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Servo’s new home

blog.servo.org

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Re: Servo’s new home

#12

Post by newscracker »

I haven’t been following Servo closely for the last few years (I’d looked at it during its early days). I recall that parts of it were already integrated into Firefox, but could someone state what percentage of the Firefox engine is based out of Servo and what the roadmap is for bringing Servo to a stage where it could almost replace Gecko? Does this new home for Servo (and detachment from Mozilla) still mean that Firefox would continue to aim to use it?

Tangentially, what’s the headless browser space with Firefox at the core looking like? When would it be able to provide something like Electron (possibly without being such a RAM hungry piece of software)?

Re: Servo’s new home

#13

Post by the_other »

On the face of it, this sounds great! I hope it leads to bold new things.

It also produces an interesting coherence:

Google + MS -> Blink

Apple -> Webkit

Linux -> Servo

All the main OSs now have their own web rendering engine.

The 00s saw anti-trust against MS for this practice (ok, for the rigid way MS forced their engine onto their users)... but today the market has coalesced around the same core idea, cementing the notion that general purpose OSs need a web rendering engine.

Might this pave the way for a better cross-platform UI development? Rather than shipping Electron to every device for every app, apps might leverage the web renderer tied to the OS?

I'm just wondering out loud. I was actually hoping we'd collectively move back towards native apps with better cross-platform tools, rather than integrating web apps deeper into OSs (even tho' I'm a web developer by trade and stand to gain from this).

Re: Servo’s new home

#15

Post by bartvk »

LockAndLol wrote: post #6
emteycz wrote: post #4

Awesome news! The world needs another prominent browser engine that browser vendors would want to use, and detaching Servo from Mozilla makes it better positioned for that task IMHO. I'm also very happy that work on Webrender continues. I love what you're doing guys!

Should we start calling it Servo by Linux now?

What's the connection to Linux?

Re: Servo’s new home

#16

Post by edoceo »

Awesome! I've been tire kicking their nightlys. I was thinking about building a "browser" but really mean just wrapping an engine. With the shakeup at M I was nervous that Servo would die, it's got a lot of promise. This is great news. Now, thoughts on a UI framework for Rust?

Re: Servo’s new home

#17

Post by dathinab »

devit wrote: post #10

How about making a browser in addition to a "rendering engine for embedding in other applications", in the form of a standalone program and/or a Firefox (desktop and mobile) fork that can use Servo as well as Gecko? You could also go for the more ambitious plan of creating a brand that can take over Mozilla as a "trusted browser maker", which seems feasible given the falling reputation of Mozilla and the technical se…

You first need a regarding engine to write a browser just doing a embedded html rendering engine is a lot of work so it's a good idea to start with a more viable/reachable goal and then if viable expand to a bigger goal.

Re: Servo’s new home

#18

Post by exikyut »

Wow, this is awesome.

- Mozilla engineering finally gets the green light to beat Chrome through a from-scratch rendering stack

- This skunkworks initative popularizes the world's first viable C++ contender and interesting "mainstreamable" programming language

- Manglement suddenly lays off the teams responsible for both projects (Rust and Servo)

- Some awesome person from the trenches convinces said manglement to release governance of the rendering engine so it can be developed independently ((of said manglement))...

- ???

- Profit...?

This is real engineering and strategic problem solving. It's inspiring to see.

What is very annoying is that a Mozilla-branded web browser already took the "Phoenix" product name. :(

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