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I tried Servo

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Re: I tried Servo

#181

Post by nicce »

drdaeman wrote: post #164
danelski wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But independent browsers need this metric. Good luck convincing website owners to test against your non-chromium browser with 0.3% market share.

I'm not tracking what's currently going on with the underwater portion of frontend iceberg. Are things still like it was in late '00s and early '10s, where browsers still had plenty of their unique implementation quirks and non-standard features, and plenty of sites were relying on those? Back in the day, it was not entirely unheard of having two significantly different frontend implementations - one for IE, another…

It is not about what is supported now, but what will be supported in the future? Google is pushing most of the web standards and has a huge influence. Other, less used browsers must support them if they want to have any chance.

You should ask that how many of the standard features are brought by someone else without huge influence of Google. If you cannot get anything new, when it is enough that Google says "no", then in reality there is only one browser.

Re: I tried Servo

#182

Post by Certhas »

lesuorac wrote: post #79
Certhas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Mozilla makes a lot of sense if you consider the following long term strategic goal: Become independent of Google money. None Google income has grown to 150M$ in 2023, up from 80M$ the year before. Mozilla has used dramatically more of the Google money to build up assets than it spends on advocacy or other projects that irl some people so. In 2023 they had 1B$ in investments. Net assets have been going up by…

At what point could FireFox had just invested the money from Google into the SP500 and then just ran the company off of passive income? Like for 150M$ I bet you could fund browser development for at least a decade and that was just 1 year of income. (of course also burn the entire $150M).

Not sure that's a realistic assessment of the cost of developing a browser. Mozilla gives Software Development exp names as by far the single largest expense at 260M$ in 2023. According to DuckAI 700 out of 750 Mozilla Co employees work on Firefox.

I am sympathetic to the idea that a global remote team, that doesn't pay Silicon Valley salaries could get this done cheaper, and thus would be a better candidate for such an Invest and live on interests approach but 15M$ budget seems infeasible.

Reading directly from the 2023 financial report: Revenues were 653M, Software Dev was 260M and change in net assets was 142M, so 402/653 is spent on the core activities you favour (and that is ignoring that you do need a legal and HR department, and some management, and some marketing if you don't want Firefox market share to fall further).

Re: I tried Servo

#183

Post by Certhas »

skinkestek wrote: post #73
Certhas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Mozilla makes a lot of sense if you consider the following long term strategic goal: Become independent of Google money. None Google income has grown to 150M$ in 2023, up from 80M$ the year before. Mozilla has used dramatically more of the Google money to build up assets than it spends on advocacy or other projects that irl some people so. In 2023 they had 1B$ in investments. Net assets have been going up by…

The majority of Mozilla’s revenue came through Firefox—their flagship product and by far their most recognized project. And yet, somehow, they still struggle to secure adequate funding for Firefox itself , while millions are allocated to executive salaries and various advocacy initiatives.

What do you even mean? They have adequate funding. Financially they are doing extremely well.

Re: I tried Servo

#184

Post by dingi »

nicoburns wrote: post #118
goku12 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (Taffy [0]) that can be used standalone and is widely used accross the Rust UI ecosystem, including in the Blitz [1] web engine (which also uses Taffy for Flexbox and Block layout) This is the first time I hear about Blitz. Looks equally interesting and ambitious. It is probably the real undercover web engine. Servo was widely known around when Rust debuted.

> this is the first time I hear about Blitz. Looks equally interesting and ambitious. It is probably the real undercover web engine It's certainly a newer and lesser-known engine. It's mostly been me working on it for the past year or so (with a couple of other occasional contributors). But I do have funding to work on it full time through DioxusLabs (who are building Dioxus Native - a Flutter / React Native competit…

Just skimmed through the Blitz source. Really interesting. I don’t have experience with UI rendering or Rust, but I couldn’t help wondering: if you leave out things like local storage and websockets, why include networking at all? Feels like a separate concern. Genuinely curious. Great project. Wishing you all the best!

Re: I tried Servo

#185

Post by goku12 »

godshatter wrote: post #88
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #65

I feel like Mozilla is going to join the annals of history with the likes of Xerox in the category of "Companies that created the technology of the future and casually tossed it to the wayside for competitors to scoop up" with Rust and Servo. It's mind-boggling that for a company so often seemingly playing catch-up with Google, Mozilla actually leapfrogged Google in the browser development space for a time, and then.…

If Mozilla decides to dump Gecko, then it's time for a hard fork and an abandonment of Mozilla. Maybe it's time now. edit: I mean dumping Gecko for Chromium, not Servo.

Honestly, dumping gecko would be a suicide for Firefox. Much of Firefox's minuscule userbase consists of knowledgeable nerds who are holdouts from the Blink monoculture.

Re: I tried Servo

#186

Post by jazzypants »

criticalfault wrote: post #112
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #65

I feel like Mozilla is going to join the annals of history with the likes of Xerox in the category of "Companies that created the technology of the future and casually tossed it to the wayside for competitors to scoop up" with Rust and Servo. It's mind-boggling that for a company so often seemingly playing catch-up with Google, Mozilla actually leapfrogged Google in the browser development space for a time, and then.…

This is only fair. Mozilla doesn't deserve to survive. New players deserve our support, like servo and ladybird. Even with an enormous budget from Google (500M, I think per year) they managed to ruin everything, including Firefox, the thing bringing them those 500M. To me it looks as if Baker is an undercover person put there to sabotage Mozilla. Tldr: funded by Google, made absolutely everything in her power to run…

I'm not sure about that. Baker was one of the first Netscape employees, she literally helped found the Mozilla foundation, and she served as the first president of it.

I'm not saying she has done a good job, but a lot of the early Netscape people like Brendan Eich have done nothing but sing her praises.

Re: I tried Servo

#187

Post by AceJohnny2 »

rollcat wrote: post #140
calibas wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's mind-boggling that for a company so often seemingly playing catch-up with Google, Mozilla actually leapfrogged Google in the browser development space for a time, and then...decided it wasn't worth pursuing any further. Google has been Mozilla's main source of revenue since around 2006. For Mozilla to exist, all they have to do is keep Google happy. It's kind of a nice deal for Mozilla, despite being a huge co…

And it's an even better deal for Google. "But look, Chrome is not a monopoly." If I was Google, I'd do something to set Mozilla back on that track. But oh well, Google these days is even more dysfunctional. They're about to lose search.

Remember that time Microsoft bankrolled a floundering Apple to able to "But look, Windows is not a monopoly"

https://thisdayintechhistory.com/08/06/apple-and-microsoft-c...

Re: I tried Servo

#188

Post by YmiYugy »

xdfgh1112 wrote: post #60
YmiYugy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don't get the point of ladybird. They have full time engineers and are soliciting donations, so it's clearly more than a hobby project. Maybe my assumptions are off, but I just can't imagine they could ever become competitive in terms of features, security and performance with the big engines. Blink is setting the pace, Webkit is barely able to keep up and Gecko is slowly falling behind. All of these teams are…

It is donation funded with no reliance on outside parties. They don't have to inject ads into pages like brave did or sell out to Google compromising their independence on web standards. They're ahead of Servo already anyway, and better funded.

In the last 24h alone Chromium merged almost 900 CLs (their equivalent to a pull request) into the src/Chromium repo, Ladybird had 7. Yes a project that started fresh a couple of year ago with decades of hindsight can be more efficient than one started 16 year ago as the fork of a fork, but if I had to guess they'll sooner or later reach a point where they have implemented the low hanging fruit and chromium moves faster away than they can catch up.

Re: I tried Servo

#189

Post by gr__or »

nicoburns wrote: post #15

> The current roadmap lists Shadow DOM and CSS Grid as priorities I've been working on the CSS Grid support. About to land "named grid lines and areas" support which should make a bunch more websites layout correctly. I'm biased because it's my project, but IMO the approach Servo is using for CSS Grid is pretty cool in that the actual implementation is in an external library (Taffy [0]) that can be used standalone an…

That's so fun to hear, I've been using taffy for layouting my little rusty eink calendar

Re: I tried Servo

#190

Post by Buttons840 »

jm4 wrote: post #145
Buttons840 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Rust] was basically the one to beat until they figured out it wasn't going to work. I'd love to know more about this.

Found it! It was on a podcast: https://changelog.com/podcast/604 Here are some key quotes: "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." "So what I’ve done is I’ve asked a bunch of people to “Please implement these things in a couple of different languages. And then we can talk about how th…

I appreciate the details.

Ultimately I'm not dissuaded from my original impression.

I worked at a company doing web scraping, and our code sucked and we knew it, and the lead programmer kind of liked Elixir, and we were always going to rewrite in Elixir one day, and he would mention it in interviews and stuff, and put it on job requirements, but really there was almost no Elixir in the company. We came up with all sorts of reasons Elixir would make sense technically, I even offered some myself because I got positive social feedback when I spoke well of Elixir. But now that I'm out of the company, I can see that Elixir is not uniquely suited to solve the problems we had. It was just one guy liked Elixir and so ultimately we all did.

I still predict the same for LadyBird. You can even see in the Tweet I linked that they choose C++ because of one person, so I'm guessing that one person also likes Swift. Time will tell.

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