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Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

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221–230 of 343 posts

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#221

It'd be nice if people stopped recommending "yet another new and exciting package manager for Windows" that you have no idea of whether you can trust it or not. Git, Python, llvm, cmake, and curl all have perfectly normal windows installers available from their own websites, and if you're a programmer who has to, or chooses to work on Window, it's a good bet you already have either most or all of these already instal…

That was my favorite part of this (especially since the build didn't work). Whatever scoop is, it actually worked and installed those things without any complaint... might be my new favorite package manager

I’ve typically used chocolatey. I think it typically uses the regular installer for a package, just in a headless/unattended mode configured by the maintainer.

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#222

If anyone is willing to put an effort in building a new browser, I have just one wish - allow embedding open-source transformers in the browser; available for both the user and websites/extensions.

Do you mean transformer as in AI algorithm or transformer as in some sort of content transformer? Browsers have already STT engines embedded and stuff like that. Not LMs but close.

I mean AI transformers. I understand we have pre-embedded STT, though I will like the option to include my own - say an English grammar GPT and expose it by an API for progressive enhancement of content.

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#223
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW Ladybird is also built by people with actual browser engine experience

Ladybird was mostly developed by one person (Andreas Kilng) with no financing whatsoever ,Servo was mostly developed by a team who was being paid with Mozilla money.

That was true at the start, but it's most definitely funded development now and that's what will probably get them over the finish line.

If the development work went into debating, specifying and expressing required behavior as a written spec more exactly (beyond w3c specs and towards the more pragmatic reality of what current browsers actually do) then very long term we can probably have engines that are AI built [or just more easily developed by humans] from a combination of the written specs and the set of tests they need to pass.

Using AI for adversarial development (e.g. one group tries to break and hack it, the other group defends and refines) could get interesting and wasn't really an option before. Anything that's now available to reduce the human resource cost of development could make a big difference.

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#224
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with these smaller webbrowsers is that you have nobody to sue if the browser turns out to leak your personal information or credentials etc. Therefore it is better to stick with browsers made by big corporations.

Are you really planning on suing Google for leaking personal info via Chrome?

Some people just get warm fuzzies at the idea of theoretically being able to sue someone if they need to. Usually these are people who've never actually looked into what it would take to even start a lawsuit.

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#225

The x64.dmg release[1] requires macOS 13+, why? [1] https://web.crabnebula.cloud/verso/verso-nightly/releases

Apple makes it relatively difficult to support old versions of their OS. You pretty much have to keep an old computer around and just not update its software. So it might not have been a conscious choice, rather they just didn't go to the extra effort to support older versions.

Their build and testing platform is on Github Actions which supports macOS 12. Furthermore, Apple supports running macOS in a virtual machine or a dual-boot setup.

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#226
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been a lot of work on this in the last few years with Windows support, preliminary Android support is also being worked on and should appear at some point in Swift 6.

Is swift going to do what flutter and kotlin multiplatform cannot?

It seems something like that already exists:

https://skip.tools/blog/scrumskipper

I mostly work with flutter but Skip looks pretty cool.

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#227
post #5

So we will, in ~5 years time have two new browser, one in Rust and one in Swift. I hope in the process of doing it we will find new ways of doing things.

> I hope in the process of doing it we will find new ways of doing things.

HTML & CSS themselves have become a major bottleneck to quality and creativity. The arcane layout model, the baggage of backwards compatibility, the cognitive dissonance — played out over decades of design-by-committee — between "this is a document engine" and "this is an app engine."

The rendering-thread-is-the-main-thread architecture of JS plus the JS garbage collector cause jitters & frame drops that most people don't consciously recognize, but everyone subconsciously recognizes. These little bits of jank are why consumers can recognize webview-wrapped apps vs. native apps.

Don't get me wrong — HTML and CSS and JS have brought us far, and the zero-trust execution environment that is the browser is an amazing feat of humanity.

I hope the "new ways of doing things" you describe include a major innovation on HTML and CSS and JS. WebAssembly makes this possible today — and I have dedicated the last few years of my life to proving this concept[0], and I hope others explore similar avenues. We deserve a better substrate, and this can be done without reinventing the browser.

[0] www.pax.dev

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#228

I'm happy to see work being done in integrating Servo into custom browser chrome. My dream browser would be a servo based Qutebrowser. I can only hope.

There is Servo webview for Qt, so it should be possible to replace QtWebEngine with https://github.com/KDABLabs/cxx-qt-servo-webview.

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#229
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually i prefer the dont', easy to comprehend and spell.

Wouldn't dont be even easier?

As an acceptable compromise we can separate all punctuation and put it at the end of the paragraph Although some oldfashioned enthusiasts of the Chicago Manual of Style will object But I think its good to bring some fresh ideas to our old and worn orthographyevery now and again,.-…’—.

Re: Verso – Web browser built on top of the Servo web engine

#230
Nice! There is also Servo webview for Qt: https://github.com/KDABLabs/cxx-qt-servo-webview and Servo webview for Tauri: https://github.com/tauri-apps/wry/tree/servo-wry-demo

Hopefully we can get more web browsers with embedded Servo engine (e.g. as a QtWebEngine replacement).

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