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I tried Servo

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Re: I tried Servo

#91

Post by Buttons840 »

jm4 wrote: post #74
Buttons840 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ye…

I couldn't find any information beyond that Tweet I linked.

Re: I tried Servo

#92

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

CivBase wrote: post #89
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it's impossible to get people to pay for it when you give them no way to pay for it.

You can donate, but who's going to pay $10 for beer when the same stuff is being given away for free?

No, you can't. You can donate to the Mozilla Foundation, but you cannot donate to the Mozilla Corporation to actually fund Firefox development.

Re: I tried Servo

#93

Post by mdaniel »

BrawnyBadger53 wrote: post #80
jonkoops wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There is more to a project this massive than its choice of language

For writing a game, or Figma replacement, or some cutesy something that runs on your machine without requiring network access, probably. For one of the most impactful applications that downloads untrusted code from the Internet and executes it without any confirmation whatsoever, the language for sure does matter. "Chrome RCE" is a phrase that strikes fear, and it's not a rare occurrence. I'll point out that Google is not lacking some of the most skilled security researchers and tooling in the world, so I wish the Ladybird folks godspeed doing their own "does this build have vulns?" work

Re: I tried Servo

#94

Post by Macha »

airstrike wrote: post #81
echelon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Questions for the Rust UX experts: Is Dioxus (or Leptos) much more performant than Tauri/Electron? I want to (1) build blindingly fast, low-latency, super performant UX for users, which precludes Tauri/Electron (something I'm currently using and unhappy about), but I also want to (2) maintain developer velocity, (3) have access to nice UX primitives and widgets, and (4) have it look nice and modern. Javascript/browse…

I'm super biased in favor of iced. Yes, there are missing features (it's not even version 1.0 yet!) but I think the number is very small now and the solution is usually to fill in the gaps yourself—which is possible because iced is totally modular I've made a spreadsheet editor and a slideshow editor with it so "slimmed down photoshop" seems feasible although admittedly you will likely need to get deep into the rende…

No support for RTL or CJK text, IMEs, or accessibility tools leaves it pretty firmly in the "toy" category for me for now, sadly.

This isn't meant to bash on the project specifically, basically the only tools that meet that criteria are platform native UIs, the web stack (including Electron), Qt and Flutter.

AccessKit is promising to change that but I haven't checked in a while how it's going. I did see GTK looking into it as a cross platform option as GTK's accessibility support only works on the Linux desktop currently

Re: I tried Servo

#95

Post by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF »

nicoburns wrote: post #15

> The current roadmap lists Shadow DOM and CSS Grid as priorities I've been working on the CSS Grid support. About to land "named grid lines and areas" support which should make a bunch more websites layout correctly. I'm biased because it's my project, but IMO the approach Servo is using for CSS Grid is pretty cool in that the actual implementation is in an external library (Taffy [0]) that can be used standalone an…

> breaking down a web engine into independently usable modules with public APIs

I love that. Years ago I looked at WebRTC and asked myself, why does it seem like making a crummy Skype knockoff is either 50 lines of JavaScript or a nightmarish week of trying to get half of Chromium to compile in your C++ project?

I think there is a WebRTC Rust crate finally, which is good. Web apps shouldn't be the only beneficiaries of all this investment

Re: I tried Servo

#96

Post by [deleted] »

calibas wrote: post #87
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'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...decided it wasn't worth pursuing any further. Google has been Mozilla's main source of revenue since around 2006. For Mozilla to exist, all they have to do is keep Google happy. It's kind of a nice deal for Mozilla, despite being a huge co…

[deleted]

Re: I tried Servo

#98

Post by iotku »

fabrice_d wrote: post #84
throw839340949r wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ladybird has better results in web rendering tests than Servo, and slowly is gaining on Firefox. They are already quite competitive.

Ladybird is extremely slow, it's far from being competitive at all.

They're prioritizing correctness to the spec over speed and are still 'officially' in pre-alpha. It's still to be determined how well they can bridge the gap there.

For casual web browsing it's plenty fast enough already to do a lot of things, but they're a relatively small team fighting against decades of optimization.

Re: I tried Servo

#99

Post by thoroughburro »

olalonde wrote: post #8
ObscureScience wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you think Firefox is making money, since it has no payed features? Hint: it has Google search as the default search engine.

That's my point... The fewer people use Firefox, the less money they get from Google. If you follow the money, it doesn't make sense for them to neglect Firefox.

You’re the one who didn’t follow the money: they’ve made more from Google as their market share has decreased. Neat incentive, huh?

Re: I tried Servo

#100

Post by thoroughburro »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #30
jqpabc123 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fewer people use Firefox, the less money they get from Google. You obviously haven't been following the money. The statistical global marketshare of Firefox is very close to that of Internet Explorer --- within a single rounding digit. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-05-05/why-go...

Firefox users just block trackers, that's why you don't see them.

No. Check Mozilla’s own numbers if you don’t believe tracking stats.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/user-activity

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