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.
Why do we need another browser engine written in C++?
[deleted]
Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
61–70 of 93 posts
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#62I'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…
> 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
I was really disappointed to see Mozilla drop Servo and I think it was the wrong decision for them to make, but seeing this take mere hours after seeing people in a thread about Android Firefox bashing Mozilla for prioritizing a rewrite of their mobile browser is certainly some whiplash.
And to a certain extent, I get it, I also think Servo was a more valuable project than Fenec. But let's not pretend that there's an obvious correct answer to "should Mozilla rewrite its browsers from scratch?"
Again, I say this as someone who wanted Mozilla to stick with Servo. It was a bad decision for them to drop it, I think there was a lot more value that could have been extracted from the project. But if Mozilla had stuck with Servo, I guarantee there would be people on HN right now saying, "why are they rewriting their browser engine, the current one works fine, why aren't they doing X? Shows a lot about their priorities. This is the problem with Mozilla, they're too focused on theory and engineering projects instead of just shipping a good browser." There's no winning.
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#63It's cool to see the work on Servo since Igalia picked it up. There was a lot of tech debt to work through due to years of minimal maintenance, but they seem to have been making real progress. My personal hope is they push hard on the modularity angle. Seems to me that: 1) there's probably a niche to be filled by an OSS browser engine focussed on embedability and 2) That it could be a huge boon for the long-term heal…
An embedded engine is also a much faster path to viable use cases. For example Sciter [1] has some degree of success despite implementing only a sane subset of the DOM API. It doesn't work well for general internet surfing, but when used as an UI library you just avoid the parts that don't work.
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#64That is great news for Servo! NLNet Foundation has been funding a lot of great projects lately. I see their name pop up a lot.
Yes, my project https://www.oilshell.org/ has been funded by NLnet since 2022, and it's helped a lot. I needed some help to push through a few problems, and that happened :)
It is very forward thinking since we happen to be mostly in North America, but the funding comes from the EU.
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#65I'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…
>My guess is that if someone were to have offered Mozilla a lot of money and an unlimited timeline to complete Servo, they would have done it.
My understanding is that they tried to do that with VR (turn Servo into the first VR-capable browser and work on browser-technology-based AR overlays) and even had a partnership with Magic Leap at one point, it just never really went anywhere.
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#66Earlier 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…
>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.
They did adapt, and the HN types got mad at them for breaking the old-style extensions, which were effectively incompatible with multiple processes, sandboxing, performance, etc. And were totally incompatible with Servo at a fundamental level.
>2. There are actually markets interested in security. Think say, banking, military, industry, IOT.
Those industries are infamous for doing things like having applications that only support IE9 in Windows XP. Security may matter to them in theory but in practice it is clearly far lower on the priority list than stability and supporting one golden path. Getting them to adopt something novel and experimental for use cases they want to be thoroughly boring and unchanging for 15 years is never ever going to happen.
As someone that compiled and ran Servo and submitted a couple of patches, it had a long way to go (years of development) before it would have been production ready in its entirety.
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tauri is actually adding experimental Servo support.
Oh wow, I wasn't aware of this! So proper embedded cross-platform engine into the final binary? That'd be awesome.
Yep, embedding the Servo engine into the final binary. This work is sponsored by another (separate) NLnet grant:
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#68I'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”.
Are you talking about this? Interesting read and caused by one of the unsafe+transmute the sibling comment is talking about.
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#69See 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.
Why do we need another browser engine written in C++?
Building an browser engine from scratch is a great exercise for validating both the specifications and the web platform tests.
For example, here's some bugs raised by Andreas Kling in the HTML spec that were found while building Ladybird:
https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues?q=is%3Aissue+author%3A...
Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation
#70I'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…
Mozilla was interested in Servo. What do you mean? They extracted multiple components into Gecko including WebRender and Stylo.
Don't you know the rule? The top comment of any Mozilla-adjacent discussion needs to contains at least 70% of misinformed garbage dunking on Mozilla. /s