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Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

blog.servo.org

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Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#111

Post by aanm1988 »

hacker_9 wrote: post #84
kibwen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Improving HTML + CSS performance is absolutely one of the goals of Servo. Here's a video from pcwalton demonstrating reflow (HTML), repainting, and CSS animations on the GPU in Servo: https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/#... (much of this code is being uplifted to Firefox as WebRender). It's true that Servo won't have any effect on Javascript performance, but WASM won't have any effect on HTML…

I understand that, but the idea that HTML + CSS can only be sped up by some hugely parallel structure requiring a whole new programming language and browser engine is really quite shocking. I think once webassembly is established and in use, we will start to see steps in the direction of replacing HTML + CSS altogether, with something that has performance in mind.

It's building an engine from scratch as opposed to using legacy code and design decisions.

Why wouldn't you expect that to be faster?

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#112

Post by UtherII »

13years wrote: post #99
hacker_9 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that, but the idea that HTML + CSS can only be sped up by some hugely parallel structure requiring a whole new programming language and browser engine is really quite shocking. I think once webassembly is established and in use, we will start to see steps in the direction of replacing HTML + CSS altogether, with something that has performance in mind.

If you listen to talks about the design architecture of Servo you will understand the HTML CSS is not the problem. It actually is an advantage when you want to build an engine that works like a high performance game engine.

I'm not so sure. I remember a presentation of Webrender with nice demos : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erfnCaeLxSI&spfreload=10

Everything was perfecty smooth, but according to pcwalton the bottleneck was CSS handling.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#113

Post by tn135 »

digitalshankar wrote: post #9
tn135 wrote: post #3

This project has moved real slowly but keep remembering how often Eich referred to this as the most important aspect of Mozilla.

Talking is easy, Coding is Hard. Servo is still the most important aspect of Mozilla in terms of Security and Speed, I really think after the full development it will definitely beat the Google Chrome.

Silver bullets often fail in the world technology. Especially when Chrome has taken up such a huge market share. There might not be any Mozilla if they don't ship it fast enough.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#114

Post by EugeneOZ »

kibwen wrote: post #101
EugeneOZ wrote: post #49

Add self-update feature please.

Self-updates are great for browsers that people are using every day, but please, please don't use Servo as your everyday browser just yet. :)

I'm not going to use it every day, it would be just much more handy - opened it, clicked "update" or "yes" in "new release is here, do you want to update?" window, and it's done. Now you need to visit download page and download/install it every time.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#115

Post by Eridrus »

krzat wrote: post #29
buster wrote: post #4

After seeing a youtube demo[[1] of how the aggressive parallelisation that is done in Servo (safely possible by using Rust) speeds up this browser, i'm really excited for Servo! Also, i think this will give us a great base for all kinds of browser embedding what is not based on ancient webkit-gtk. There is another nice presentation on Rust and Servo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q9vIMXSTzc [1]: https://youtu.be/U…

I'm hoping for Servo-based alternative to Electron. If it could deliver some performance/memory improvements it would be good advertisement for the project, and also for Rust. Not sure if that's realistic, Servo app ran on macOS takes about 200MB of RAM usage.

Servo isn't going to use any less CPU than other rendering engines, it will just be able to increase user-visible performance significantly by reducing latency by making better use of multiple cores.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#116

Post by mundanevoice »

Ygg2 wrote: post #42
mundanevoice wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha. As if there is no development going on in V8. Rewriting anything doesn't mean it will beat it's competitors.

First of, isn't V8 the JavaScript engine of Chrome? That's a bit apples to oranges comparison, no? One thing Servo didn't touch is JS Virtual machine, it's still SpiderMonkey. Rewriting that AND the layout engine would be suicidal.

Sorry! I meant Blink.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#117

Post by mundanevoice »

Sylos wrote: post #78
mundanevoice wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha. As if there is no development going on in V8. Rewriting anything doesn't mean it will beat it's competitors.

No, rewriting alone doesn't make software great. But you have to realize that all modern browser engines started out before 2000. They were not built with multi-core processors in mind, nor with GPUs, as the web was still mostly text. And it does require rewriting a lot of things to change that architecture out. Google won't be able to compete with that in the long run just by continuously updating their browser engi…

Rewriting anything in a new language is a very time consuming and expensive process. To maintain feature parity with the latest and keeping up with bugs introduced could be very difficult. Google has much more juice to pull something like this off with lots of money. I doubt Mozilla could actually compete in the long run without generating lots of money like Google does.
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