Layout 2013 and Layout 2020
servo.org
Layout 2013 and Layout 2020
1–10 of 114 posts
Re: Layout 2013 and Layout 2020
#2I’m amazed that Servo is actually a thing.
Firefox abandoned it years ago, and now Flow and Ladybird are from-scratch new, efficient browsers.
Re: Layout 2013 and Layout 2020
#3TIL servo was still actively developed. I thought it was dead after Mozilla stopped developing it.
Re: Layout 2013 and Layout 2020
#4I’m not sure I understand the context.
They began a replacement engine 7 years later to address shortcomings, and 3 years after that still aren’t sure if it’s actually better and worth switching over to?
Now that I write this, I kind of get it. But I’ve only experienced this for weeks worth of work, not for years.
Re: Layout 2013 and Layout 2020
#5None of this would be so difficult if the CSS specifications were well defined.
But they’re not, so we all have to more or less guess what the intrinsic algorithms for drawing fundamental aspects of the web are supposed to be.
Such a failure of the CSS specs.
Re: Layout 2013 and Layout 2020
#6TIL servo was still actively developed. I thought it was dead after Mozilla stopped developing it.
It was, until a few months ago.
Re: Layout 2013 and Layout 2020
#7Servo is now under the Linux Foundation umbrella. It's refreshing to finally see some more players in the browser engine space than the tri-opoly of Google (Blink), Apple (WebKit) and Gecko (Mozilla). LibWeb (Ladybird Browser) is another browser engine, but also in very early days of development.
Gecko is depressingly tied to Firefox and not easily embedded. Blink has somehow become the de facto browser engine thanks to Electron. Even Qt (QtWebEngine) is now based on Blink instead of WebKit. A lot of web apps like Teams only support Blink/Chromium, just like the dark old days of Internet Explorer. Chrome and Edge are basically spyware which people are most drawn to because of being somewhat default and/or well known for their phone/PC.
Re: Layout 2013 and Layout 2020
#8None of this would be so difficult if the CSS specifications were well defined. But they’re not, so we all have to more or less guess what the intrinsic algorithms for drawing fundamental aspects of the web are supposed to be. Such a failure of the CSS specs.
Dumb question: if CSS is under-specified and everyone designs their sites for Chrome, could we analyze Chromium's CSS rendering code and use that to create a more well-defined CSS spec which other browsers can implement?
Re: Layout 2013 and Layout 2020
#9I’m not sure I understand the context. They began a replacement engine 7 years later to address shortcomings, and 3 years after that still aren’t sure if it’s actually better and worth switching over to? Now that I write this, I kind of get it. But I’ve only experienced this for weeks worth of work, not for years.
I heard that Firefox incorporated some parts of Servo years ago as part of the Quantum project. However my knowledge is limited to those buzzwords and I don’t have any real sense of how big a portion of the work that went into Servo got used.
Re: Layout 2013 and Layout 2020
#10I’m not sure I understand the context. They began a replacement engine 7 years later to address shortcomings, and 3 years after that still aren’t sure if it’s actually better and worth switching over to? Now that I write this, I kind of get it. But I’ve only experienced this for weeks worth of work, not for years.
Mozilla abandoned work on Servo in 2020 (source: https://tildes.net/~tech/ra8/i_am_a_mozilla_employee_amaa) shortly after Layout 2020 came about. Servo was in limbo for some time before recently being handed over to the Linux Foundation, hence the time delay.