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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

#91

Post by nickpsecurity »

digitalshankar wrote: post #7

Tried Servo in Linux, even though the browser is slow in starting up, the page was loading very fast and scrolling the page is butter smooth! This Servo with Rust will redefine Browser and i wish this will restore the Crown back to Mozilla Firefox!

The experience was pretty good for what they were doing. I found a critical bug in UI that I submitted. I enjoyed watching how quickly they tackled the bug even more than how quickly it was rendering the sites. They're doing great work. I might fire it up again in near future and put it through it's paces.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#92

Post by nwah1 »

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…

They invented a new font rendering engine based on the rust-based font-rs, called Pathfinder. Look into it, it seems to be progressing nicely.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#93

Post by kibwen »

hacker_9 wrote: post #84
kibwen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Improving HTML + CSS performance is absolutely one of the goals of Servo. Here's a video from pcwalton demonstrating reflow (HTML), repainting, and CSS animations on the GPU in Servo: https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/#... (much of this code is being uplifted to Firefox as WebRender). It's true that Servo won't have any effect on Javascript performance, but WASM won't have any effect on HTML…

I understand that, but the idea that HTML + CSS can only be sped up by some hugely parallel structure requiring a whole new programming language and browser engine is really quite shocking. I think once webassembly is established and in use, we will start to see steps in the direction of replacing HTML + CSS altogether, with something that has performance in mind.

If you mean throwing out the DOM entirely for something canvas-based, I'm sure that will happen in some cases but I'm very skeptical that it will ever be anything close to the dominant paradigm for the web.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#94

Post by aquadrop »

Ygg2 wrote: post #42
mundanevoice wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

First of, isn't V8 the JavaScript engine of Chrome? That's a bit apples to oranges comparison, no? One thing Servo didn't touch is JS Virtual machine, it's still SpiderMonkey. Rewriting that AND the layout engine would be suicidal.

And I think they didn't touch it because that's the place where they can't use advantage of parallel execution - javascript's model suppose that user's code is single threaded.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#95

Post by pekk »

UtherII wrote: post #87
hacker_9 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that, but the idea that HTML + CSS can only be sped up by some hugely parallel structure requiring a whole new programming language and browser engine is really quite shocking. I think once webassembly is established and in use, we will start to see steps in the direction of replacing HTML + CSS altogether, with something that has performance in mind.

A new programming language is not required, it's just a bonus to help developers handling safety and concurrency.

It seems like a valid point that many of the details of HTML and CSS, while you can use all kinds of fancy techniques to make them a little faster, impose limits on performance.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#96

Post by frik »

larsberg wrote: post #73
frik wrote: post #14

Can you also offer a Zip package? (portable) Why only this MSI package?

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

Thanks for the fast response and for creating the Github issue!

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#97

Post by Rusky »

uncletaco wrote: post #85
hacker_9 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Would web assembly help out with desktop web applications running on stuff like electron?

It can help there exactly as much as it can help non-desktop web apps.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#99

Post by 13years »

hacker_9 wrote: post #84
kibwen wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Improving HTML + CSS performance is absolutely one of the goals of Servo. Here's a video from pcwalton demonstrating reflow (HTML), repainting, and CSS animations on the GPU in Servo: https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/#... (much of this code is being uplifted to Firefox as WebRender). It's true that Servo won't have any effect on Javascript performance, but WASM won't have any effect on HTML…

I understand that, but the idea that HTML + CSS can only be sped up by some hugely parallel structure requiring a whole new programming language and browser engine is really quite shocking. I think once webassembly is established and in use, we will start to see steps in the direction of replacing HTML + CSS altogether, with something that has performance in mind.

If you listen to talks about the design architecture of Servo you will understand the HTML CSS is not the problem. It actually is an advantage when you want to build an engine that works like a high performance game engine.

Re: Servo nightly builds on Windows now available

#100

Post by kibwen »

pekk wrote: post #95
UtherII wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A new programming language is not required, it's just a bonus to help developers handling safety and concurrency.

It seems like a valid point that many of the details of HTML and CSS, while you can use all kinds of fancy techniques to make them a little faster, impose limits on performance.

It's true that the DOM is a bottleneck on many apps (I don't think anybody is disputing that), but "a little faster" undersells what Servo is trying to achieve: order-of-magnitude speedups on GPU-parallelizable tasks, and at least factor-of-two speedups on CPU-parallelizable tasks, all while providing stronger guarantees WRT user security than any contemporary browser.
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