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June in Servo: real world compat, media queries, SharedWorker, and more

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Re: June in Servo: real world compat, media queries, SharedWorker, and more

#21

Post by ChrisSD »

esprehn wrote: post #20
ChrisSD wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe give them a second? Yes, it's usable for applications web views if you're willing to restrict yourself but for general purpose web browsing there's still a lot that needs doing (but work is progressing). Under Google's management, web tech has grown fast. And it's an ever shifting living standard. There is a lot for any alternative browser engine to implement, let alone keep pace with the changes.

Servo is 14 years old, it's hardly a new project. Ladybird has come much farther in a shorter amount of time. The issue has always been Mozilla not being focused.

Servo was sparsely maintained for years after Mozilla abandoned the project. Just in the last year it has picked steam as an independent project with a range of third party sponsors. Work is now progressing apace and it's becoming increasingly compatible with real-world websites.

Re: June in Servo: real world compat, media queries, SharedWorker, and more

#22

Post by akiselev »

esprehn wrote: post #20
ChrisSD wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe give them a second? Yes, it's usable for applications web views if you're willing to restrict yourself but for general purpose web browsing there's still a lot that needs doing (but work is progressing). Under Google's management, web tech has grown fast. And it's an ever shifting living standard. There is a lot for any alternative browser engine to implement, let alone keep pace with the changes.

Servo is 14 years old, it's hardly a new project. Ladybird has come much farther in a shorter amount of time. The issue has always been Mozilla not being focused.

> Ladybird has come much farther in a shorter amount of time.

That's hardly a fair assessment when large parts of Servo were mainlined into Firefox years before Ladybird even existed. Stylo, their CSS engine, landed in Firefox 57 in 2017 replacing ~160k lines of C++ with ~85k lines of Rust.

Servo wasn't originally really intended as a browser competitor. It was the flagship experimental project of the Rust language to replace parts of Firefox with memory safe implementations, which it pulled off in style. It's only recently that people have picked it back up as a browser project, years after Mozilla killed the development.

Re: June in Servo: real world compat, media queries, SharedWorker, and more

#23

Post by steveklabnik »

stackghost wrote: post #7
Xirdus wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Servo has always been a purely reasearch project with no intention to be ever used in production.

I thought the original purpose was to rEwRiTe iT iN rUsT and replace gecko in Firefox?

From the presentation announcing Rust inside of Mozilla: https://venge.net/graydon/talks/intro-talk-2.pdf

> We are not “rewriting the browser”. That's impossible. Put down the gun.

Re: June in Servo: real world compat, media queries, SharedWorker, and more

#24

Post by cyberax »

Rohansi wrote: post #19
cyberax wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until ~2015 one of the world's most deployed browser engines was Sciter. A work of _one_ person. A fast embedded browser engine, a binary about 4Mb in size. It was used to render the UI in apps like our favorite McAfee antivirus. This niche is still wide open. Electron apps are just terrible, and a focused fast embeddable browser engine would be very welcome.

> This niche is still wide open. Electron apps are just terrible, and a focused fast embeddable browser engine would be very welcome. I agree with you but throwing web standards out the window like Sciter is a non-starter. One of the benefits of Electron apps is still having the option to run it in your browser.

Yes, that's why Servo is so exciting.

It doesn't have to implement _all_ the standards, just a subset that is compatible with the full set. So that if you can develop an app within that subset and have it working in other browsers. But not necessarily vice versa.

Re: June in Servo: real world compat, media queries, SharedWorker, and more

#25

Post by nicoburns »

kingwill101 wrote: post #16
hn_submit wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Ladybird is being ported to Rust as we speak.

Nah, just individual components where memory haters

> just individual components

That kinda undersells it I think. It's really core components being ported: the JavaScript engine is already ported, with the style and layout systems underway.

Re: June in Servo: real world compat, media queries, SharedWorker, and more

#26

Post by akiselev »

rpdillon wrote: post #3
9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #2

Does anyone actually use Servo for anything?

Not really. There's a parallel thread on the front page where everybody's talking about writing a browser engine in anything other than Rust is irresponsible, and ridiculous. And yet, no one's rushing to pick up Servo. There seem to be some projects in GTK and QT to embed it, but other than a handful of pretty niche browsers, doesn't seem like there's much use.

> And yet, no one's rushing to pick up Servo.

Mozilla Firefox merged Servo's Stylo CSS engine into Firefox 57 in 2017 and their WebRender renderer into Firefox 67 in 2019. I guess you could call that a "pretty niche browser" even then but that's a stretch.

No one's rushing to pick it up because Servo was originally an experimental Rust project meant to incrementally replace parts of Firefox. Then Mozilla stopped funding its development, and only recently have people picked it back up again as an independent browser implementation.

Re: June in Servo: real world compat, media queries, SharedWorker, and more

#27

Post by nicoburns »

cyberax wrote: post #14
rpdillon wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. There's a parallel thread on the front page where everybody's talking about writing a browser engine in anything other than Rust is irresponsible, and ridiculous. And yet, no one's rushing to pick up Servo. There seem to be some projects in GTK and QT to embed it, but other than a handful of pretty niche browsers, doesn't seem like there's much use.

Up until ~2015 one of the world's most deployed browser engines was Sciter. A work of _one_ person. A fast embedded browser engine, a binary about 4Mb in size. It was used to render the UI in apps like our favorite McAfee antivirus. This niche is still wide open. Electron apps are just terrible, and a focused fast embeddable browser engine would be very welcome.

I've been building for the fast/embeddable browser engine niche:

Source: https://github.com/dioxuslabs/blitz

Status: https://blitz.is/status/css

Typical binary sizes are around 10-20mb, although you can go smaller by doing things like excluding features or compiling with `Os`/`Oz`.

There's no JavaScript yet (which can also be a benefit of course!), but people have recently started experimenting, and we may well start on this soon.

Re: June in Servo: real world compat, media queries, SharedWorker, and more

#28

Post by cyberax »

nicoburns wrote: post #27
cyberax wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until ~2015 one of the world's most deployed browser engines was Sciter. A work of _one_ person. A fast embedded browser engine, a binary about 4Mb in size. It was used to render the UI in apps like our favorite McAfee antivirus. This niche is still wide open. Electron apps are just terrible, and a focused fast embeddable browser engine would be very welcome.

I've been building for the fast/embeddable browser engine niche: Source: https://github.com/dioxuslabs/blitz Status: https://blitz.is/status/css Typical binary sizes are around 10-20mb, although you can go smaller by doing things like excluding features or compiling with `Os`/`Oz`. There's no JavaScript yet (which can also be a benefit of course!), but people have recently started experimenting, and we may well start…

This is awesome! Do you think you can host something like React Native if you add a JS engine?

Re: June in Servo: real world compat, media queries, SharedWorker, and more

#30

Post by dabinat »

esprehn wrote: post #20
ChrisSD wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe give them a second? Yes, it's usable for applications web views if you're willing to restrict yourself but for general purpose web browsing there's still a lot that needs doing (but work is progressing). Under Google's management, web tech has grown fast. And it's an ever shifting living standard. There is a lot for any alternative browser engine to implement, let alone keep pace with the changes.

Servo is 14 years old, it's hardly a new project. Ladybird has come much farther in a shorter amount of time. The issue has always been Mozilla not being focused.

Ladybird has far more funding. The original blog post said Servo brought in $7k last month. Compare that to Ladybird and the first donation on this list already exceeds Servo’s total: https://ladybird.org/newsletter/2026-06-30/
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