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Servo Nightly Builds Available

blog.servo.org

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Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#81

Post by pilif »

It's amazing to see actual effort taking place to build a new browser engine from scratch.

I would say that since the late 90ies, there hasn't been a single new engine being made. Everything we have now is a development based on KHTML, Gecko, Presto or Trident.

By now, HTML and the standards surrounding it have become so big that starting from a blank slate nowadays is next to impossible. The existing engines have it much easier as they are allowed to grow with the spec, but a new engine has to do everything from scratch.

This makes it even more impressive to see how far Servo is already (yes. I know - there's probably some overlap with some existing Mozilla code, but still).

Huge congrats to everyone involved. We need unafraid visionaries like you people to actually move the web forward.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#82

Post by reissbaker »

pimeys wrote: post #50

Is there an article somewhere comparing how Servo and Chromium threaded compositing differ? I guess there is some work on Chromium side to render pages using multiple threads, but I couldn't find more information and how it compares to Servo's mechanism.

The compositing is very different: Servo does almost everything on the GPU in "retained mode" as opposed to "immediate mode," which is much faster and similar to how modern game engines work. There's a good talk here explaining it here: https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#83

Post by Manishearth »

epidemian wrote: post #78
pcwalton wrote: post #2

Happy to answer questions (when I wake up; getting this ready has been a lot of work, needless to say) :) It goes without saying, but as this is the very first nightly (not by any means a full-fledged release), expect severe bugs, crashes, and missing functionality. Many of your favorite sites will be broken. Don't expect to use this as your everyday browser. We'd love feedback on what issues folks hit the most, so w…

Kudos on this milestone! A very general question: what's the high-level plan for Servo regarding Firefox? I see a lot of requests/issues dealing with stuff that doesn't seem related to a layout engine. Is the plan to have browser.html as a temporary incubator for Servo and eventually migrate it to replace FF's layout engine, or is it to "grow" an entire new browser around this new engine?

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation

There are efforts to make various components work in Firefox. The largest effort is "Stylo", which replaces Firefox's selector matching with ours. I'm not sure what the future is on Firefox using Webrender or our layout; though I suspect it depends on how well stylo works.

The plan seems to be to let Servo continue to evolve as a testbed for new ideas (like webrender), and share components with firefox whenever ready. An independent Servo product is not likely in the near future, since there's a lot of work to make it fully web compat. In the far future ... well, we can't tell :)

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#84

Post by lmm »

pekk wrote: post #74
pcwalton wrote: post #2

Happy to answer questions (when I wake up; getting this ready has been a lot of work, needless to say) :) It goes without saying, but as this is the very first nightly (not by any means a full-fledged release), expect severe bugs, crashes, and missing functionality. Many of your favorite sites will be broken. Don't expect to use this as your everyday browser. We'd love feedback on what issues folks hit the most, so w…

> expect severe bugs, crashes, and missing functionality. I really don't mean this in a snarky way: wasn't this kind of thing supposed to be obviated by the switch to Rust? It often seems that every other post about Rust on HN says that if it compiles, it works.

In pure Rust that never uses "unsafe", maybe. (Though even then, you only get memory safety; it's still possible to e.g. go into an infinite loop and use all CPU and/or memory).

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#85

Post by _pmf_ »

pilif wrote: post #81

It's amazing to see actual effort taking place to build a new browser engine from scratch. I would say that since the late 90ies, there hasn't been a single new engine being made. Everything we have now is a development based on KHTML, Gecko, Presto or Trident. By now, HTML and the standards surrounding it have become so big that starting from a blank slate nowadays is next to impossible. The existing engines have it…

Edge is a new engine, too.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#86

Post by kibwen »

epidemian wrote: post #78
pcwalton wrote: post #2

Happy to answer questions (when I wake up; getting this ready has been a lot of work, needless to say) :) It goes without saying, but as this is the very first nightly (not by any means a full-fledged release), expect severe bugs, crashes, and missing functionality. Many of your favorite sites will be broken. Don't expect to use this as your everyday browser. We'd love feedback on what issues folks hit the most, so w…

Kudos on this milestone! A very general question: what's the high-level plan for Servo regarding Firefox? I see a lot of requests/issues dealing with stuff that doesn't seem related to a layout engine. Is the plan to have browser.html as a temporary incubator for Servo and eventually migrate it to replace FF's layout engine, or is it to "grow" an entire new browser around this new engine?

browser.html is just the browser chrome (er, not to be confused with the browser Chrome), it's an independent Mozilla project to create a frontend entirely in web technologies, which, since these are all standardized, should theoretically work with any browser engine, not just Servo.

As for Firefox, later on this year we should see the integration of Servo's style engine ("Stylo") into Gecko, and going forward we should expect to see the two codebases share even more components. However, wholesale replacement of Gecko with Servo in Firefox isn't on the table at the moment.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#88

Post by iso-8859-1 »

_pmf_ wrote: post #85
pilif wrote: post #81

It's amazing to see actual effort taking place to build a new browser engine from scratch. I would say that since the late 90ies, there hasn't been a single new engine being made. Everything we have now is a development based on KHTML, Gecko, Presto or Trident. By now, HTML and the standards surrounding it have become so big that starting from a blank slate nowadays is next to impossible. The existing engines have it…

Edge is a new engine, too.

EdgeHTML is based on Trident: http://www.neowin.net/news/whats-powering-spartan-internet-e...

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#89

Post by rat87 »

_pmf_ wrote: post #85
pilif wrote: post #81

It's amazing to see actual effort taking place to build a new browser engine from scratch. I would say that since the late 90ies, there hasn't been a single new engine being made. Everything we have now is a development based on KHTML, Gecko, Presto or Trident. By now, HTML and the standards surrounding it have become so big that starting from a blank slate nowadays is next to impossible. The existing engines have it…

Edge is a new engine, too.

doesn't seem like it

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Edge#EdgeHTML

> EdgeHTML is a proprietary layout engine developed for Edge. It is a fork of Trident that has removed all legacy code of older versions of Internet Explorer and rewritten the majority of its source code with web standards and interoperability with other modern browsers in mind.

Re: Servo Nightly Builds Available

#90

Post by alex_duf »

IanCal wrote: post #77
pekk wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> expect severe bugs, crashes, and missing functionality. I really don't mean this in a snarky way: wasn't this kind of thing supposed to be obviated by the switch to Rust? It often seems that every other post about Rust on HN says that if it compiles, it works.

No language can fix missing functionality, that seems pretty clear. Your compiler doesn't know what you're trying to do, so you can't prevent all bugs. That leaves crashes, and ... well it may also depend on what you mean by a crash. The UI becomes unresponsive? Might have absolutely nothing to do with memory issues or even code written in rust. Maybe your rust code is fine but you're trying to open and write to the…

>Maybe your rust code is fine but you're trying to open and write to the same file from two places which you don't realise because the users file system is case insensitive but you've only tested on a case sensitive one, etc

That sounds too precise to be just an example :) We've all been there!

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