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Servo’s new home

blog.servo.org

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Re: Servo’s new home

#281

Post by cies »

bsimpson wrote: post #193
satya71 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple forked WebKit from KDE KHTML.

They aren't mutually exclusive. WebKit was originally based on KHTML, but Apple still founded WebKit and controls its source code. Even if WebKit was just Apple's name for their internal fork of KHTML, I don't see any reason they'd retire it. Blink was originally spun-out of WebKit too. Similarly, Google controls Blink, and the two have diverged significantly in the intervening years. I suspect patches for any of the…

> Apple still founded WebKit

> Blink was originally spun-out of WebKit too

Founded, spun out of, forked... What's in the name?

I think one cannot "found" something that's largely based on a fork of something else.

Re: Servo’s new home

#282

Post by SimonSapin »

codys wrote: post #197
lastontheboat wrote: post #2

We've been cagey about this over the months since the Servo team at Mozilla was disbanded, since there were various moving pieces that needed to fall into place. We're excited about the possibility for Servo to continue growing and evolving in its new home, though!

Can you talk a bit about the "moving pieces" and/or the process here? Interested in the process of doing this type of migration.

There’s things like finding an agreement over https://uspto.report/TM/87796973 and setting up everything in https://servo.org/governance/. And on the technical side, although it’s not a blocker for announcing: https://github.com/servo/project/issues/25

Re: Servo’s new home

#283

Post by SimonSapin »

jfk13 wrote: post #139
brabel wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Firefox have any Rust component at all if Servo is not apparently used at all by it, currently? People have been claiming Firefox components were written in Rust for ages, usually meaning Servo, but it seems now that those claims were just misleading.

> Does Firefox have any Rust component at all Yes, lots (and increasing). E.g.: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/servo/component... https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/gfx/wr https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/third_party/rus...

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation#Rust_Components is probably the most up to date

Re: Servo’s new home

#284

Post by Deukhoofd »

tsimionescu wrote: post #280
LockAndLol wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter would be better, imo. Chromium won because it introduced a sane API before Mozilla's Gecko. That's why you see so many Electron apps. Seriously, we don't need to wrap a whole browser. Just the engine and a debugger would've been fine. The engine could be distributed as a lib and other frameworks could just bind it. Apps could be distributed without an 150MB behemoth just to have a chat client. Making the e…

I'm not sure what you mean by 'an engine', but people who choose Electron typically don't want a rendering engine like Servo, they want to write a web app and have it installed locally. They need a rendering engine, a JS runtime, a DOM handler, an HTTP client library, WebSockets support etc - they want a whole browser. Also, 150MB is not really that scary of a size in today's world. Also, a huge part of it is simply…

> Also note that vim with all its dependencies is ~40 MB, without a GUI

That's mostly just due to vim-runtime though, and the documentation in many different languages. The actual vim executable is around 3 MB.

Re: Servo’s new home

#285

Post by account42 »

konjin wrote: post #212
arendtio wrote: post #98

I am confused. I thought it is the raison d'être of Mozilla to develop a browser. So how does it come that the brand new browser engine they developed is being given away? I mean, even if they need to cut costs, isn't Servo part of the team they should keep until the end?

>I am confused. I thought it is the raison d'être of Mozilla to develop a browser. To put it bluntly: Mozilla is no longer a browser company. It is a patsy for google to point to and say "See we're not a monopoly.". Secondary goals are increasing the supply of devs for big tech and lowering wages.

> lowering wages

Except for the leadership.

Re: Servo’s new home

#286

Post by roblabla »

PeCaN wrote: post #279
trevyn wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything specific GCC does for performance that Clang/LLVM could adopt? How is this race expected to evolve over time?

it's not so much that gcc does anything specific so much as LLVM is just really really inefficient—they don't track compilation time at all so it's easy for releases to regress, half the stuff in there is academics implementing their PhD thesis aiming for algorithmic accuracy with little regard for efficiency, and LLVM's design itself is somewhat inefficient (multiple IRs, lots and lots of pointers in IR representati…

The rust compiler team now tracks LLVM performance, see [0]. They are able to spot regressions as soon as they get merged, and petition to get the change reverted or performance fixed when the impact is large. This has been fairly successful so far, but obviously needs sustained efforts if we are to ever dream of ever getting halfway decent compilation times.

[0]: https://nikic.github.io/2020/05/10/Make-LLVM-fast-again.html

Re: Servo’s new home

#287

Post by supermatt »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #152

Edit: It's clear to me Servo is vaporware right now. The discussions in this thread and crawling servo.org make that abundantly clear. Original post: As an embedder, I just don't get the point. Servo is a nonstarter. The idea of Servo minus Rust is great, because most embedders don't use Rust. They use C, because C is easy to embed with, and the availability of FFIs across languages that interface with C is tremendou…

Servo is a WIP. Some components are mature, and have actually been merged into firefox.

Embedding is a primary aim, but certainly requires a lot of wrapping at present to be as functional as more mature engines.

No doubt it would be nice to have an easily portable lib - maybe with a compatible interface to other engines - but its certainly not there yet.

I agree that the project could/should be a bit clearer on its current status.

Re: Servo’s new home

#288

Post by LockAndLol »

jamienicol wrote: post #239
LockAndLol wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is the default search engine of a "privacy aware" browser. It uses Google Safe browsing which, from what I understand, is practically an embedded call home to Google for each new domain you visit. For quite a while they were using Google as the default location provider. Pocket was an unnecessary acquisition that wasted money for an opt-out solution to... I don't even know what problem. The money spent on acqu…

So pocket in no way detracts from your privacy. It's an very useful feature to many people. It's fine if you don't like it, but to use the privacy argument against it is incredibly disingenuous. Edit: Also, you understand incorrectly about safe browsing. It does its checks locally.

I never claimed pocket detracted from privacy. I actually explained my problem with pocket... To add to that, it shouldn't be embedded in the browser. It's an extension and they have a marketplace for that.

And even if Safe Browsing does do what you say, the other google stuff still does and did exist.

Re: Servo’s new home

#289

Post by Narann »

MayeulC wrote: post #253
Narann wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be awesome! But it would need a JS engine.

Why would it, though? Any language should do, as long as you can package a runtime for the environment. Be it lisp, WASM, plain old C... It's just functions to call, that change the DOM, CSS properties, load pages, perform computations, call APIs... Of course, the thing you lose is the hardware and software abstraction layer provided by chromium's javascript APIs. Those could be exported to a select number of languag…

Thanks, is there a public Servo C API with function calls to change the DOM?

Re: Servo’s new home

#290

Post by [deleted] »

stuaxo wrote: post #142
phonon wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they wanted to "put a crisper focus on new product development and go to market activities."[1] I'm sure that explains it well... [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Message-...

I'm guessing that the "new products" are not the browser.

[deleted]
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