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

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

#311

Post by notjustadog »

sokz wrote: post #251
ninepoints wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd really rather not, personally. All my Swift experiences have been fighting the abysmal compilation times.

Pardon me for not getting your context, but are compile times a big issue in software development? I have never programmed professionally and all my experiences with code is from a couple of classes taken in college a decade ago.

In general, you're right. But there are at least 2 times where they're absolutely vital- anytime you're dealing with a UI and data exploration in data science (since you make a lot of frequent, small changes in the goal of fine tuning something.) Everything else, best practices has good testing and partial compilations to make it moot. There's probably some other contexts that make it valuable, but I've never had to deal with those.

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

#312

Post by niutech »

zackbrown wrote: post #227
ksec wrote: 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…

We already had Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX and now Flutter (with Wasm). How is Pax better than them?

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

#313

Post by niutech »

bbatha wrote: post #294
mappu wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to summarize like that since Ladybird is still ahead in many individual tests including important ones (e.g. acid3 at https://staging.wpt.fyi/results/acid/acid3/numbered-tests.ht... ).

acid3 isn't particularly important as it doesn't even match modern standards. Modern chrome and firefox only pass 97/100 tests.

The web standards have changed since the introduction of Acid3. The updated Acid3 test is here: https://wpt.live/acid/acid3/test.html and modern browsers should score 100/100.

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

#314

Post by zackbrown »

niutech wrote: post #312
zackbrown wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

We already had Flash, Silverlight, JavaFX and now Flutter (with Wasm). How is Pax better than them?

I won't claim Pax is better than any of these, but that we seek to solve different goals.

Unlike Flash: driven by a markup language, fully open source, no plugin required, solves a11y, compiles to native apps incl. mobile

Unlike Silverlight: fully open source, no plugin required, no heavy VM

Unlike JavaFX: no plugin required, no heavy VM, visual builder is a vector design tool

Unlike Flutter: designed for web (small footprint, a11y out of the box); first-party and foundationally integrated visual builder, visual builder is a vector design tool

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

#315

Post by zackbrown »

bangaladore wrote: post #304
zackbrown wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

To me, it seems like you are reinventing frameworks like Svelte while adding the complexity of Rust. I don't see the benefits.

Primary goal of Pax is "designability" -- any project can be opened and edited visually at any time with Pax Designer, which is a vector design tool.

The difference between Webflow and Figma is immense; Pax unlocks a Figma-style visual creative experience while building software.

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

#316

Post by zackbrown »

replete wrote: post #296
zackbrown wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

`Waiting for fonts.googleapis...`, pax website was blank for a couple of minutes, might want to reconsider making third-party fonts non blocking on your website so it doesn't appear broken/empty when a third-party CDN edge is slow.

Thank you for the tip!

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

#317

Post by zackbrown »

themikesanto wrote: post #307
zackbrown wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alternate layout engines for the web might be a fun experiment, PhD thesis, or talent retention program, but it's not practical. Flexbox was once an "alternate layout engine for the web," as was Flash player, as is Figma. Framer, Retool, and Squarespace all offer alternate layout engines tailored for visual building. All of these seem practical to me.

All of the products you described are just tools that build HTML/CSS for you.

> just tools that build HTML/CSS for you

1. not Figma or Flash: it's not practical or performant to manipulate HTML/CSS to achieve the creative freedom of a vector design tool[0]

2. the rest of these that build on HTML: not a single one of them exposes that code for manual editing, so they're not developer tools and their "alternate layouts" are proprietary + locked away.

The root issue: HTML was not designed to be a substrate for design.

[0] I don't claim this casually; I spent several years seeking to do exactly this with github.com/famous/famous and https://www.haikuanimator.com/

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

#318

Post by zackbrown »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #285
zackbrown wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like we agree about the good parts of HTML. > There has never been a better markup language. > It has been the best thing for accessibility we ever came up with. I observe past tense in both sentences above. So perhaps we agree, the salient question is: is it the best thing we can come up with? With a focus on the future. I argue we can do better, while celebrating and building off of what's great about the…

I can imagine no better way for readability and accessibility than a text-first representation of content, which is what HTML is. I will even argue that having the modern web emerge from a text-content first approach is the best thing that could have happened to us. All other content representation infrastructures that weren't text first, like java applets or flash died because they were no match for HTML.

Agreed! Markup-as-content-backbone is one of many things HTML/CSS do extremely well, and I agree not building around something like this was a major weakness of Flash.

Silverlight sought to do this with XAML, but it had other problems (required a plugin right as plugins were on their way out; CLR was a huge dependency; too locked down and proprietary under Ballmer leadership)

Can you imagine a text-first content representation, which is visually editable with the UX of a vector design tool? This is the rabbit hole that drives our work on Pax.

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

#319

Post by favorited »

nbbaier wrote: post #47
ChocolateGod wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to see Swift adopted more on non-Apple operating systems, some of the recent GTK apps written in Swift are pretty cool.

What apps are you thinking of? Curious to check them out.

The greenfield Ladybird browser is adopting Swift as its C++ replacement language.

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

#320

Post by niutech »

culi wrote: post #213
tvshtr wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They plan to abstract it (work is underway) to make it even possible to use chromium's js engine. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Servo-JavaScript-Engine-Modula...

Interesting. Kinda reminds me of the 360 Safe browser that's one of the most popular browsers used in China. It can render a website using WebKit, Blink, or Trident (Internet Explorer)

It's not about including multiple web engines (like e.g. Sleipnir does) but multiple JS engines in a single web engine.
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