Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

servo.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 93 posts

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#71

Post by frankjr »

jedisct1 wrote: post #35
wredue wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean they currently have 12 unsafes and 4 transmutes (who knows how many in dependencies). I wouldn't say it's many when the code base is clocking at around 53k of Rust. Compared to languages such as C/C++/Zig, which provide no safety at all, it's still an improvement to at least know where to look when address sanitizer is screaming at you (see the bug I linked to in the sibling comment).

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#72

Post by fabrice_d »

danShumway wrote: post #62
znpy wrote: post #6

Earlier 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

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…

> I think there was a lot more value that could have been extracted from the project

What exactly? They extracted the 2 pieces that worked better than the existing gecko stack (Stylo and WebRender). I'm a big fan (and small contributor) to Servo, but it's far behind on anything else (layout, networking, security, web api support...).

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#73

Post by exxos »

jancsika wrote: post #39
jedisct1 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[dead]

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#75

Post by exxos »

frankjr wrote: post #71
jedisct1 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even memory safe. It has many "unsafe" and "transmut", and this is without the bazillion external dependencies it also depends on.

I mean they currently have 12 unsafes and 4 transmutes (who knows how many in dependencies). I wouldn't say it's many when the code base is clocking at around 53k of Rust. Compared to languages such as C/C++/Zig, which provide no safety at all, it's still an improvement to at least know where to look when address sanitizer is screaming at you (see the bug I linked to in the sibling comment).

[dead]

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#76

Post by wredue »

frankjr wrote: post #68
wredue wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. https://github.com/helix-editor/helix/pull/7227

It was recent. I just updated to Sonoma and then after recompiling everything, helix was crashing whenever I switched modes due to reading past the buffer.

Sorry I can’t be any more help on specifics than that. I am WAY beyond fiddling with my tools when they give me trouble. I just moved back to neovim.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#77

Post by whytevuhuni »

tristan957 wrote: post #52
mvelbaum wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do we need another browser engine written in C++?

Can you explain why people shouldn't pursue passion projects because they are written in a language you don't like?

Not the parent, but my own opinion is that if a C/C++ passion project becomes successful, it burdens other people with yet another source of security vulnerabilities.

This is even more so for small projects that didn't have the decades of security hardening of Firefox/Chrome behind them, and now people go to these projects assuming their security is on par with Firefox/Chrome.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#78

Post by actuallyalys »

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.

I have more optimism for Ladybird as well. For me, That’s not a knock on Servo and mostly because it was started as a research project, which suggests you’re focusing more on experimentation than producing a product.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#79

Post by danShumway »

fabrice_d wrote: post #72
danShumway wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I think there was a lot more value that could have been extracted from the project What exactly? They extracted the 2 pieces that worked better than the existing gecko stack (Stylo and WebRender). I'm a big fan (and small contributor) to Servo, but it's far behind on anything else (layout, networking, security, web api support...).

On a small level, I think that some of the areas it's behind on (security, layout) might have eventually turned out to be improvements. Stylo and WebRender were behind Firefox when they first began development as well, they were experiments to see if Rust could enable differing patterns. I personally think those experiments would have been useful to try and replicate for layout at the very least, although I don't know for sure if they would have yielded fruit.

On a bigger level, I think having a more easily embeddedable Firefox could change the dynamics around V8 and Chromium could end up being pretty important for the health of the web overall, including the health of Firefox.

There's an argument to be made here that none of that potential is gone because, hey, Servo is still being developed. But I think it could have gone faster with Mozilla's support behind it for longer, I think they would have served as an effective advertising/hype engine behind the technology. I think the dominance of Chromium for embedded applications does influence how developers approach the web in some minor ways.

On a really out-there level, I would like to see HTML-like interfaces proliferate in more apps, and Servo in particular has a very modular approach that could make it more feasible to bring in the DOM without bringing in languages like Javascript (yes, manipulation and events and all that stuff would need to be accessible without JS, but... it's certainly easier than it would be with Chromium, Stylo already makes some interesting applications possible). If I had to pick a company to push that effort that I didn't thing would horribly mess it up, Mozilla would be high on my list. And I vaguely maybe suspect that pulling more browser technologies out of the web could open up more technical fields and niches for Mozilla to get its hands into. Right now what that area mostly looks like is Electron or embedded Chromium. At most you have embedded JS engines like V8.

I'm hoping that there's some potential to do more interesting things, and I think it could have been valuable to Mozilla and it could have increased developer investment/mindshare if Mozilla was a bigger player in those areas.

But that's just my instinct, maybe I'm wrong.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#80

Post by bluejekyll »

dralley wrote: post #65
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…

>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.

Ah, yeah, I forgot about that. Seemed like a good tactic to get it onto some production use case more quickly.
Post reply on HN