built by a more ragtag indie group. https://ladybird.dev/ The chaddest of the chad projects honestly.
I have more hope in Ladybird than Servo, TBH. Considering how young it is, Ladybird is already very impressive.
Even just to take screenshots, Servo's renderer is very basic, slow and buggy.