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Servo to Advance in 2023

servo.org

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Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#21

Post by bornfreddy »

mouse_ wrote: post #8
_zllx wrote: post #2

Excited to see the renewed interest in Servo. Another new web engine that is coming along nicely is SerenityOS LibWeb: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Userland/...

First new browser engine to pass acid3 test since the test was invented. Nice. Hopefully this will turn into something end users can benefit from. I'd love to see done to Chrome what WireGuard did to OpenVPN.

> I'd love to see done to Chrome what WireGuard did to OpenVPN.

While I share the hope, the situation is (imho) very different. OpenVPN is FOSS while Chrome is proprietary... OpenVPN is a tool which still helps many many many users while Chrome is a mixed bag - pretty good browser made by a worlds largest advertising company.

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#22

Post by DrBazza »

> The first task is to reactivate the project and the community around it

What does that mean, when there's active development of the github repository?

It's never been deactivated has it?

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#23

Post by seanw444 »

guerrilla wrote: post #10
dmix wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From their wikipedia: > Igalia is a major contributor to each of the major Web engines (Blink, Gecko/Servo and WebKit). In 2019 they were the #2 committers to both the WebKit and Chromium codebases and in the top 10 contributors to Gecko/Servo. Igalia has helped the interoperability of some features across web engines; they implemented CSS Grid Layout in WebKit and Blink. They are maintainers for several areas of the…

Not only that but they're a worker-owned cooperative. This is all very impressive. > Igalia is a private, worker-owned, employee-run cooperative model consultancy focused on open source software. Based in A Coruña, Galicia (Spain), Igalia is known for its contributions and commitments to both open-source and open standards. Igalia's primary focus is on open source solutions for a large set of hardware and software pl…

I salute these kinds of companies. Including Collabora.

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#24

Post by camgunz »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #19
orra wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was far [from] obvious it would be used to provide things piecemeal to Gecko when it was started. I don't know why you're so surprised. Creating a browser rendering engine with full feature parity is an absolutely gigantic project. Of course successful modules were merged into Gecko. > Servo, which had a great velocity at that point, would focus on VR and AR usage. Mozilla doesn't have the same financial clout a…

> Creating a browser rendering engine with full feature parity is an absolutely gigantic project. So? Gecko was a mess and they had something actually exciting on their hand which was mostly untainted by their branding. They could have bet on it rather than chose to die a slow death while their money trickles to their highly pay executive team. > Of course Mozilla wanted a way to monetise Servo. R&D is great but they…

> I generally feel little sympathy for Mozilla.

I see this take a lot in Mozilla-ish threads, and at this point it just reads to me a lot like backseat driving. I think real critiques of Mozilla take the form of companies like Vivaldi, Opera, The Browser Company, Brave, Mighty, Synth, Sidekick, etc. I'm not doing a "put up or shut up" thing; I always think people have the right to critique and discuss. I'm just saying there's a difference between substantive and non-substantive critiques, and most of the anti-Mozilla stuff I see now seems like the former.

> Gecko was a mess and they had something actually exciting on their hand which was mostly untainted by their branding.

Honestly I'm not that excited by Servo. It's geek-cool that they're able to leverage Rust and build a browser engine that maybe doesn't have memory error vulns and can better take advantage of multiple CPU cores, but I'm yawning just typing that out. By the time they're done we'll have the metaverse.

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#25

Post by cies »

bornfreddy wrote: post #21
mouse_ wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First new browser engine to pass acid3 test since the test was invented. Nice. Hopefully this will turn into something end users can benefit from. I'd love to see done to Chrome what WireGuard did to OpenVPN.

> I'd love to see done to Chrome what WireGuard did to OpenVPN. While I share the hope, the situation is (imho) very different. OpenVPN is FOSS while Chrome is proprietary... OpenVPN is a tool which still helps many many many users while Chrome is a mixed bag - pretty good browser made by a worlds largest advertising company.

Also the project scope is of a totally different order magnitude.

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#26

Post by tomstockmail »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #5

It’s shame Mozilla gimped Servo by shackling it to Gecko for political reasons and giving it utterly stupid priorities like VR. Some of the ideas put forward were great. It was really inspiring to see that such a cool R&D project was possible in a space as uncompetitive as web browsers.

One of Igalia's, the team funding this new Servo development, projects is Servo-based Wolvic[1] which is a continuation of the Firefox VR project:

>A few months ago, we announced we would be taking over stewardship of what was then the Firefox Reality project, spinning off a new browser based on Reality’s foundations that would follow its own evolutionary path: Wolvic.

[1] https://www.igalia.com/2022/07/08/Wolvic-1.0.html

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#27

Post by Calavar »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #19
orra wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was far [from] obvious it would be used to provide things piecemeal to Gecko when it was started. I don't know why you're so surprised. Creating a browser rendering engine with full feature parity is an absolutely gigantic project. Of course successful modules were merged into Gecko. > Servo, which had a great velocity at that point, would focus on VR and AR usage. Mozilla doesn't have the same financial clout a…

> Creating a browser rendering engine with full feature parity is an absolutely gigantic project. So? Gecko was a mess and they had something actually exciting on their hand which was mostly untainted by their branding. They could have bet on it rather than chose to die a slow death while their money trickles to their highly pay executive team. > Of course Mozilla wanted a way to monetise Servo. R&D is great but they…

> So? Gecko was a mess and they had something actually exciting on their hand which was mostly untainted by their branding. They could have bet on it rather than chose to die a slow death while their money trickles to their highly pay executive team.

Mozilla/Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape, which failed precisely because they tried to do a complete rewrite of their browser engine. With that in mind, it's not too surprising that they would want to backport features to Gecko.

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#28

Post by fabrice_d »

DrBazza wrote: post #22

> The first task is to reactivate the project and the community around it What does that mean, when there's active development of the github repository? It's never been deactivated has it?

For all practical purposes the project was on pause. Looks like no-one had time / energy / willingness / knowledge to make real progress.

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#29

Post by TuringTest »

camgunz wrote: post #24
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Creating a browser rendering engine with full feature parity is an absolutely gigantic project. So? Gecko was a mess and they had something actually exciting on their hand which was mostly untainted by their branding. They could have bet on it rather than chose to die a slow death while their money trickles to their highly pay executive team. > Of course Mozilla wanted a way to monetise Servo. R&D is great but they…

> I generally feel little sympathy for Mozilla. I see this take a lot in Mozilla-ish threads, and at this point it just reads to me a lot like backseat driving. I think real critiques of Mozilla take the form of companies like Vivaldi, Opera, The Browser Company, Brave, Mighty, Synth, Sidekick, etc. I'm not doing a "put up or shut up" thing; I always think people have the right to critique and discuss. I'm just sayin…

Possibly. But thanks to Wolvic, there's a chance that the metaverse will be built on top of Servo ;-)

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#30

Post by devit »

I'd suggest those priorities, in order:

1. Making a fully secure no-JavaScript browser for Tor usage

2. A secure browser that works on major websites

3. Android support

4. Embedding support

5. Extensions support

6. All missing features supported by both Firefox and Chrome, roughly in order of addition to the web standards

7. Replace Firefox

8. All features supported by any browser

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