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Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

blog.servo.org

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Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#71

Post by larsberg »

Aissen wrote: post #64

Meanwhile, the Linux nightly build has been broken on all major distros for a while (see https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/12015 ), because the project won't bundle openssl. For a nightly. Which they already do for Firefox (all release channels). And of course, there are bundling it for this Windows nightly as well…

The awesome avadacatavra is working on a plan right now to move us off of OpenSSL: https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/7888#issuecomment-2934...

TBH, it's been hard to prioritize work to fix OpenSSL issues when we all knew it was going away from the dependency list. However, I don't think anybody anticipated the scope of work required to get there :-)

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#72

Post by youdontknowtho »

pcwalton wrote: post #19

A lot of the Servo work lately has been pushing specific components, in particular the style system and WebRender, toward production quality. (These are the parts that are being integrated into Gecko on an experimental basis.) This is all necessary work for Servo--for instance, we have to have an industrial-grade style system that passes all tests, no matter what. But it doesn't result in immediately-visible improvem…

I think what you guys are doing is really great. It's super exciting.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#74

Post by larsberg »

chaz6 wrote: post #6

A *.zip file would be useful for users who do not have admin privileges, as well as people who do not like giving elevated access to development software and who do not have access to a development computer nor a virtual environment.

Shouldn't be too bad - we already build the zip and would just need to upload it, too! https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/16437

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#75

Post by Aissen »

larsberg wrote: post #71
Aissen wrote: post #64

Meanwhile, the Linux nightly build has been broken on all major distros for a while (see https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/12015 ), because the project won't bundle openssl. For a nightly. Which they already do for Firefox (all release channels). And of course, there are bundling it for this Windows nightly as well…

The awesome avadacatavra is working on a plan right now to move us off of OpenSSL: https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/7888#issuecomment-2934... TBH, it's been hard to prioritize work to fix OpenSSL issues when we all knew it was going away from the dependency list. However, I don't think anybody anticipated the scope of work required to get there :-) Sorry for the inconvenience!

I understand, but then why bundle it for MacOS & Windows, and not Linux ? Couldn't they, too, wait for OpenSSL to go away ?

Note that I fully support using a clean rust-based TLS implementation. Given how young servo is, it will have time to mature before Servo becomes widely-deployed. I just think this is an orthogonal problem.

PS: thanks for taking the time to answer here and keep up the good work !

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#76

Post by tambourine_man »

phkahler wrote: post #60
tambourine_man wrote: post #59

We're all exited about Servo (and Rust) and I'm really looking forward to using it. But what makes software that's used everyday feel great are the small details. I can't use Chrome (for consumption, though I use it for development) because of the way it renders text and a few other UI annoyances. A browser is a lot of things, but to me, it's first and foremost a reading platform. So please, do whatever you can to us…

>> So please, do whatever you can to use the OS's native text rendering. That seems odd and would mean different quality on different platforms. Yes, if native is better than built-in then I agree. But what if their GL based text rendering is just fine, shouldn't they use it everywhere because it's portable?

I don't use Windows, so maybe GL text rendering is better there.

But on the Mac, light thin fonts on dark backgrounds look much better with Cocoa text on retina screen than anything else. That's why I can't use anything but Terminal.app, despite all the niceties other terminals provide.

Besides, I don't want to give up on the built in dictionary, spell checking, etc

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#77

Post by Sylos »

ruleabidinguser wrote: post #47

Does servo make any speed gains on machines that dont have dedicated gpus?

Not having a dedicated GPU doesn't mean not having a GPU at all. You still have a GPU, it's just built into the same chip as your CPU and at this point in time, it takes up about half of the surface area. This silicon stays nearly unused in other browser engines (only used for hardware-accelerating video decoding and such). Servo will make use of that and makes use of it in the same way that video games do (which is called "retained mode", as opposed to "immediate mode"), so yes, it should still cause a significant performance improvement. Basically, if you've ever wondered why you can run some games at multiple hundreds of FPS, but your browser doesn't manage 60 FPS when scrolling Wikipedia, this is the difference between retained mode and immediate mode, and therefore should be corrected by Servo.

Also, current browser engines don't utilize multi-core processors, which Servo does, so even if you don't have a GPU at all, it should even there provide significant performance gains.

Mind the difference here between "browser engine" and "browser". Most browsers by now do utilize multi-core processors, but they only do so to run multiple tabs or the GUI in parallel. The actual browser engine still only stays on one processor. And well, with HTML being structured like a tree, it's actually incredibly well suited for parallelization, as you can process individual subtrees in parallel.

(And if you're asking yourself why no modern browser engine does utilize multi-core processors, that's because all of them were architectured in the previous millennium when multi-core CPUs weren't really a thing on desktop PCs. Also, the web was still mostly text, which is why no browser engine properly uses the GPU. So, yes, it's high-time for a browser engine being written from scratch.)

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#78

Post by Sylos »

mundanevoice wrote: post #22
digitalshankar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking is easy, Coding is Hard. Servo is still the most important aspect of Mozilla in terms of Security and Speed, I really think after the full development it will definitely beat the Google Chrome.

Haha. As if there is no development going on in V8. Rewriting anything doesn't mean it will beat it's competitors.

No, rewriting alone doesn't make software great. But you have to realize that all modern browser engines started out before 2000. They were not built with multi-core processors in mind, nor with GPUs, as the web was still mostly text. And it does require rewriting a lot of things to change that architecture out. Google won't be able to compete with that in the long run just by continuously updating their browser engine.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#79

Post by notriddle »

hacker_9 wrote: post #67
AdamSC1 wrote: post #46

I'm really hopeful for this. The world needs a new browser engine, there is dwindling competition in this space and time and time again I find myself dissatisfied with browser offerings. I've tried every obscure browser out there, and many of them are great at specific things but nearly all of them lack a few key features or present an experience that frequently crashes. I think the Servo project is the biggest chanc…

> The world needs a new browser engine > As a non-dev I expect you are just responding to the inherent lack of performance that the javascript + html + css bundle shamelessly provides, which Servo will do nothing to sort out. Webassembly on the other hand is the first step to bringing superior performance to all browsers.

Servo doesn't really do anything for JavaScript (which is pretty much as fast as it's going to get, thanks to all the hard work of the V8, Spidermonkey, and SquirrelFish teams). But speeding CSS up is kind of the whole point of Servo.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#80

Post by floatboth »

Sylos wrote: post #77
ruleabidinguser wrote: post #47

Does servo make any speed gains on machines that dont have dedicated gpus?

Not having a dedicated GPU doesn't mean not having a GPU at all. You still have a GPU, it's just built into the same chip as your CPU and at this point in time, it takes up about half of the surface area. This silicon stays nearly unused in other browser engines (only used for hardware-accelerating video decoding and such). Servo will make use of that and makes use of it in the same way that video games do (which is…

> only used for hardware-accelerating video decoding and such

Not true. GPU layer compositing is implemented in all modern engines. That's how the CSS 3d transforms work. That's why the translateZ(0) hack existed to speed up animations (it created a new GPU layer. Now there's an official property for this, will-change.)

WebRender (used in Servo) goes a step further — it's not just compositing, it's actually rendering the colors, gradients, borders, shadows, rounded corners and so on in OpenGL. Look at the shaders: https://github.com/servo/webrender/tree/master/webrender/res

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