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Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

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Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still think [it] is a great approach for cross-platform apps You think so? I find that running a whole second OS for every process is hugely bloated and slow, and that we can do much, much better when there are already very good languages that run cross-platformly, they just need bindings to a good cross-platform UI toolkit. Unfortunately, nothing looks as good on OS X as Cocoa does.

Yes. Yes I do. Look at R studio. Wonderful IDE, runs as a safari app. Having a whole extra browser and a node backend running for each app seems a waste, but using the browser that is already running as a runtime environment seems much saner. I do most of my work in the browser, I wouldn't mind if some of that had better integrated UI. I also wouldn't mind writing small, easy to produce apps that will work across sys…

I'm not saying programs written in it aren't useful or doable, I just don't think it's a great approach. I think it's a last-resort approach, because there just isn't a better cross-platform toolkit available.

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#42
post #32

Very cool. What parts of Servo are already in Firefox? What is missing? Is there a list of what will get into Firefox over time?

There is a wiki page about Project Quantum: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum Currently Quantum CSS (Stylo) and Quantum Render (Webrender) are both in Firefox Nightly, but they are unstable and can cause really bad performance, especially Quantum Render. They won't be done until at least Firefox 57 and some most likely later. Quantum Compositor is in Release already I believe. It's the out of process compositor for Fi…

Whoa I didn't know webrender was shipping on nightly already, even if it's unstable.

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#43

I really like this idea of switching over to servo bit by bit. It makes me happy that there might be a real WebKit alternative again.

Servo's WebRender is also in the Firefox tree. I've seen some crazy benchmarks using it. It's not ready to be enabled widely yet, though.

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#44
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a wiki page about Project Quantum: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum Currently Quantum CSS (Stylo) and Quantum Render (Webrender) are both in Firefox Nightly, but they are unstable and can cause really bad performance, especially Quantum Render. They won't be done until at least Firefox 57 and some most likely later. Quantum Compositor is in Release already I believe. It's the out of process compositor for Fi…

Do I get this right. Servo is the experimental browser (engine?)? Quantum is the project that ports parts of Servo to Firefox over time?

Quantum is now also a bit of an umbrella project for initiatives making Firefox faster. "Quantum Flow", for example, is an engine-wide effort to push performance in the bits that still C++.

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a wiki page about Project Quantum: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum Currently Quantum CSS (Stylo) and Quantum Render (Webrender) are both in Firefox Nightly, but they are unstable and can cause really bad performance, especially Quantum Render. They won't be done until at least Firefox 57 and some most likely later. Quantum Compositor is in Release already I believe. It's the out of process compositor for Fi…

Whoa I didn't know webrender was shipping on nightly already, even if it's unstable.

Currently with Webrender enabled Firefox renders it both on Webrender and the old renderer which causes it to be really slow.

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#46
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember way before Electron there was XULRunner, and there were a few ridiculously bloated non-Mozilla apps that were based on it. Like Songbird[1] -- anyone remember that? I suppose the idea was largely ahead of its time; in 2006 computers just didn't have enough RAM/CPU to get away with running a full web browser stack for every app like we (sort of) can today. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(softwa…

I don think it's quite the same thing though. Songbird was a XUL app with extension support and a built in browser. Aren't Electron based apps HTML based and running on Website?

They don't run on a website, they are static files (usually) served from a zip file.

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa I didn't know webrender was shipping on nightly already, even if it's unstable.

Currently with Webrender enabled Firefox renders it both on Webrender and the old renderer which causes it to be really slow.

I see, that would explain the performance issues. Why is it set up like that?

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently with Webrender enabled Firefox renders it both on Webrender and the old renderer which causes it to be really slow.

I see, that would explain the performance issues. Why is it set up like that?

My understanding is that WebRender doesn't support everything yet, so right now it's mostly about validating correctness.

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see, that would explain the performance issues. Why is it set up like that?

My understanding is that WebRender doesn't support everything yet, so right now it's mostly about validating correctness.

So it renders it two times and compares the results?

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#50
post #39
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do I get this right. Servo is the experimental browser (engine?)? Quantum is the project that ports parts of Servo to Firefox over time?

Right. Servo is an engine that will be embeddable into apps that need to render HTML, not just browsers.

Ah, so like the omni-present webkit view?
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