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

221–230 of 256 posts

Re: I tried Servo

#221

Post by beefnugs »

YmiYugy wrote: post #23
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…

I think the browser attempts are all wrong trying to "cover all edge cases" they should focus on being able to transform any and all dark patterns down into something simpler.

Hell starting out as extracting text, pictures, video for all nightmare sites. Then slowly add whatever features dont actually lead to dark patterns

Re: I tried Servo

#222

Post by xdfgh1112 »

YmiYugy wrote: post #188
xdfgh1112 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is donation funded with no reliance on outside parties. They don't have to inject ads into pages like brave did or sell out to Google compromising their independence on web standards. They're ahead of Servo already anyway, and better funded.

In the last 24h alone Chromium merged almost 900 CLs (their equivalent to a pull request) into the src/Chromium repo, Ladybird had 7. Yes a project that started fresh a couple of year ago with decades of hindsight can be more efficient than one started 16 year ago as the fork of a fork, but if I had to guess they'll sooner or later reach a point where they have implemented the low hanging fruit and chromium moves fas…

Depends what's in those CLs I guess. Google crap like automatic sign in, passkeys, prefetching? Developer tools stuff? Very little of it is core web.

Re: I tried Servo

#223

Post by PinkMilkshake »

bee_rider wrote: post #179
GuB-42 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla is nothing like Xerox, if anything Google is the new Xerox: they have way too much money so they throw it at R&D side projects without a business plan. The big one for Google is transformer models, they basically invented LLMs only to play catchup with OpenAI later. Mozilla successes have always been focused on the web browser, from the very beginning. Even the name reflects that: "Mozilla" stands for "Mosaic…

> […] and I can't think of anything particularly innovative coming from Mozilla that isn't a browser. I don't consider Rust to be a side project, it is a programming language for writing a browser, that it is useful for projects other than a web browser is a happy side effect. I’m sure Rust started out as something intended to help with their browser work. But it became a general purpose programming language pretty e…

> I’m sure Rust started out as something intended to help with their browser work.

It started out as something to make elevators more reliable. Not even joking (mostly).

Re: I tried Servo

#224

Post by jahnu »

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #187
rollcat wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's an even better deal for Google. "But look, Chrome is not a monopoly." If I was Google, I'd do something to set Mozilla back on that track. But oh well, Google these days is even more dysfunctional. They're about to lose search.

Remember that time Microsoft bankrolled a floundering Apple to able to "But look, Windows is not a monopoly" https://thisdayintechhistory.com/08/06/apple-and-microsoft-c...

And MSFT are still second biggest company in the world by market cap. If Apple hadn’t regrown maybe MS would have been broken up.

Re: I tried Servo

#225

Post by sbstp »

goku12 wrote: post #185
godshatter wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Mozilla decides to dump Gecko, then it's time for a hard fork and an abandonment of Mozilla. Maybe it's time now. edit: I mean dumping Gecko for Chromium, not Servo.

Honestly, dumping gecko would be a suicide for Firefox. Much of Firefox's minuscule userbase consists of knowledgeable nerds who are holdouts from the Blink monoculture.

Using WebKit (even JavaScriptCore) and working with Apple wouldn't be the worst thing to my eyes as a Firefox/FOSS user. Duopoly isn't great but it's better than a monopoly.

Re: I tried Servo

#226

Post by igrunert »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #42
YmiYugy wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not being funded by Google money is a pretty big deal. Some of the developers are former webkit devs so they have a good foundation to start from. It remains to be seen if they can pull it off. Orion adding Windows support (getting WebKit running on Windows again) would be pretty good too.

WebKit runs on Windows, the Windows port just needs work to bring it up to the level of the Linux port. I got every JIT tier enabled in JavaScriptCore [1] and enabled libpas (the memory allocator). The Windows port is moving to Skia in line with the Linux port.

Really just needs more people (and companies) pushing it forward. Hopefully Kagi will be contributing improvements to the Windows port upstream.

[1] https://iangrunert.com/2024/10/07/every-jit-tier-enabled-jsc...

Re: I tried Servo

#227

Post by wodenokoto »

goku12 wrote: post #55
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…

> (Taffy [0]) that can be used standalone and is widely used accross the Rust UI ecosystem, including in the Blitz [1] web engine (which also uses Taffy for Flexbox and Block layout) This is the first time I hear about Blitz. Looks equally interesting and ambitious. It is probably the real undercover web engine. Servo was widely known around when Rust debuted.

Wasn’t rust and servo co-developed?

Re: I tried Servo

#228

Post by Klaster_1 »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #206
dmytrish wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Show us the way!

Form a design team to reduce the amount of primitives in html such that I can do everything that html + css does but with the minimum amount of primitives.

Something tells me with that approach you'd get emergent complexity that different people handle in a different manner, eventually leading to strong incentive to add new, higher level primitives. That's one of driving forces behind current state of HTML and JS and why JQuery and TABLE layouts went out of fashion. Sounds like a people thing, not a technical one.

Re: I tried Servo

#229

Post by criticalfault »

jazzypants wrote: post #186
criticalfault wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is only fair. Mozilla doesn't deserve to survive. New players deserve our support, like servo and ladybird. Even with an enormous budget from Google (500M, I think per year) they managed to ruin everything, including Firefox, the thing bringing them those 500M. To me it looks as if Baker is an undercover person put there to sabotage Mozilla. Tldr: funded by Google, made absolutely everything in her power to run…

I'm not sure about that. Baker was one of the first Netscape employees, she literally helped found the Mozilla foundation, and she served as the first president of it. I'm not saying she has done a good job, but a lot of the early Netscape people like Brendan Eich have done nothing but sing her praises.

If we take a look at the results, I'm not convinced she is a good guy just because she was there at the beginning. There is a chart with her salary going up and Firefox usage going down. Looks like an X.

If anything, how come she didn't make it a success on the very limited market?

Even if she wasn't a bad actor in the beginning, she could have changed her opinion and be seduced by the money.

Just for comparison: a few people made a completely new engine in a few years. Task often thought as impossible (they had 200k USD for the start). Mozilla started servo, then when they saw its going well, decided to abandon it?

So what was Mozilla spending the money on? Many have requested the ability to donate for Firefox development, but it was never allowed: they (she?) wanted to distribute the donation money on things they thought were important?

For years they made decisions that the uses hated. How else to explain this?

Re: I tried Servo

#230

Post by drsnow »

thoroughburro wrote: post #100
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No. Check Mozilla’s own numbers if you don’t believe tracking stats. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

Firefox users also tend to disable telemetry and any kind of phoning home whatsoever.
Post reply on HN