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Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

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Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#61

Post by hsivonen »

Manishearth wrote: post #55
k__ wrote: 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?

We have: - Stylo, built by default, off by default - Webrender, built by default, off by default, current pref makes it render things through both engines. - rust-url for url parsing, built by default, off by default, current pref makes it parse through both parsers and compare. I intend to bring this across the finish line once done with stylo - encoding_rs for dealing with string encodings. built and on by default.…

A GitHub search suggests that Servo isn’t using encoding_rs.

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#62

Post by metajack »

infogulch wrote: post #47
NiLSPACE wrote: post #45

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?

There's a lot of refactoring to do in Gecko's graphics stack to fit the new rendering model. While they do that, they can also accelerate one thing at a time with WebRender, testing incrementally. Things like SVG which WebRender doesn't have yet, can also use the old system and be included in WebRender as images.

The old system will still be needed post-WebRender for printing at the very least.

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#64

Post by charrondev »

krzyk wrote: post #58
wodenokoto wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with in its current state as a WebKit alternative is that it lacks stable api. We don't see any gecko based apps like we see WebKit based apps (electron, etc) because gecko is so tightly developed around Firefox.

That's good. I don't see a point in having an app that embeds a browser to show an app. It's like having those silly Android apps that are just a wrapper around a web version of the service. If I want to use a web version I can do it using a browser of my choosing not the one developers want.

The browser rendering environment is only half of electron. Electron (and nw.js) provide a node.js / browser hybrid. You can use native node-modules, instead of browser-based workarounds and you have the same filesystem access a native application would have. You also have hooks into platform specific menu/dock/notifications.

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#65

Post by WorldMaker »

maxsilver wrote: post #18
wodenokoto wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back then I was a big fan of the concept and I really enjoyed songbird. I still think that building a html+javascript package, and have the default browser run it chromeless with some expanded privileges (or near chromeless) is a great approach for cross-platform apps, sadly it doesn't seem like anyone is working seriously on such an approach.

> I still think that building a html+javascript package, and have the default browser run it I think the thing that kills that approach is the default browser, which on Windows is IE 12 (Edge). Edge isn't actually that bad to work with these days. But almost no web developers will use that when they could ship Chromium / Electron just as easily and get the exact same browser on all three platforms. Even Microsoft's o…

I don't think Edge is the problem: the problem is IE11 and people clutching to Windows 7 until the bitter end and whether or not to support them.

You can see bits and pieces where Microsoft's teams are also experimenting with Node on ChakraCore and Electron on Edge.

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#66

Post by chairmanwow »

tolien wrote: post #25
chairmanwow wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm new to frontend in general and wondering if I could trouble you for some context. Why is Firefox's CSS styling engine not already "in" the browser? To me it seems like Stylo is just a parallelized replacement for the old system, Servo. What am I missing here? Also, why are you celebrating an alternative for WebKit? Isn't it already supported by most major browsers?

> Why is Firefox's CSS styling engine not already "in" the browser? It is, Firefox can do CSS and styles just now. Stylo is a replacement for that. > To me it seems like Stylo is just a parallelized replacement for the old system, Servo. What am I missing here? Servo isn’t the old system. Servo is a research project to build a layout engine (analogous to Gecko which Firefox currently uses) in Rust, of which Stylo is…

Thanks to you (and all the other commenters) for the detailed answers! I learned a lot!

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#67

Post by cptskippy »

tmzt wrote: post #46
cptskippy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Argh, sorry phone auto-corrected Webkit to Website.

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#69

Post by NiLSPACE »

metajack wrote: post #62
infogulch wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's a lot of refactoring to do in Gecko's graphics stack to fit the new rendering model. While they do that, they can also accelerate one thing at a time with WebRender, testing incrementally. Things like SVG which WebRender doesn't have yet, can also use the old system and be included in WebRender as images. The old system will still be needed post-WebRender for printing at the very least.

> The old system will still be needed post-WebRender for printing at the very least.

Isn't it possible to take a frame from WebRender and print that? Having two separate systems seems like allot of unnecessary maintenance. Especially if one of those systems is only used on rare occasions like printing.

Re: Stylo shipping in Firefox Nightly

#70

Post by blauditore »

eridius wrote: post #60
blauditore wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, I got it through `ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa` on Ubuntu, so this is generally a couple days behind? Did you download it manually?

Looks like that disables Servo at build time. Someone on Reddit had the same problem - https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/6p9t83/psa_you_can...

Indeed, same issue. Thanks for the pointer.
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