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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.
If you're going by binary size then Servo is already as big as other browsers. 106 MB excluding dependencies, or 274 MB including dependencies.
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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.
I believe Ladybird is being ported to Rust as we speak.
Huh they gave up on that apparently.
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I don't see how it is irresponsible or ridiculous. More browser engines is a good thing. It might be irresponsible to bet your company on it at this point, but on its own I think it is a worthy endeavor. Plus it looks like a lot of fun to work on! This is hacker news after all.
Ridiculous because it's absolutely guaranteed to fail. Irresponsible because if it does succeed against all odds, the internet will actually become a worse place. If you can't implement most of the web standards (not even all, just most of them), then one of the following will happen: - your engine will never catch on (best case scenario) - your engine will be forever known as "this browser where nothing works" and w…
If violence doesn't solve your problems, you use not enough violence.
Also if you don't implement web standards, it's doesn't mean that nothing works. Adblock and noscript break web standards, but people use them just fine, they actually make web work better.
>A massive project like that will have massive code complexity, which leads to enormous number of security holes.
Presumably much of that is in network protocols like heartbleed, which has little to do with something like html parsing or google fonts. Also this is in fact a reason for a new browser engine: Chrome and Firefox lost security, because no matter how much they fix, they still have holes.
>If you don't use Rust, then security would be so bad it's not even funny.
Proofs?
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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.
https://github.com/servo/servo/releases/tag/0.4.0
Prior releases included a preceding 'v' in the version but not this one for some reason.
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> 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.
Can't you run servo apps in the browser? There's no compat in the reverse direction only.
Wonder how long it will take before they can render PDFjs? That is a hard target admittedly.
There are more important things to work on like that overengineered bloatware regex.
I don't know what that would mean in this context. Did you mean the js stdlib regex implementation? Any help?