Live data from Hacker News

Servo to Advance in 2023

servo.org

31–40 of 53 posts

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#31
post #14

It’s shame Mozilla gimped Servo by shackling it to Gecko for political reasons and giving it utterly stupid priorities like VR. Some of the ideas put forward were great. It was really inspiring to see that such a cool R&D project was possible in a space as uncompetitive as web browsers.

How was Servo "shackled to Gecko"?

Servo was a PoC browser that did not need to become an actually usable browser by itself, but it served as a test bed for writing browser parts in Rust so they could be used to replace bits of Firefox (Gecko).

Now it seems they are pushing for Servo as a browser and goal by itself.

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#32
post #6

It’s shame Mozilla gimped Servo by shackling it to Gecko for political reasons and giving it utterly stupid priorities like VR. Some of the ideas put forward were great. It was really inspiring to see that such a cool R&D project was possible in a space as uncompetitive as web browsers.

I wish the first priority for the project would be to make it easy to integrate into other applications, instead of building a full fledged browser. To break the monopoly of WebKit/Blink browsers we need a competing rendering engine that is being developed outside the Google/Alphabet umbrella.

>first priority for the project would be to make it easy to integrate into other applications, instead of building a full fledged browser

That's the case. From homepage:

> Servo’s mission is to provide an independent, modular, embeddable web engine, which allows developers to deliver content and applications using web standards.

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#33
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was Servo "shackled to Gecko"?

It was far obvious it would be used to provide things piecemeal to Gecko when it was started. The decision to port WebRender came more or less at the same time when it was decided that Servo, which had a great velocity at that point, would focus on VR and AR usage. It wasn't too hard to read between the lines for what was happening especially considering how political Mozilla is from the inside. The decision to stop…

I don't mean to wade into the question if the strategy with Servo was good or bad or anything like that, but

> It was far obvious it would be used to provide things piecemeal to Gecko when it was started.

While many people believed that Servo would be a total re-write of the browser, a new clean slate project, everyone involved was very clear from the very beginning that it was not.

See slide 3 of the presentation that introduced Rust and Servo inside of Mozilla: http://venge.net/graydon/talks/intro-talk-2.pdf

> We are not “rewriting the browser”. That's impossible. Put down the gun.

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#34

It’s shame Mozilla gimped Servo by shackling it to Gecko for political reasons and giving it utterly stupid priorities like VR. Some of the ideas put forward were great. It was really inspiring to see that such a cool R&D project was possible in a space as uncompetitive as web browsers.

[deleted]

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that but they're a worker-owned cooperative. This is all very impressive. > Igalia is a private, worker-owned, employee-run cooperative model consultancy focused on open source software. Based in A Coruña, Galicia (Spain), Igalia is known for its contributions and commitments to both open-source and open standards. Igalia's primary focus is on open source solutions for a large set of hardware and software pl…

I salute these kinds of companies. Including Collabora.

Here's a list for people looking to work at at tech company worker's cooperative:

https://tech-coops.xyz

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#36

It’s shame Mozilla gimped Servo by shackling it to Gecko for political reasons and giving it utterly stupid priorities like VR. Some of the ideas put forward were great. It was really inspiring to see that such a cool R&D project was possible in a space as uncompetitive as web browsers.

If its any consolation Mozilla will never threaten the browser engine that is used by the company that provides the lion's share of its income, just saying.

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#38
post #8
post #2

Excited to see the renewed interest in Servo. Another new web engine that is coming along nicely is SerenityOS LibWeb: https://github.com/SerenityOS/serenity/tree/master/Userland/...

First new browser engine to pass acid3 test since the test was invented. Nice. Hopefully this will turn into something end users can benefit from. I'd love to see done to Chrome what WireGuard did to OpenVPN.

The pace at which Ladybird is evolving is impressive, both LibWeb and LibJS. I've never seen anything like it. The amount of work needed to make a browser work is uncanny and they're making it look easy (it's not).

I was around when webkit browsers started to appear. Back then, the engine was leveraging almost a decade of work on KHTML. It wasn't something pulled out of thin air. All popular browsers nowadays have their roots in 90's and early 2000's codebases.

Servo is a very cool project as well, I'm rooting for them!

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#39
post #7

Is there any tool in Rust that allows auto import module based on usage ? A VSCode extension is perfect.

When a symbol is unresolved, but could be made available in the current workspace -- e.g., HashMap when you haven't yet imported it, or a trait function whose trait isn't in scope -- rust-analyzer offers to import or qualify the symbol or import the necessary trait.

Re: Servo to Advance in 2023

#40
post #30

I'd suggest those priorities, in order: 1. Making a fully secure no-JavaScript browser for Tor usage 2. A secure browser that works on major websites 3. Android support 4. Embedding support 5. Extensions support 6. All missing features supported by both Firefox and Chrome, roughly in order of addition to the web standards 7. Replace Firefox 8. All features supported by any browser

It’s rather uncommon that you consider TOR support to be a higher priority than “a browser that works”, so I’d like to hear more about the ordering of your first two priorities, specifically.
Post reply on HN