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Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

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Re: Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

#3

Post by laerus »

k8svet wrote: post #2

I'd like to know how much Tauri is driving interest in Servo. I was ecstatic to see that Servo is using Tauri as a "test client" of sorts.

The plan is to see how viable Servo is as an alternative to WebView. If it works well I expect Tauri to provide an option to use Servo when building the app.

Re: Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

#5

Post by fyrn_ »

sa-code wrote: post #4

Wasn't servo's purpose to essentially be a testing ground for features that would eventually be pushed to Firefox?

Not really no, it was more to explore a greenfield web engine design, and also to use rust to do that. Not for user facing features as all, for one thing servo barely has a UI

Re: Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

#7

Post by Joeboy »

laerus wrote: post #3
k8svet wrote: post #2

I'd like to know how much Tauri is driving interest in Servo. I was ecstatic to see that Servo is using Tauri as a "test client" of sorts.

The plan is to see how viable Servo is as an alternative to WebView. If it works well I expect Tauri to provide an option to use Servo when building the app.

Which leads me to wonder, what would be the reason for doing that rather than just using the system WebView?

Re: Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

#8

Post by GuB-42 »

sa-code wrote: post #4

Wasn't servo's purpose to essentially be a testing ground for features that would eventually be pushed to Firefox?

That's what happened, but if I remember correctly, it was supposed to be an entirely new engine. I had a lot of hope for it, as the demo looked really promising at the time. It really was what Mozilla needed to get back on track, because to be honest, Firefox was pretty sucky when compared to Chrome at that time. I also liked the idea of inventing a whole programming language for that purpose (Rust), it reminded me of C/UNIX.

In the end, Firefox got better, and we have Rust, a great language on its own, but I think it could have been even better. And I was particularly disappointed when Mozilla laid off the Servo team, I feel they let go of the most important thing they had.

Re: Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

#9

Post by ephemeral-life »

Joeboy wrote: post #7
laerus wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plan is to see how viable Servo is as an alternative to WebView. If it works well I expect Tauri to provide an option to use Servo when building the app.

Which leads me to wonder, what would be the reason for doing that rather than just using the system WebView?

You won't have to worry about different engines and their edge cases. But at that point we are back to electron, but in rust.

Re: Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

#10

Post by Raicuparta »

Joeboy wrote: post #7
laerus wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The plan is to see how viable Servo is as an alternative to WebView. If it works well I expect Tauri to provide an option to use Servo when building the app.

Which leads me to wonder, what would be the reason for doing that rather than just using the system WebView?

I'm currently suffering the pains of developing a Tauri app that relies on the system WebView (which is the default for Tauri). It's unreliable (especially on Windows where people love to mess around and run "debloat" scripts), and causes slight differences on each platform. Tauri lets you bundle the WebView, but this causes the installer to grow like 150 MB. I presume this alternative would be a lot smaller.
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