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Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

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Re: Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

#131

Post by KronisLV »

jojobas wrote: post #119
KronisLV wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Your notion that browser-based apps are somehow bug-free is absurd. My notion is that more people are familiar with using the web stack, than any other alternative. Out of curiosity, I perused some local job boards: out of about 50 technical role ads that I looked through, 4 were embedded or desktop development, there were some DevOps and ML related roles in the middle, but the majority were web development. If tha…

This is an equivalent of "our town job board has mostly carpenter jobs and few metalworking one, so then we started building cars out of wood". Yes it might be cheaper and easier to make a car out of wood but it will drive like crap. Using tools not made for the job yields crappy results, who would have known.

> Using tools not made for the job yields crappy results, who would have known.

Depends on what the goals are. If they are to take people from the job market that currently exists (lots of webdevs) and build software that is good enough and ship it to earn $$$, then clearly they've succeeded, no matter how much people complain about the inefficiencies or how suboptimal the tools might be considered.

Re: Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

#132

Post by yoavm »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #73
yoavm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because without the Mozilla Foundation the Firefox market share would raise?

I mean even staying stagnant would be an improvement over the current management that seems more focused on selling VPN scams and other farces.

Not sure what's a scam about Mozilla's VPN offering? AFAIK it's powered by Mullvad, one of the VPN providers with the best reputation when it comes to privacy.

Re: Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

#133

Post by jraph »

niutech wrote: post #120
jraph wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, but it seems to be a PITA. They endure whatever changes happen on Firefox UI, which are well tested on Firefox, but not on Thunderbird and Thunderbird has much more UI to manage than Firefox. See this interesting Thunderbird talk at FOSDEM on visual change that mentions this issue [1]. You also kinda have to fork Firefox to do this. It would be good to be able to #include and build the UI from there. XULRunner s…

> all alternative browsers that are not forks of Firefox that were based on Gecko have abandoned: they stopped being maintained, or switched to WebKit or Blink, which is a shame. Which browsers? Pale Moon, Basilisk, K-Meleon are still being developed.

They are all kind of pre-multiprocess/Rust Firefox forks. It seems Pale Moon has forked Gecko into Goanna and made it embeddable (which is neat!) and that's what K-Meleon uses too. Which I didn't know.

Is Goanna on part with web standards? Maintaining what seems basically a folk of an old Gecko must be hard.

It also kinda validates my point: using Gecko elsewhere is a PITA. You have to work hard to make it embeddable.

To answer your question, Gnome Web / Epiphany was once based to Gecko. It switched to WebKit because using Gecko was harder and harder. Konqueror optionally allowed you to use Gecko, but that stopped being possible a long time ago for the same reason. Galeon and Camino both died a long time ago.

Brave, Vivaldi & Co picked Chromium instead of Gecko. With Eich coming from Mozilla, I think Brave considered Gecko but that was deemed too hard.

Re: Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

#134

Post by ksec »

pier25 wrote: post #77
thinkingemote wrote: post #13

I would like to see Positron rebooted. Positron is to Firefox what electron is to chromium. https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/

And in that vein, a reduced version of Servo for rendering desktop/games GUIs. There's a lot of stuff in CSS and HTML nobody uses anymore like floats, blink, marquee, etc. Ultralight has a product based on that idea but I think they use WebKit. https://ultralig.ht/

Something isn't that right. It is using 1/5 to 1/10 of memory compared to Chrome while still supporting 95% of what WebKit supports.

Re: Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

#135

Post by devaiops9001 »

postalrat wrote: post #97
devaiops9001 wrote: post #23

A 100% Rust based browser engine is sorely needed.

That sounds pretty difficult unless it's also the operating system.

An operating system that isn't written in Rust can contend with browser remote code execution vulnerabilities. Having the browser implemented in Rust to mitigate most remote code execution vulnerabilities stops the problem at the root.

Re: Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

#136

Post by coffeeling »

jraph wrote: post #133
niutech wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all alternative browsers that are not forks of Firefox that were based on Gecko have abandoned: they stopped being maintained, or switched to WebKit or Blink, which is a shame. Which browsers? Pale Moon, Basilisk, K-Meleon are still being developed.

They are all kind of pre-multiprocess/Rust Firefox forks. It seems Pale Moon has forked Gecko into Goanna and made it embeddable (which is neat!) and that's what K-Meleon uses too. Which I didn't know. Is Goanna on part with web standards? Maintaining what seems basically a folk of an old Gecko must be hard. It also kinda validates my point: using Gecko elsewhere is a PITA. You have to work hard to make it embeddable…

Brave was originally based on a Gecko-based Electron-alike. I think it was called Muon?

Re: Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

#137

Post by cageface »

Raicuparta wrote: post #101
cageface wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After messing around with various cross platform desktop toolkits, including a big Electron app and some smaller Tauri apps, I've settled on Flutter. It's not perfect but the results I'm getting are so far much better than anything I was able to achieve using repurposed web tech.

How is desktop performance and startup times for you with Flutter? I tested some flutter apps like Flutter Folio and they seemed to perform poorly.

At least on the Mac my desktop Flutter app starts up quickly and performs quite well. It’s much smoother in fact than a prototype I built in SwiftUI.

Re: Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

#138

Post by niutech »

coffeeling wrote: post #136
jraph wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are all kind of pre-multiprocess/Rust Firefox forks. It seems Pale Moon has forked Gecko into Goanna and made it embeddable (which is neat!) and that's what K-Meleon uses too. Which I didn't know. Is Goanna on part with web standards? Maintaining what seems basically a folk of an old Gecko must be hard. It also kinda validates my point: using Gecko elsewhere is a PITA. You have to work hard to make it embeddable…

Brave was originally based on a Gecko-based Electron-alike. I think it was called Muon?

No, it was based on Blink: https://github.com/brave/muon

Re: Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

#139

Post by Raicuparta »

cageface wrote: post #137
Raicuparta wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is desktop performance and startup times for you with Flutter? I tested some flutter apps like Flutter Folio and they seemed to perform poorly.

At least on the Mac my desktop Flutter app starts up quickly and performs quite well. It’s much smoother in fact than a prototype I built in SwiftUI.

Interesting, thanks for the answer. I wonder if it's just way worse on Windows for some reason.

Re: Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

#140

Post by BrendanEich »

niutech wrote: post #138
coffeeling wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave was originally based on a Gecko-based Electron-alike. I think it was called Muon?

No, it was based on Blink: https://github.com/brave/muon

Muon was our Electron fork (μ− is heavy e-), but Brave started on Gecko:

https://brianbondy.com/blog/174/the-road-to-brave-10

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