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

I tried Servo

spacebar.news

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 256 posts

Re: I tried Servo

#21

Post by StopDisinfo910 »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

It's still baffling to me that Mozilla threw out Firefox's technical future Very little about Mozilla makes sense --- until you follow the money.

The string of departures and how people communicated around them let me think it’s something a lot less nefarious: Mozilla looked like an extremely political company at the time.

Servo was extremely good at communication with their very frequent news letter and Rust had a lot of wind in its sails, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ruffled the wrong feathers. Mozilla is very much still managed by what remains of its old guards - by that I mean what hasn’t been poached - especially at the top.

That would be pure incompetence from the top management but not malice.

Re: I tried Servo

#22

Post by bobajeff »

camdroidw wrote: post #16
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

It's still baffling to me that Mozilla threw out Firefox's technical future Very little about Mozilla makes sense --- until you follow the money.

It's wrong to name names without prood but after a point you start doubting your understanding of the world and at this point I'm beginning to suspect Mitchell Baker is a plant

I think without Mitchell Baker there would probably not have been a Mozilla. I'm fuzzy on the history but I believe she was the lawyer who originally set up the organization.

Re: I tried Servo

#23

Post by YmiYugy »

ObscureScience wrote: post #3

While it's hard to know what comes of it, there is also https://ladybird.org/ to challenge to monopoly of Blink.

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 orders of magnitudes larger than the Ladybird team. If you think that Blinks dominance is a thread to the web it's not enough to have an alternative engine you need enough adoption of that engine so web devs make sure their site is compatible with that engine. Most of this also applies to Servo, but at least their technical project goals (embeddable, modular, parallel, memory safe) sound at least moderately compelling. Maybe Ladybird has similar goals, but at least their website doesn't really state any technical goals.

Re: I tried Servo

#24

Post by specproc »

kookamamie wrote: post #5

> The Dogemania test ran at a smooth 60 FPS on my M4 Pro MacBook Pro until reaching around 400 images I ran Dogemania on Chrome until 1400 images at steady 60 FPS at which point I got bored and closed the tab.

Wow, just did this myself. The difference between Firefox and Chromium was depressing.

I'm getting >100 FPS almost consistently all the way up to 1,000 in Chromium, FF barely made it above 500 before dropping below 60.

Probably not a completely fair test, I've no extensions etc. on Chromium and only use it for the odd stubborn website, but that was quite a lesson in their comparative performance.

Re: I tried Servo

#25

Post by jqpabc123 »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #10
olalonde wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? Doesn't most of Mozilla's revenue come from Firefox?

Mozilla is basically paid by Google to have a multi-platform non-Blink browser around they can point to when accused of being a monopoly. Having a quality browser is not required, merely it existing. So why waste money on novel web engine experiments when you can have AI conferences in Zambia?

Living large and loving life --- by selling out.

Re: I tried Servo

#26

Post by xpe »

StopDisinfo910 wrote: post #21
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

It's still baffling to me that Mozilla threw out Firefox's technical future Very little about Mozilla makes sense --- until you follow the money.

The string of departures and how people communicated around them let me think it’s something a lot less nefarious: Mozilla looked like an extremely political company at the time. Servo was extremely good at communication with their very frequent news letter and Rust had a lot of wind in its sails, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ruffled the wrong feathers. Mozilla is very much still managed by what remains of its old…

A lot of things look like incompetence at a distance, but get really fascinating up close. Does anyone know care to share what they know about the particular personalities, drives, and visions?

Re: I tried Servo

#27

Post by rockwotj »

fouronnes3 wrote: post #17
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…

Does having experience implementing a web browser engine feature change the way you write HTML or CSS in any way? Do you still google "css grid cheatsheet" three times a week like the rest of us?

To me, this is like asking if having built a sql engine if you write SQL differently.

I think the answer is yes. Having a strong understanding of the underlying engine helps you debug and optimize more quickly

Needing reference stuff never changes unless it’s so frequently used.

Re: I tried Servo

#28

Post by xpe »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

It's still baffling to me that Mozilla threw out Firefox's technical future Very little about Mozilla makes sense --- until you follow the money.

The end of Pocket is just another sad example.

As an April fools joke, Mozilla should announce that they are discontinuing Firefox in order to focus on their core business, which is a beautiful abstraction: the Platonic ideal of discontinuing popular products.

Re: I tried Servo

#29

Post by johnisgood »

Gualdrapo wrote: post #18
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

It's still baffling to me that Mozilla threw out Firefox's technical future Very little about Mozilla makes sense --- until you follow the money.

I still strongly believe Servo can be a real counterpoint to Chrome/Chromium's hegemony in the long haul. Not sure why Mozilla ditched it nor why The Linux Foundation gives little to no support at all to it.

Because Mozilla benefits from Google's donations (the majority comes from Google), and being a counterpoint to Google's Chrome is bad for Google, which means less or no donations to Mozilla. Google holds the key here. They have leverage over Mozilla.

Re: I tried Servo

#30

Post by GoblinSlayer »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #12
olalonde wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my point... The fewer people use Firefox, the less money they get from Google. If you follow the money, it doesn't make sense for them to neglect Firefox.

The fewer people use Firefox, the less money they get from Google. You obviously haven't been following the money. The statistical global marketshare of Firefox is very close to that of Internet Explorer --- within a single rounding digit. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...

Firefox users just block trackers, that's why you don't see them.
Post reply on HN