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We've been cagey about this over the months since the Servo team at Mozilla was disbanded, since there were various moving pieces that needed to fall into place. We're excited about the possibility for Servo to continue growing and evolving in its new home, though!
I looked for a list of projects currently embedding Servo, or planning to, but didn't find one. Is any software embedding it now?
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Has anyone tried Cobalt? It looks like something based on it could be an alternative to Electron. https://cobalt.foo/ It's meant for embedded but that probably just means it's easy to build and uses low memory. A high-performance, small-footprint platform that implements a subset of HTML5/CSS/JS to run applications, including the YouTube TV app.
Cobalt lags on modern web APIs pretty badly. I wouldn't recommend it.
To be clear I wasn't suggesting that Cobalt is a replacement for Electron. Electronic has a lot of its own APIs too.
Rather, I wonder if Cobalt could be better than Servo along some dimensions as an engine for something like Electron.
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Apple founded WebKit, so I doubt it will retire its repository. Are you asking for iOS and macOS Safari to converge, or for Apple to ship straight from the open-source HEAD?
Apple forked WebKit from KDE KHTML.
WebKit was originally based on KHTML, but Apple still founded WebKit and controls its source code. Even if WebKit was just Apple's name for their internal fork of KHTML, I don't see any reason they'd retire it.
Blink was originally spun-out of WebKit too. Similarly, Google controls Blink, and the two have diverged significantly in the intervening years. I suspect patches for any of them won't apply cleanly to the other two.
Regardless of their origins; KHTML, WebKit, and Blink are now independent pieces of software.
It's still unclear to me why anyone should expect Apple to retire WebKit for iOS.
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Electron (WebKit) is much more than a rendering engine though. Sure, you could use Servo in a desktop app, but you’d have to also bundle all the other browser components (a JS engine, for example) individually. You’re basically building a browser at that point.
Servo currently incorporates a network stack, a JS engine, the DOM, JS APIs, an HTML parser, a CSS styling engine, graphical rendering, media parsing and playback, etc. It is not a browser, since it doesn't impose requirements about how to load specific pages, interact with tabs, expose history or bookmarks, etc.
I'm happy to hear servo is going to continue to exist. Please forgive the beginner's question: my understanding is that servo is "just" an engine, which needs to be wrapped into a browser to really become usable. I've just tried (not for the first time, btw) your tech demo, which I think illustrates this perfectly. The rendering was lightning fast, but it's not a full browser. You state that your goals are "to provid…
Servo was never tightly integrated with a sizeable browser project. It shared some components with Firefox, but the only time Servo itself was inside an actual browser release was Firefox Reality for AR. Which still exists, though I'm not sure what the future of development for it will look like.
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My personal opinion is that, for a servo based browser, it's probably better to just use UWP/C++ on Windows, C/GTK on Linux, and SwiftUI on Mac, and just embed Servo via its C-API layer. Rust shine when it comes to building a safe and fast web engine. For the OS "glue" code, I would stick to whatever is best for each platform.
You missed Android. Firefox for mobile is so far behind Chrome, it’s unusable for me, most plugins don’t work. I would vote for HTML/CSS based browser (React / React Native?), though I know that a lot of operating system specific code needs to be written.
We've been cagey about this over the months since the Servo team at Mozilla was disbanded, since there were various moving pieces that needed to fall into place. We're excited about the possibility for Servo to continue growing and evolving in its new home, though!
Would it be possible to create a rendering path that just supports flexbox/grid and stuff that's not performance limiting ?
This wouldn't be great for existing websites but it would be amazing if you had a CSS "strict mode" for electron like apps and new content.
Stoked this project isn't dead and isn't tied to Mozilla, I like lsf much more.
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Except multiple parts of it had already been integrated into Firefox, providing its most recent performance gains (Webrender, Stylo).
Yes, they were developed in Servo first, then brought over when mature. I wonder if this is the end of that model, or more an effort to get external people to contribute more to Servo.