I tried Servo • Hacker News Board

Re: I tried Servo

#71

Post by windsurfer » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 2:12 PM UTC

paulryanrogers wrote: post #45

xpe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They integrated Pocket as a proprietary service in their open source product 2 years before Mozilla acquired it. Removing the integration required editing about:config. The complaints were mostly during that time.

Re: I tried Servo

#72

Post by mort96 » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 2:12 PM UTC

fouronnes3 wrote: post #63

nielsbot wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish there was a CSS analyzer that would give tips like this based on your CSS.

Or a straight up fork of CSS that removes the legacy stuff and fixes wrong defaults so that tips like this are unnecessary in the first place.

I don't think it's necessarily a wrong default, just one which prioritizes usability/ease of programming over performance.

Re: I tried Servo

#73

Post by skinkestek » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 2:13 PM UTC

Certhas wrote: post #49

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…

The majority of Mozilla’s revenue came through Firefox—their flagship product and by far their most recognized project.

And yet, somehow, they still struggle to secure adequate funding for Firefox itself, while millions are allocated to executive salaries and various advocacy initiatives.

Re: I tried Servo

#74

Post by jm4 » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 2:14 PM UTC

Buttons840 wrote: post #67

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.

Looks interesting, but they're going to try writing it in Swift? If you're writing a browser engine in C++, I may not like it, but I can see that you're pragmatic and are focused on the end result rather than the language. If you're writing it in Rust, okay, you maybe have your eyes on that pie in the sky, but you've chosen a language that, at least potentially, has the ability to replace C++ in creating bedrock soft…

You should look into why they chose it and what their implementation plan is. They evaluated multiple languages, including rust. There were some specific issues with rust that made it unsuitable for them. Swift was a bit of a dark horse candidate that the developers ended liking.

There is no immediate plan to switch to anything so it’s still C++. They may not ever switch. Swift’s cross platform support isn’t there yet and that’s a prerequisite.

Re: I tried Servo

#75

Post by bobajeff » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 2:17 PM UTC

f311a wrote: post #36

Gualdrapo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still strongly believe Servo can be a real counterpoint to Chrome/Chromium's hegemony in the long haul. Not sure why Mozilla ditched it nor why The Linux Foundation gives little to no support at all to it.

WebKit is a nice competitor, too. Look at Orion browser, it's a pretty decent competitor. Although they only target macOS, WebKit can be used on Windows and Linux, too.

Webkit on Linux is in terrible shape. Maybe in theory it could be a complete and useable engine but there clearly isn't enough interest to make it that way.

Re: I tried Servo

#76

Post by skinkestek » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 2:17 PM UTC

nicce wrote: post #69

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #65

I feel like Mozilla is going to join the annals of history with the likes of Xerox in the category of "Companies that created the technology of the future and casually tossed it to the wayside for competitors to scoop up" with Rust and Servo. It's mind-boggling that for a company so often seemingly playing catch-up with Google, Mozilla actually leapfrogged Google in the browser development space for a time, and then.…

It is difficult to get people to pay for it. People happily pay for 10€ beer but asked ”friends” about how to bypass WhatsApp’s 0,99 lifetime licenses.

Some did. Some like me lined up eagerly to pay the $1 yearly license and would have been happy to pay for my family too.

Re: I tried Servo

#77

Post by ninetyninenine » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 2:20 PM UTC

I feel guis have taken a wrong turn. We need a simple composable language. I want entire theorems built from the least amount of axioms possible.

HTML and css is not it. The sheer complexity is what causes all the bs.

Re: I tried Servo

#78

Post by chimeracoder » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 2:21 PM UTC

paulryanrogers wrote: post #45

xpe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

They bought Pocket to assuage complaints from people that they were "selling out" by including an optional button in Firefox (which never even loaded any code until it was clicked) that allowed you to set up an integration with your Pocket account and send articles there. They were clear that no data was sent to a third party unless you explicitly clicked it and went through the steps to set it up.

Despite that, purists were unhappy that Firefox was doing literally anything at all with a third party, so Mozilla decided to buy Firefox in an attempt to put those complaints to rest, since it would no longer be a third party.

In the end, those purists didn't stop complaining - they just moved on to different complaints. If you're curious to see for yourself, you can look up the conversations on HN and cross-reference the usernames against other topics involving OSS purism and Firefox.

In the end, everyone lost: longtime Pocket users lost a product that they had enjoyed because it got acquired by a company that never really had an active interest in the product itself, Firefox lost because of the negative PR which contributes to their declining market share, and Mozilla lost because of the massive waste of money this was.

Re: I tried Servo

#79

Post by lesuorac » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 2:22 PM UTC

Certhas wrote: post #49

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…

At what point could FireFox had just invested the money from Google into the SP500 and then just ran the company off of passive income?

Like for 150M$ I bet you could fund browser development for at least a decade and that was just 1 year of income. (of course also burn the entire $150M).

Re: I tried Servo

#80

Post by BrawnyBadger53 » Thu, Jul 31, 2025, 2:23 PM UTC

jonkoops wrote: post #68

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 have to be honest that I don't really understand the appeal of Ladybird from a purely technical perspective. It is written in C++, just like all the existing engines (yes there is some Swift, but it is negligible), so what benefit does it provide over Gecko or Blink? With Servo, I can see there is a distinct technical design around security and parallelism.

There is more to a project this massive than its choice of language. For me though it's mostly about breaking from the monopoly and putting a check on Google's influence over browser space.