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Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

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Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#31

Post by wila »

dale_glass wrote: post #17
rvz wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it. It is because it doesn't make money. An expensive research project (Servo) that was not worth the effort for Mozilla. Mozilla needs to find better ways of making money and not depending on Googles' money. Now thanks to the US v Google anti-trust trial, Mozilla doesn't know if they should support Google for keeping them alive for their hundreds of millions of dollars or…

That sounds like an amazing failure of imagination to me. I see at least 3 excellent angles. 1. Chrome beat Firefox in the stability/security area. Its usage of multiple processes, sandboxing, etc is excellent, while Firefox failed to adapt. Servo seems to have an excellent potential for coming up on top there, being both more secure, and having higher performance. 2. There are actually markets interested in security…

> 3. Embedding. Like I said, using a web engine as a component seems to have been forgotten in modern times. Surely that can be sold to somebody, because there are plenty use cases for embedding web engines in stuff.

It's not forgotten. Microsoft has WebView2 which uses the same engine as MS Edge and it can be included in your .net applications.

If OTOH you want an ActiveX then you can buy AntView, which wraps WebView2 in an ActiveX control.

Disclaimer: AntView is a control sold by my company.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#32

Post by jszymborski »

ilaksh wrote: post #23

Somehow 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 CSS style system (stylo) started out in Servo and is now in Firefox but as I understand it they've diverged quite a bit.

https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2017/07/25/stylo-is-ready-f...

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#33

Post by GuB-42 »

div72 wrote: post #15
mrd3v0 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They fired everyone working on it and completely abandoned it while giving the CEO a million dollar pay raise the same year. When are we going to talk about how openly corrupt Mozilla has become? They clearly have issues at the top that need to be fixed for the betterment of web.

> When are we going to talk about how openly corrupt Mozilla has become? It's routinely discussed on HN, whenever a topic about Mozilla/browsers comes up. The real question in my opinion is what can we do about it? Start an awareness campaign? Stop using Firefox? Stop donating to Mozilla?

There is not much we can do ourselves, they are hurting themselves more than we can hurt them.

We don't want to punish the corrupt, we want to save Firefox from them. If would be great if some organization could fork Firefox and work with Servo to make a usable browser, but that's going to be really expensive, and the new browser will have to make a name for itself. Also the organization will have to do better than Mozilla in terms of corruption, which, again, is not a given when a lot of money is involved.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#34

Post by wila »

sergiotapia wrote: post #20

See 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.

Ladybird is amazing.

They move so fast and are building all of it in the open. I'm very impressed by what the Ladybird team is doing.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#35

Post by jedisct1 »

wredue wrote: post #24
dale_glass wrote: post #3

I'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”.

Not even memory safe.

It has many "unsafe" and "transmut", and this is without the bazillion external dependencies it also depends on.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#36

Post by dale_glass »

ericlewis wrote: post #27
bluejekyll wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Servo is an experimental web engine written in Rust, originally by Mozilla.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#37

Post by schuyler2d »

jwells89 wrote: post #28
dale_glass wrote: post #3

I'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.

I get your point but xul specifically is gone https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/1ORqed8SW_7fPnPdjfz42...

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#38

Post by ZeroGravitas »

dahauns wrote: post #25
paulryanrogers wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Facts don't matter, this is one of those QAnon things were people collectively fan-fiction an apocalyptic battle for them to be on the right side of based on nothing more than a vague dislike of women and minorities.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#39

Post by jancsika »

jedisct1 wrote: post #30
sergiotapia wrote: post #20

See 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.

Hm... is Ladybird more feature complete than Servo at this point?

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#40

Post by fulafel »

ilaksh wrote: post #23

Somehow 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.

WebRender and Stylo come from Servo and have been integrated as Quantum Render and Quantum CSS. An maybe some other things as well?
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