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Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

servo.org

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Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#11

Post by bluejekyll »

dale_glass wrote: post #3

I'm very excited about Servo. Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it. Not only the idea of an engine with great security and performance is an excellent one, but I also love the idea of a web engine as a component. This for some reason seems to have disappeared in modern times. IE used to have an ActiveX control back in the Windows 9x days. You could embed a web engine anywhere you wanted. KHTML also worked li…

> 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 projected morals).

Based on what I’ve read from their blog posts, Mozilla then took what they could from Servo and incorporated it into Firefox, which means they were able to get some value from the 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.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#12

Post by rvz »

dale_glass wrote: post #3

I'm very excited about Servo. Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it. Not only the idea of an engine with great security and performance is an excellent one, but I also love the idea of a web engine as a component. This for some reason seems to have disappeared in modern times. IE used to have an ActiveX control back in the Windows 9x days. You could embed a web engine anywhere you wanted. KHTML also worked li…

> Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it.

It is because it doesn't make money. An expensive research project (Servo) that was not worth the effort for Mozilla.

Mozilla needs to find better ways of making money and not depending on Googles' money.

Now thanks to the US v Google anti-trust trial, Mozilla doesn't know if they should support Google for keeping them alive for their hundreds of millions of dollars or being going against them for Google to be broken up for more competition.

Either way Google's search AND browser monopoly is held together by paying its competitors such as Apple (for Safari) and Mozilla (for Firefox).

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#13

Post by tentacleuno »

rvz wrote: post #12
dale_glass wrote: post #3

I'm very excited about Servo. Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it. Not only the idea of an engine with great security and performance is an excellent one, but I also love the idea of a web engine as a component. This for some reason seems to have disappeared in modern times. IE used to have an ActiveX control back in the Windows 9x days. You could embed a web engine anywhere you wanted. KHTML also worked li…

> Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it. It is because it doesn't make money. An expensive research project (Servo) that was not worth the effort for Mozilla. Mozilla needs to find better ways of making money and not depending on Googles' money. Now thanks to the US v Google anti-trust trial, Mozilla doesn't know if they should support Google for keeping them alive for their hundreds of millions of dollars or…

> Now thanks to the US v Google anti-trust trial, Mozilla doesn't know if they should support Google for keeping them alive for their hundreds of millions of dollars or being going against them for Google to be broken up for more competition.

Why would they not publicly support Google when Google are the ones keeping Mozilla alive? I'm all for journalistic integrity, but I don't think Mozilla could pull that one off.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#14

Post by capableweb »

nicoburns wrote: post #2

It's cool to see the work on Servo since Igalia picked it up. There was a lot of tech debt to work through due to years of minimal maintenance, but they seem to have been making real progress. My personal hope is they push hard on the modularity angle. Seems to me that: 1) there's probably a niche to be filled by an OSS browser engine focussed on embedability and 2) That it could be a huge boon for the long-term heal…

> 1) there's probably a niche to be filled by an OSS browser engine focussed on embedability

Absolutely. Electron or something Electron-like with Servo embedded could be a nice outcome. Tauri already fills that niche a bit, but uses whatever the OS provides, rather than embedding anything. Would be nice with something in-between that.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#15

Post by div72 »

mrd3v0 wrote: post #10
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

They fired everyone working on it and completely abandoned it while giving the CEO a million dollar pay raise the same year. When are we going to talk about how openly corrupt Mozilla has become? They clearly have issues at the top that need to be fixed for the betterment of web.

> When are we going to talk about how openly corrupt Mozilla has become?

It's routinely discussed on HN, whenever a topic about Mozilla/browsers comes up. The real question in my opinion is what can we do about it? Start an awareness campaign? Stop using Firefox? Stop donating to Mozilla?

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#16

Post by 101008 »

dale_glass wrote: post #3

I'm very excited about Servo. Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it. Not only the idea of an engine with great security and performance is an excellent one, but I also love the idea of a web engine as a component. This for some reason seems to have disappeared in modern times. IE used to have an ActiveX control back in the Windows 9x days. You could embed a web engine anywhere you wanted. KHTML also worked li…

Oh, that ACtiveX comment brought so many memories! I remember that when the desktop background failed, an ActiveX error page was shown (on the desktop) with clickable links. That was so consufing...

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#17

Post by dale_glass »

rvz wrote: post #12
dale_glass wrote: post #3

I'm very excited about Servo. Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it. Not only the idea of an engine with great security and performance is an excellent one, but I also love the idea of a web engine as a component. This for some reason seems to have disappeared in modern times. IE used to have an ActiveX control back in the Windows 9x days. You could embed a web engine anywhere you wanted. KHTML also worked li…

> Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it. It is because it doesn't make money. An expensive research project (Servo) that was not worth the effort for Mozilla. Mozilla needs to find better ways of making money and not depending on Googles' money. Now thanks to the US v Google anti-trust trial, Mozilla doesn't know if they should support Google for keeping them alive for their hundreds of millions of dollars or…

That sounds like an amazing failure of imagination to me. I see at least 3 excellent angles.

1. Chrome beat Firefox in the stability/security area. Its usage of multiple processes, sandboxing, etc is excellent, while Firefox failed to adapt. Servo seems to have an excellent potential for coming up on top there, being both more secure, and having higher performance.

2. There are actually markets interested in security. Think say, banking, military, industry, IOT. There are various laws coming requiring companies to take security seriously. Servo has a lot of potential there too. There's potential for both projects that have security as a selling point, and regulatory compliance.

3. Embedding. Like I said, using a web engine as a component seems to have been forgotten in modern times. Surely that can be sold to somebody, because there are plenty use cases for embedding web engines in stuff.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#18

Post by jeltz »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #9
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

Or they (Firefox folks) learned what happens when you (Netscape) try a major greenfield rewrite (Netscape v5) so ambitious that it becomes the example of why one should never rewrite. And instead just back ported the lessons learned to make Firefox/Gecko better years earlier than a rewrite could.

That they got a ton of valuable code and lessons which improved Firefox a lot? Seems like the investment into Servo paid off really well.

Re: Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

#19

Post by the_duke »

capableweb wrote: post #14
nicoburns wrote: post #2

It's cool to see the work on Servo since Igalia picked it up. There was a lot of tech debt to work through due to years of minimal maintenance, but they seem to have been making real progress. My personal hope is they push hard on the modularity angle. Seems to me that: 1) there's probably a niche to be filled by an OSS browser engine focussed on embedability and 2) That it could be a huge boon for the long-term heal…

> 1) there's probably a niche to be filled by an OSS browser engine focussed on embedability Absolutely. Electron or something Electron-like with Servo embedded could be a nice outcome. Tauri already fills that niche a bit, but uses whatever the OS provides, rather than embedding anything. Would be nice with something in-between that.

Tauri is actually adding experimental Servo support.
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