Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 343 posts

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#141

Post by fngjdflmdflg »

hanniabu wrote: post #125
bee_rider wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I somewhat wonder—Firefox and Chrome are in a constant race to have the best JavaScript performance. In general, the sites I want to browse use minimal JavaScript, prudently, if at all, just where it is strictly necessary to add little dynamic features. So, I don’t really care about JavaScript performance at all. Optimization sometimes introduces additional complexity, which might open up the possibility of security…

> wonder if there’s room for a browser engine that ditches performance and just focuses on correctness and safety Isn't this just the noscript, which breaks most sites to a degree where they're impossible to use or load?

I assume he means something like turning off the JS JIT, not turning off JS completely. IIRC iOS turns off Safari's JIT when in lockdown mode. Ladybird browser also abandoned its JIT apparently due to security concerns. JS JIT is one important example but also in general if you write your code to only focus on correctness and not performance then you will get safer code (all else being equal).

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#142

Post by worik »

sesm wrote: post #91
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For everything. Swift is—at least in theory—a general purpose language, it's not exclusively for Apple technologies. > First off, Swift has both memory & data race safety (as of v6). It's also a modern language with solid ergonomics. > Something that matters to us a lot is OO. Web specs & browser internals tend to be highly object-oriented, and life is easier when you can model specs closely in your code. Swift has f…

> First off, Swift has both memory & data race safety (as of v6) But v6 is not released yet, right?

> > First off, Swift has both memory & data race safety (as of v6) > But v6 is not released yet, right

As of Swift 5 there is zero data race protection and the process model (DispatchQueues if memory serves) is woefully. No advantage over fork and much more convoluted

I am well clear of the Apple development world now (thank goodness) but the tools were of very poor quality, albeit very nice looking, as of this time last year

For the sake of my friends still in the world I hope Swift 6 is better, but I fear the dumpster fire that is Xcode is too far gone to rescue.

The comparison with Rust demonstrates the utility of "design by committee ". Rust is far from perfect, but feels like the future where Swift feels like warmed up Objective C

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#143

Post by moffkalast »

culi wrote: post #64
wongarsu wrote: post #2

According to https://servo.org/about/ Servo currently passes ~60% of the web platform tests. Does anyone have experience how far that subset gets you on the open internet?

I'm assuming that's in reference to these tests? https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=experimental&label=master&ali... For comparison, there are 1.9 million tests Chrome passes 97.14% Edge passes 96.98 Firefox passes 95.96 Safari passes 95.22 I wonder where Ladybird stands in this

Edge being a Chromium based browser and somehow scoring lower is genuinely hilarious. Congrats Microsoft, on taking something almost perfect and only slightly running it.

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#144

Post by worik »

afavour wrote: post #119
refulgentis wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right but this touches the hot stove. HN majority doesn't like hearing that ladybird et al might just be wandering around, even if the goal is catnip for the bleachers, and we should be skeptical this is the year of multiplatform Swift, because it wasn't last year if you actually tried it. Or the year before last. Or the year before that. Or the year before that year. Or the year before that one.

I’m slightly more ambivalent than you about it. Swift is a nice language and has better ergonomics than C++ and I imagine a Swift codebase might find more contributors than a C++ one (maybe I’m wrong about that!) I also think it’s separate from the dream of “multiplatform Swift”. For that you need a healthy package ecosystem that all works cross platform, Swift doesn’t have that. But a lot of Ladybird is written at a…

> and has better ergonomics than C++

It is unfair to compare a twenty first century language with one from the 1980s

Rust is the proper comparison

The only advantage Swift has is an easier learning curve , but the ergonomics of Rust are far superior than Sift's

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#145

Post by moffkalast »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #78
jsheard wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Reddit or Old Reddit?

New Reddit rendering “properly” is as useful as a chocolate fire guard. Do you want to view this content on the app? You Can Only View This Content In The App, THE APP is the WAY, JUST FUCKING DOWNLOAD THE APP!!! At least on mobile.

Me: Okay fine, I'll download RedReader.

Reddit: Wait no.

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#146

Post by dale_glass »

samstave wrote: post #82

Serious Question: With risk of being hated, this is an honest question: I've never sought out another browser than using pretty much any of the big three... Just because I have never had any sort of personal workflow/painpoint/interest in any of these other browsers/engines, that frankly I had never heard of and then another thing pops up every few years with yet another new one that I havent heard of -- but they all…

Servo is written in Rust so one big aim would be to have better security. I believe it's supposed to also be much better parallelized.

On my part, I'm very much looking forward to an embeddable browser engine. Neither Firefox nor Chrome are interested, and QtWebEngine exists, but takes extensive patching, and so depends on the Qt project remaining to exist and keeping up with upstream.

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#148

Post by ninkendo »

worik wrote: post #142
sesm wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First off, Swift has both memory & data race safety (as of v6) But v6 is not released yet, right?

> > First off, Swift has both memory & data race safety (as of v6) > But v6 is not released yet, right As of Swift 5 there is zero data race protection and the process model (DispatchQueues if memory serves) is woefully. No advantage over fork and much more convoluted I am well clear of the Apple development world now (thank goodness) but the tools were of very poor quality, albeit very nice looking, as of this time…

> As of Swift 5 there is zero data race protection and the process model (DispatchQueues if memory serves) is woefully. No advantage over fork and much more convoluted

Swift Concurrency is the replacement for Dispatch and has been around since Swift 5.5 in (IIRC) 2021. It’s a completely different system, uses lightweight tasks (a la tokio in rust, or goroutines in go, etc), has a concept of “Sendable” for thread-safety a la rust’s Send, async/await, and a native `actor` type, among other things.

Swift 5.5 didn’t get all the way towards rust-style data race safety due to a few things they had to make warnings instead of errors (to avoid breaking existing code), and introducing keywords like `@preconcurrency` when importing frameworks that predate Swift Concurrency, to facilitate incremental adoption. They’ve also been adding more checks in each minor release to tighten things up.

IIUC Swift 6 is mainly going to turn all the warnings into proper errors and tweak some defaults so that you get proper data race protection on a default compile.

Point is, it’s totally inaccurate to say that Dispatch Queues is all that exists in Swift 5. You’ve had much better stuff for a while now (although SC still has a ton of issues worth discussing.)

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#149

Post by RandomThoughts3 »

littlestymaar wrote: post #132
culi wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh thanks. Seems like Servo is way ahead of LadyBird

Which isn't that surprising given it has been underway for much longer, and as built with people with actual browser engine experience. Ladybird isn't that bad in comparison.

libweb was started in 2019. Anyway, I’m really sour that 90% of the discussion on a thread about the incredible project that is Servo are wasted on Ladybird.

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#150

Post by pndy »

hypeatei wrote: post #22
conkeisterdoor wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most likely Arc ( https://arc.net/ )

Arc is based on Chromium for anyone wondering. I believe part of the UI is written in Swift but the engine isn't.

Can user enhance it with extensions?
Post reply on HN