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Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

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Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#211

Post by falsedan »

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #107
falsedan wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be dead on the outside eventually as Grim Death's grasping claw squeezes the life out of me. Please, my time on earth is precious and I would rather spend it with my loved ones in preference to skimming over forced references.

Oh yeah, that 0.5s you lost while reading that totally ruined your day, enough to make you waste even more time to comment on it. It's an informal blog, I read the same reference, thought, "must be some joke I've missed", and got on with reading the rest of the blog.

Will you lie on your deathbed recalling all the times you spend reading forced memes and thinking, "… for teh win!!1"?

That blog is informal in style but not in content; it's a professional blog by a Mozilla employee. I don't feel like it respects its audiences' time, which is sadly the norm for software-related technical writing. Whings won't get better by saying nothing, and asking people to improve is never a waste of time (if done nicely).

Related: Normalization of deviance in software: how broken practices become standard[0]

[0]: http://danluu.com/wat/

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#212

Post by hsivonen »

quincunx wrote: post #22
statictype wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla was a rewrite of Netscape and Firefox was a restructuring of Mozilla. The only reason they still exist today and have relevance is their willingness to rewrite. I don't disagree with Joel - but his main point seems to be - be prepared to spend longer than you expect on a rewrite - that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.

Wasn't Mozilla the open source version of Netscape Communicator, rather than a rewrite?

Initially Netscape Open Sourced Mariner that was on track to becoming the engine of Netscape 5 and was an evolution of the engine of Netscape 4. Netscape 4 lacked proper DOM support and proper CSS support. (Project to add DOM support was called Perignon, IIRC.)

Netscape had purchased another company called Digital Style. Their layout tech became Gecko but was called Raptor and NGLayout before being renamed to Gecko. Mariner / Netscape 5 was canceled and Mozilla migrated to Gecko, which was used in Netscape 6.

SpiderMonkey survived the transition from Mariner to Gecko and is used in Servo, too.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#213

Post by majewsky »

flyingramen wrote: post #167
syncsynchalt wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good way to force this along is to have a champion for the work, and an automated burndown metric that random devs can watch and influence. Mozilla is pretty good at the latter, cf. https://arewefastyet.com

Seems like Safari is doing better than everything else if I'm reading the charts right.

I don't think so. It's at the bottom for "Sunspider execution time" and "Octane score", but I would expect execution time to be "lower is better" (so Safari is best), but a score to be "higher is better" (so Safari is worst).

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#214

Post by posterboy »

krallja wrote: post #105
posterboy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put servo into production and let it face attackers would be a profuse test for the viability of the memory safety claims.

Rust is already used in stable Firefox. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/07/shipping-rust-in-firefox/

Fx has enough holes already to draw attention away from the Rust modules. >:]

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#215

Post by awj »

frik wrote: post #207
blauditore wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue that Trident (or EdgeHTML as partial fork) is still in wide use, and this started with IE4 in 1997.

You mean IE3. But the code dates back to Mosaic, IE1 is based on a fork of Mosaic. And you can read about it in the credits in the Info dialog of IE up to IE6 (and even all later IE and Edge contain anomalies/small glitches from Mosaic that are still present up to this day, nevertheless the code got refactored a lot and Mosaic hasn't been mentioned in IE7+.

> and even all later IE and Edge contain anomalies/small glitches from Mosaic that are still present up to this day

Have any resources documenting this? I'd be curious to find the building blocks of an old empire in some modern skyscrapers.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#216

Post by hobbes78 »

majewsky wrote: post #213
flyingramen wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like Safari is doing better than everything else if I'm reading the charts right.

I don't think so. It's at the bottom for "Sunspider execution time" and "Octane score", but I would expect execution time to be "lower is better" (so Safari is best), but a score to be "higher is better" (so Safari is worst).

On "Octane score" you can see the vertical axis reads 0 at the top and 40000 at the bottom, so it seems it's always "lower is better" across the three graphs, which also means Safari is the fastest browser, if you consider just these metrics. I'm actually surprised...

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#217

Post by frik »

awj wrote: post #215
frik wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean IE3. But the code dates back to Mosaic, IE1 is based on a fork of Mosaic. And you can read about it in the credits in the Info dialog of IE up to IE6 (and even all later IE and Edge contain anomalies/small glitches from Mosaic that are still present up to this day, nevertheless the code got refactored a lot and Mosaic hasn't been mentioned in IE7+.

> and even all later IE and Edge contain anomalies/small glitches from Mosaic that are still present up to this day Have any resources documenting this? I'd be curious to find the building blocks of an old empire in some modern skyscrapers.

Start there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#History

There are various sites that had article about early IE history. And I suggest you to install Mosaic browser on Win7 32bit and try it out yourself - you will see how familiar almost everything is, if you know IE from everyday usage. Not just familiar, but also little things, traits and glitches are still in todays IE and Edge.

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#218

Post by daenney »

mishac wrote: post #133
daenney wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then again, Gecko itself started under Netscape, they just released it under an open license after the Mozilla thing was started. So in a sense it's still an incremental improvement over Netscape 4.7, at least when it comes to the rendering engine.

Gecko was the rewrite of the rendering engine for Netscape 6. Netscape 4.7 (and earlier) didn't use Gecko.

Ah, you're absolutely right. Thank you!

Re: Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

#219

Post by falsedan »

falsedan wrote: post #211
Ar-Curunir wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah, that 0.5s you lost while reading that totally ruined your day, enough to make you waste even more time to comment on it. It's an informal blog, I read the same reference, thought, "must be some joke I've missed", and got on with reading the rest of the blog.

Will you lie on your deathbed recalling all the times you spend reading forced memes and thinking, "… for teh win!!1"? That blog is informal in style but not in content; it's a professional blog by a Mozilla employee. I don't feel like it respects its audiences' time, which is sadly the norm for software-related technical writing. Whings won't get better by saying nothing, and asking people to improve is never a wast…

*Things (whoops)
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