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

41–50 of 256 posts

Re: I tried Servo

#41

Post by 0x000xca0xfe »

olalonde wrote: post #8
ObscureScience wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think Firefox is making money, since it has no payed features? Hint: it has Google search as the default search engine.

That's my point... The fewer people use Firefox, the less money they get from Google. If you follow the money, it doesn't make sense for them to neglect Firefox.

> The fewer people use Firefox, the less money they get from Google

This is not reflected in the numbers, at least from what I've found: 300m/year in 2011[1], 400+m/year in 2020[2], 485m/year in 2025[3].

[1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1543269/google-to-pay-...

[2] https://www.pcmag.com/news/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3-year-go...

[3] https://nerdschalk.com/85-of-mozillas-revenue-at-risk-firefo...

Re: I tried Servo

#42

Post by sirwhinesalot »

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…

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.

Re: I tried Servo

#43

Post by kaoD »

olalonde wrote: post #8
ObscureScience wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think Firefox is making money, since it has no payed features? Hint: it has Google search as the default search engine.

That's my point... The fewer people use Firefox, the less money they get from Google. If you follow the money, it doesn't make sense for them to neglect Firefox.

Google does not need Mozilla to have a sizable market share. They just need it as a semblance of competition in the browser space.

Re: I tried Servo

#44

Post by nashashmi »

nicoburns wrote: post #32
fouronnes3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does having experience implementing a web browser engine feature change the way you write HTML or CSS in any way? Do you still google "css grid cheatsheet" three times a week like the rest of us?

> Does having experience implementing a web browser engine feature change the way you write HTML or CSS in any way? I think I'm more concious of what's performant in CSS. In particular, both Flexbox and CSS Grid like to remeasure things a lot by default, but this can be disabled with a couple of tricks: - For Flexbox, always set `flex-basis: 0` and `min-width: 0`/`min-height: 0` if you can without affecting the layou…

How do you propose standards to the web groups?

I want to propose CSS-inheritance—by-name (#box {inherit:$(#menu)})

and the reintroduction of marquee tags for horizontal scrolling (a frequently used UI pattern on shopping sites).

Re: I tried Servo

#45

Post by paulryanrogers »

xpe wrote: post #28
jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

It's still baffling to me that Mozilla threw out Firefox's technical future Very little about Mozilla makes sense --- until you follow the money.

The end of Pocket is just another sad example. As an April fools joke, Mozilla should announce that they are discontinuing Firefox in order to focus on their core business, which is a beautiful abstraction: the Platonic ideal of discontinuing popular products.

Strange. I remember reading nothing but complaints about Pocket when they bought and integrated it. I guess it grew on people.

Re: I tried Servo

#46

Post by dleeftink »

nicoburns wrote: post #32
fouronnes3 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does having experience implementing a web browser engine feature change the way you write HTML or CSS in any way? Do you still google "css grid cheatsheet" three times a week like the rest of us?

> Does having experience implementing a web browser engine feature change the way you write HTML or CSS in any way? I think I'm more concious of what's performant in CSS. In particular, both Flexbox and CSS Grid like to remeasure things a lot by default, but this can be disabled with a couple of tricks: - For Flexbox, always set `flex-basis: 0` and `min-width: 0`/`min-height: 0` if you can without affecting the layou…

(Just say yes, you have to look it up all the time so we don't feel as bad)

Re: I tried Servo

#47

Post by johnisgood »

fhd2 wrote: post #39
johnisgood wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Mozilla benefits from Google's donations (the majority comes from Google), and being a counterpoint to Google's Chrome is bad for Google, which means less or no donations to Mozilla. Google holds the key here. They have leverage over Mozilla.

They don't get donations from Google, but get paid to include Google as the default search engine, right? No important difference though. Mozilla tried to switch to Yahoo a few years back and backpedaled. In terms of what users expect, they don't have a lot of options. Google OTOH could do without the users Firefox has left. And I've personally observed Google strong arm "partners". Not sure I see a conspiracy here,…

You are right, it is not a "donation", more like a business arrangement or something. I am not sure it is limited to "be the default search engine" though.

Re: I tried Servo

#48

Post by nicoburns »

piker wrote: post #37
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…

Do you not worry that instead it will lead to feature bloat and fragmentation? If you’re going to strike at Google, you need laser focus.

Not really. Everything has a spec, so it's pretty clear what's in scope and what isn't. Also, we don't have time for bloat with our team size. We have to be laser focussed on what actually makes a difference to real websites. It's Chrome that has bloat!

Also the specs don't change much (there are additions, but almost always backwards-compatible), so once written the code shouldn't need too much maintenance.

I see it as writing a piece of foundational infrastructure. You can write your own HTTP library. But you don't need to: there are high-quality libraries readily available (e.g. curl or hyper). Similarly for HTML parsers or 2D graphics rendering. Nobody's done that for web layout yet (except arguably React Native's Yoga [0], but that's much less ambitious in terms of how much of the spec it attempts to support), so everybody has to write their own. But it's possible so we're doing it.

[0]: github.com/facebook/yoga/

Re: I tried Servo

#49

Post by Certhas »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #2

It's still baffling to me that Mozilla threw out Firefox's technical future Very little about Mozilla makes sense --- until you follow the money.

I think Mozilla makes a lot of sense if you consider the following long term strategic goal: Become independent of Google money. None Google income has grown to 150M$ in 2023, up from 80M$ the year before. Mozilla has used dramatically more of the Google money to build up assets than it spends on advocacy or other projects that irl some people so. In 2023 they had 1B$ in investments. Net assets have been going up by 100M+ per year.

They are not yet in striking distance to truly become independent, but they are making significant steps in that direction. The share of Google money in their revenue went from 90% in 2020 to 75% in 2023.

I don't think following the money actually shows what you think it does.

As a postscript:

Damned if they do, damned if they don't. There were plenty of people at the time arguing that Firefox maintaining one independent browser engine was idiotic and they should just switch to Chromium like everyone else. People like to lambast Mozilla over relatively minor advocacy spending stuff and cry that it should just focus on Firefox, but insist it should have obviously continued with Servo. Even though Servo probably wouldn't have made a substantial difference to Firefox post Quantum for a very long time.

Re: I tried Servo

#50

Post by badsectoracula »

bobajeff wrote: post #22
camdroidw wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wrong to name names without prood but after a point you start doubting your understanding of the world and at this point I'm beginning to suspect Mitchell Baker is a plant

I think without Mitchell Baker there would probably not have been a Mozilla. I'm fuzzy on the history but I believe she was the lawyer who originally set up the organization.

AFAIK she also wrote the MPL, but the thing is, people change and doing good stuff 30 years ago doesn't mean they'd keep doing good stuff decades later.

In any case it doesn't really matter much anymore since apparently she left Mozilla around February.

Post reply on HN