[HN Gopher] Servo's new home
___________________________________________________________________
Servo's new home
Author : gbrown_
Score : 754 points
Date : 2020-11-17 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.servo.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.servo.org)
| exikyut wrote:
| Wow, this is awesome.
|
| - Mozilla engineering finally gets the green light to beat Chrome
| through a from-scratch rendering stack
|
| - This skunkworks initative popularizes the world's first viable
| C++ contender and interesting "mainstreamable" programming
| language
|
| - Manglement suddenly lays off the teams responsible for both
| projects (Rust and Servo)
|
| - Some awesome person from the trenches convinces said manglement
| to release governance of the rendering engine so it can be
| developed independently ((of said manglement))...
|
| - ???
|
| - Profit...?
|
| This is real engineering and strategic problem solving. It's
| inspiring to see.
|
| What _is_ very annoying is that a Mozilla-branded web browser
| already took the "Phoenix" product name. :(
| pqoek wrote:
| Why is Mozilla not betting on Rust anymore?
| untog wrote:
| It seems like they're just not placing big bets now. Creating
| an entire new programming language is a big bet, one that I'd
| argue already looks like it's paid off, but Mozilla has
| decided their future is as a much leaner company that does
| fewer experiments. It really is a shame.
| baq wrote:
| the CEO needs a new house.
| satyrnein wrote:
| She's hardly the most overpaid CEO in tech, but she seems
| to come up pretty often for some reason.
| simias wrote:
| Some people have an axe to grind with Mozilla since that
| whole Brendan Eich thing, and on top of that there's just
| good old sexism.
|
| This all contributes to create a very toxic subject that
| I generally tend to avoid, but I think that it's fair at
| this point to question Mozilla's execs results at this
| point. These past few years have been pretty brutal for
| Mozilla, and there's no clear path ahead from where I
| stand.
| pqoek wrote:
| > good old sexism
|
| The only comment mentioning her gender was someone
| defending her, you're pulling hair here
| jamienicol wrote:
| yes because one can only be sexist by explicitly
| mentioning gender
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > for some reason
|
| This isn't a mystery. Mozilla accept donations. It isn't
| an ordinary for-profit corporation.
|
| Yes, they separate Mozilla Corporation from Mozilla
| Foundation, but the point stands. If Mozilla are going to
| claim to _make browsers, apps, code and tools that put
| people before profit_ , [0] they should expect backlash
| when they lay off engineers while continuing to overpay
| their leadership, despite continuing poor outcomes under
| their stewardship. [1]
|
| [0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/
|
| [1] http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Mozilla has decided to move to a different mission less about
| improving the web and more about enacting things that make
| them money, so they can continue to pay a large CEO salary
| and push policy objectives against free speech.
|
| Unfortunately Mozilla seemed to go from "awesome" to really
| disappointing in a very short time window.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Mozilla currently cares more about surviving than its main
| mission. And yes, it can't accomplish its mission if it
| dies, but don't they understand? If Mozilla falls, another
| will take its place.
|
| The way to kill Mozilla is from the inside: to quash its
| soul.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > If Mozilla falls, another will take its place.
|
| Yes, another chrome skin perhaps?
| munificent wrote:
| _> Mozilla currently cares more about surviving than its
| main mission._
|
| In the open market, any organization that doesn't cares
| more about its survival than its mission will eventually
| be replaced by one that does. This is fundamental to the
| definition of "survival".
|
| _> If Mozilla falls, another will take its place._
|
| The one that will take its place will be an organization
| that prioritizes survival, not its mission.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Organisations are made of people. There are enough people
| who care about Mozilla's mission that they'd do the
| things even if Mozilla didn't, and if they got together
| they could get at least 10% of the funding from non-
| Google people who currently donate to Mozilla, if Mozilla
| ceased to exist.
|
| The only real downside is that they wouldn't have a seat
| on the WHATWG.
| runarberg wrote:
| > _pay a large CEO salary_
|
| Sure, I'll buy that.
|
| > _push policy objectives against free speech_
|
| Can people please stop this latent homophobia? Mozilla
| fired a person who donated money to a deplorable cause. You
| can try to hide behind free speech, but we all know what
| this is about.
| BearOso wrote:
| > Can people please stop this latent homophobia? Mozilla
| fired a person who donated money to a deplorable cause.
| You can try to hide behind free speech, but we all know
| what this is about.
|
| He quit. And I don't agree with it, but I wouldn't
| exactly call his cause deplorable. People with those
| views can believe they're being completely ethical. That
| was also in 2008, a different political climate, and
| nobody allowed him to learn from it or to restitute.
|
| Of course, I agree that wasn't their downfall--it was
| simply misdirected goals and funding.
| dralley wrote:
| >He quit. And I don't agree with it, but I wouldn't
| exactly call his cause deplorable.
|
| The purpose of Proposition 8 was to remove the right to
| marry from gay couples - yes remove - because the courts
| had already granted them that right.
|
| If I was a gay Mozilla employee and I learned that my CEO
| wanted to remove rights which the legal system had
| already granted me, I would be so incredibly demoralized
| and pissed.
|
| Regardless of personal beliefs, it's a bad thing for a
| leader of a tech company to be doing if they want to
| retain talent.
| nnethercote wrote:
| It was a really weird and messy situation, and unpleasant
| to live through.
|
| I agree that Brendan's Prop 8 donation was bad. But he
| did it privately, and never (AFAIK) made anti-LGBT
| comments in public. People who had worked with him for
| many years were surprised to find he had these views. It
| was only found out because of political donation public
| disclosure laws.
|
| Some Mozilla employees publicly criticized Brendan for
| the Prop 8 donation, but some defended him, because of
| the aforementioned privateness of it. A number of the
| defenses came from LGBT employees.
|
| The pile-on at the time was _intense_. It lasted more
| than a week. It reached the front page of my local paper.
| Crazy stuff.
|
| Brendan chose to stand down as CEO and also quit Mozilla.
| He wasn't fired, and Mozilla leadership asked him to
| stay.
|
| All this nuance was lost. Lots of left-leaning people
| concluded that Mozilla had knowingly promoted a proudly
| anti-LGBT guy to CEO. Lots of right-leaning people
| concluded that Mozilla had fired their CEO for his
| political views. Both conclusions were greatly over-
| simplified. Almost everyone found a reason to hate
| Mozilla. Bad times!
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Wow, that is a hugely loaded statement. Even if it is 100%
| true, the level of derision and bias should make any person
| not familiar with the situation question everything you
| say.
|
| If you're going to be that biased, at least back it up. And
| by back it up, I mean at LEAST throwing in some statements
| of fact, if not URLs.
| coldpie wrote:
| Every thread tangentially related to Mozilla has a bunch
| of people who don't understand how non-profits work come
| in and complain about executive compensation.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| I'd say >$2.4M in exec comp[1] isn't just making up for a
| lack of stock options.
|
| [1] - https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-cuts-70-staff-as-
| part-of-p...
| coldpie wrote:
| The absolute number doesn't matter. Non-profits
| participate in the same labor market as for-profit
| companies. You have to compare it to executive salaries
| for other similarly sized companies in their market
| segment to make the argument that she is overpaid.
| Otherwise you're just arguing against income inequality,
| which is not a problem exclusive to Mozilla, and
| crippling Mozilla's ability to participate in that labor
| market will not fix it.
| shi314 wrote:
| Does Mozilla compete with for profit companies for C
| suite market? Which technology intensive company hire a
| CEO who is lawyer by profession and hasn't had any
| redeeming resume for management and technology. If you
| look at firefox's market share, the only growth it had
| was when she was not a CEO. Seriously, Mozilla is not
| competing with for profit companies in C suite labor
| market.
| pqoek wrote:
| > The pay for Mozilla Chair and longtime leader Mitchell
| Baker in 2018, the most recent year for which the
| organization released the information, surpassed $2.4
| million.
| [deleted]
| simias wrote:
| What even is Mozilla betting on at this point?
| lastontheboat wrote:
| We've been cagey about this over the months since the Servo team
| at Mozilla was disbanded, since there were various moving pieces
| that needed to fall into place. We're excited about the
| possibility for Servo to continue growing and evolving in its new
| home, though!
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Tangent: is your username in combination with that comment a
| reference to the Mozilla Lifeboat?
| webmaven wrote:
| I don't imagine this is news to you, but just in case, the
| 'Contributing' link 404s.
| codys wrote:
| Can you talk a bit about the "moving pieces" and/or the process
| here? Interested in the process of doing this type of
| migration.
| wiz21c wrote:
| Hmmm Well, I'm not in the business, but if the team was
| disbanded, then where's the knowledge gone and who will be the
| next paid team ? I ask because I guess Servo is not the kind of
| project you just commit some patch over the weekend...
| erickt wrote:
| This is great news! I'm glad Servo found a place to land. Are
| you planning on sticking with the MPL-2.0 license, or are you
| also considering relicensing as well?
| [deleted]
| lastontheboat wrote:
| There is no plan to relicense at this time.
| simias wrote:
| What's the plan exactly? Will there be a Servo browser that
| integrates the servo rendering engine with some open source
| components (for instance from Firefox, WebKit or Chromium) that
| will let us use the engine stand-alone, or is it "just" going
| to be an engine for embedding in third-party programs?
|
| The former seems like it would be a huge amount of work, but if
| it's the latter I fear for the long term survival of the
| project because it's going to be hard to build a community
| around such a project IMO.
|
| Or is there a possibility that Firefox will try to integrate
| Servo even if it's developed outside of Mozilla? Seems unlikely
| to me.
| LockAndLol wrote:
| The latter would be better, imo.
|
| Chromium won because it introduced a sane API before
| Mozilla's Gecko. That's why you see so many Electron apps.
| Seriously, we don't need to wrap a whole browser. Just the
| engine and a debugger would've been fine.
|
| The engine could be distributed as a lib and other frameworks
| could just bind it. Apps could be distributed without an
| 150MB behemoth just to have a chat client.
|
| Making the engine also mobile compatible would mean Android
| and iOS could maybe have the same base. I also look forward
| to what this means for Linux phones. Custom browsers could be
| written for those that don't have to use WebKit or try to
| launch Chromium or Firefox on a mobile device.
|
| Not only for mobile devices, but also displaying things in VR
| can be made significantly easier if you don't have to write
| all the UI yourself. Give it an opengl rectangular surface
| (or vulkan?) and you can then use web technologies to make
| UIs in VR.
|
| All in all, I'm very for an engine. It would definitely allow
| a competitor with a good name to enter the market. Developer
| should be able to reach for something else than WebKit
| because nobody in their right mind is going to reach for
| Gecko.
| smnthermes wrote:
| > That's why you see so many Electron apps. Seriously, we
| don't need to wrap a whole browser
|
| Actually, Electron wraps an entire browser, except for its
| UI part.
| an_opabinia wrote:
| It's tough. People really do want Flash, it's just Google
| Chrome now.
|
| The bigger question is when will Mobile Safari retire its
| WebKit fork? What role will Servo play in that inevitable end
| point?
| bsimpson wrote:
| Apple founded WebKit, so I doubt it will retire its
| repository.
|
| Are you asking for iOS and macOS Safari to converge, or for
| Apple to ship straight from the open-source HEAD?
| satya71 wrote:
| Apple forked WebKit from KDE KHTML.
| bsimpson wrote:
| They aren't mutually exclusive.
|
| WebKit was originally based on KHTML, but Apple still
| founded WebKit and controls its source code. Even if
| WebKit was just Apple's name for their internal fork of
| KHTML, I don't see any reason they'd retire it.
|
| Blink was originally spun-out of WebKit too. Similarly,
| Google controls Blink, and the two have diverged
| significantly in the intervening years. I suspect patches
| for any of them won't apply cleanly to the other two.
|
| Regardless of their origins; KHTML, WebKit, and Blink are
| now independent pieces of software.
|
| It's still unclear to me why anyone should expect Apple
| to retire WebKit for iOS.
| nvrspyx wrote:
| A third-option that I would like to see is extending the
| latter to an Electron alternative (aka using Servo as a
| cross-platform GUI). There's definitely positives to
| Electron, but it would be nice to see a more performant, less
| memory hungry, and more battery friendly alternative.
| chubot wrote:
| Has anyone tried Cobalt? It looks like something based on
| it could be an alternative to Electron.
|
| https://cobalt.foo/
|
| It's meant for embedded but that probably just means it's
| easy to build and uses low memory.
|
| _A high-performance, small-footprint platform that
| implements a subset of HTML5 /CSS/JS to run applications,
| including the YouTube TV app._
| spankalee wrote:
| Cobalt lags on modern web APIs pretty badly. I wouldn't
| recommend it.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Cobalt is definitely not for someone like you.
| spankalee wrote:
| I have to make code work in Cobalt as part of my job.
| You?
| kortilla wrote:
| Parent was tone deaf but the point is that if you want a
| bunch of cutting edge APIs then Cobalt isn't really for
| you. It's light weight.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I write compositors, like the one you work with. Wanna
| compare some more?
| dang wrote:
| Hey, please don't be a jerk in HN comments. If you know
| more than others, that's great, but the thing to do is to
| share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn
| something. If you don't want to do that, not posting
| anything is always an option. But please don't post
| unsubstantive comments and especially not nasty
| unsubstantive comments.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I welcome you to go read the rest of my posts in this
| thread and get back to me on whether or not my posts are
| substantive, thanks!
| dang wrote:
| I didn't mean that all of your posts were that way, only
| some of them.
| chubot wrote:
| Can you elaborate on that?
|
| To be clear I wasn't suggesting that Cobalt is a
| replacement for Electron. Electronic has a lot of its own
| APIs too.
|
| Rather, I wonder if Cobalt could be better than Servo
| along some dimensions as an engine for something like
| Electron.
| devwastaken wrote:
| Servo last time I checked used the same if not more memory
| (100MB) for basic pages. There doesn't appear to be major
| differences for that application yet.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Why should there be any great difference? Firefox is
| already written in a language where compilers have been
| optimized since decades.
|
| Rust will not bring that magic.
| alexusgracia wrote:
| Yap, it's magic
| sergiomattei wrote:
| This is also my concern. Everyone's cheering on, but I'm just
| thinking... What's the mission and end goal now?
|
| Previously it was doing research, with the possibility of
| landing in Firefox. Now that's highly unlikely.
| jfk13 wrote:
| Is it really so unlikely? Firefox integrates all kinds of
| components from elsewhere; why shouldn't it continue
| adopting parts of Servo where appropriate?
| cogman10 wrote:
| Seems just more unlikely.
|
| It's one thing for a mozilla team member to say "Hey,
| let's pull the servo css layout engine into firefox" It's
| a whole different thing for someone to say "Hey, let's
| pull the webkit css layout engine into firefox".
|
| The servo stuff, while for experimentation, was
| ultimately geared towards the notion of landing parts of
| it into firefox. It was built for that. Under an
| opensource foundation maintainer model, there's a strong
| possibility that it moves from that as a goal.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I would still expect servo to at loosely remain "firefox
| shaped", at least far more than the separately-developed
| webkit lineage.
| smnthermes wrote:
| The true difference is that Servo is more modular than
| WebKit.
| eznzt wrote:
| So the Servo developers will now work for free but
| Mozilla will start to leech from it? That would be
| uncool.
| DominoTree wrote:
| It's an open-source project - a lot of us have already
| been working for free :)
| danShumway wrote:
| > Servo's high-level goals remain unchanged: to provide a
| high-performance, safe rendering engine for embedding in
| other applications.
|
| This is exactly what I want their goals to be. Embedding
| Chromium in applications is cumbersome, bloat applications,
| etc...
|
| In the long run, having more options of web renders to use
| will help with everything, including browsers. Maybe it
| won't all be pulled into Firefox, but (ignoring all the
| other problems with DRM/regulation/anticompetive
| behavior/etc) it'll at least make it a little easier for
| other people to build browsers, and it opens the door for
| us to have more lightweight alternatives to applications
| like Electron.
| kodablah wrote:
| This is a big one for me. I have to use CEF because it's
| the only easily embeddable engine for me.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| With respect to the latter, I agree that it seems unlikely
| that the project would attract users. Maybe it's my own
| ignorance, but I don't know what kind of apps (besides web
| browsers) would want just the web rendering engine and not
| various other components in a web browser. What are the
| responsibilities of a "web rendering engine" anyway? How
| tightly coupled is it to the DOM? Does it "own" the DOM, or
| is that owned by some other component in the browser? In the
| latter case, how are the relevant aspects of the DOM
| communicated to servo? And does the rest of the web engine
| query servo for things (e.g., "what are the exact coordinates
| of this <div>?")? If this engine ends up not being so web-
| specific, then maybe it could be used as a replacement for
| Skia, more or less.
| akiselev wrote:
| You send Servo raw display lists, which is a format
| tailored specifically to represent the DOM but it acts like
| a generic slicing compositor in practice. It's not coupled
| in the classical sense - the display lists represent
| shapes, colors, stacks, rounded borders, etc..
|
| It's more like Skia and can be used to develop GUI
| frameworks (which is exciting because Servo is Rust and
| Rust's GUI story is still in its early stages).
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Thanks for that explanation. From the website, it wasn't
| quite clear to me (and still isn't tbh) whether servo is
| merely a rendering or also a CSS layout (+ parsing etc)
| engine.
| mst wrote:
| The Servo CSS engine is what powers Stylo to handle CSS
| in Firefox Quantum.
| szundi wrote:
| Very true, just wanted to find out what it is and not
| easy.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying. This is exciting indeed! Are you
| aware of usage outside of browsers?
| networkimprov wrote:
| I looked for a list of projects currently embedding Servo, or
| planning to, but didn't find one.
|
| Is any software embedding it now?
| kbumsik wrote:
| Servo is not production ready yet. So no software would use
| it for now.
| networkimprov wrote:
| Plenty of pre-production software is built with pre-
| production dependencies.
|
| Does it not work for a useful subset of HTML/CSS?
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Kinda hard when they don't even tell you how.
| roadbeats wrote:
| While this is great news on one hand, on the other hand, how
| could Mozilla manage to lose its browser engine project ? If a
| web browser company can't even keep its browser engine project,
| what is really Mozilla working on these days ?
| randomdata wrote:
| A VPN service, apparently.
|
| https://vpn.mozilla.org
| p0nce wrote:
| It's really a classic situation, the greenfield project is
| stopped and the historical "old" project keeps going on.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Mozilla is still obviously working on Gecko, which is the
| browser engine powering Firefox. You can check the activity
| here for instance: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev
| webmaven wrote:
| This is encouraging. An Electron competitor would be really nice.
|
| I'd be _especially_ interested in an Electron-but-for-Python,
| along the lines of PythonWebkit:
| https://www.gnu.org/software/pythonwebkit/
| olah_1 wrote:
| The rust electron competitor is already here
| https://tauri.studio/en/
| webmaven wrote:
| Nice!
|
| Okay, so now I want Tauri-but-for-Python.
| Nkuna wrote:
| Interesting project as they seem to be tackling the same
| problem as the Flutter team whom started with mobile and are
| steadily working their way up the stack.
|
| Though it should be said repurposing a desktop first
| framework for a mobile paradigm is much harder than the
| inverse.
|
| Cheers for this. Definitely keeping tabs on the project.
| MrAlex94 wrote:
| This is great news! Really nice to see another browser engine out
| there being developed. Hope to be able to use this in a project
| one day in the future and all the best to the team - quite a feat
| how far Servo has come in supporting web standards in such a
| short span of time (comparatively).
| david-cako wrote:
| seems like a great step for Rust adoption in the Linux community!
| emteycz wrote:
| Awesome news! The world needs another prominent browser engine
| that browser vendors would want to use, and detaching Servo from
| Mozilla makes it better positioned for that task IMHO. I'm also
| very happy that work on Webrender continues. I love what you're
| doing guys!
| SimonSapin wrote:
| For what it's worth, these days WebRender is mostly being
| worked on by the Firefox graphics team at Mozilla.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| As long as it still works for both!
| LockAndLol wrote:
| Should we start calling it Servo by Linux now?
| blitblitblit wrote:
| Servo Rust Kernel(tm) ... coming soon to a hacked up Linux
| kernel near you.
| bartvk wrote:
| What's the connection to Linux?
| SimonSapin wrote:
| The Linux Foundation is a legal and fiscal host for many
| projects, not just the kernel:
| https://www.linuxfoundation.org/projects/
| JustFinishedBSG wrote:
| The Linux Foundation ?
| dathinab wrote:
| It's now part of the Linux Foundation.
|
| (through that's all there is to it, calling it "by Linux"
| would still be misguided I think as the foundation is named
| after Linux and not the other way around)
| [deleted]
| cute_boi wrote:
| Very good news for Rust.
| triptych wrote:
| We are seeing the birth of a new browser ( age )
| Communitivity wrote:
| Overjoyed to see this, and best wishes to the team. Looking
| forward to seeing the future of Servo, and possibly contributing.
|
| I see Servo as a great Electron alternative. And I think
| eventually it could become a browser, though I understand that at
| least as of a few months ago that wasn't the plan.
| eitland wrote:
| > or donating to help cover the project's new CI and hosting
| costs,
|
| Planning to do exactly that tonight.
|
| I'm one of those who stopped donating to Mozilla once I realized
| none of the money donated could ever be used for developing the
| browser.
|
| If anybody else thought like me tonight might be a good time to
| prove we were principled, not cheap.
|
| Edit: one more thing. Hopefully at some time we can now recreate
| Firefox with a new name, a new engine and a new, safe but also
| complete extension API that allows us to recreate what we've lost
| over the last few years.
|
| Edit2: done.
| LockAndLol wrote:
| > I'm one of those who stopped donating to Mozilla once I
| realized none of the money donated could ever be used for
| developing the browser.
|
| I never donated to Mozilla for this precise reason. Now I'm
| seriously considering it.
|
| Edit: Done
| ygjb wrote:
| The irony is that from both of these comments it implies you
| have a concern about the future and the stability of Firefox
| as both an open source project, and it's role in preventing a
| browser monoculture.
|
| Setting aside concerns about leadership, because IMO it's
| time for most of the current leadership to retire and make
| space for more innovative folks, Mozilla needs two things to
| preserve Firefox and Gecko, money and relevance. The have had
| numerous misfires on diversifying revenue, and they have been
| challenged on how to do that for a long time, but MoCo
| (Mozilla Corporation) has been profitable for quite some time
| due to the business deals with Google. That funds Firefox and
| many other related projects.
|
| The other thing that Mozilla needs is relevance, and over and
| above the presence of Firefox, MoFo (Mozilla Foundation) has
| played an activist role across many different initiatives,
| standards bodies, and lobbying. That requires money, and
| because of the legal manoeuvring that Mozilla has done in
| structuring MoFo and MoCo it requires that Mozilla Foundation
| be largely self-funding.
|
| Donations help with that, and pay for relevance in a way that
| Firefox alone can't. Please rethink the hostility towards
| donating to Mozilla Foundation.
| LockAndLol wrote:
| If Mozilla were serious about Firefox and privacy, they'd
| move it to the Foundation, allow direct donations, remove
| all the Googleware, Pocket and whatever else they
| unnecessarily shoved into Firefox + all the problems you
| stated.
|
| I'm not going to consider affirming bad leadership by
| giving them money. Mozilla Corp employees aren't locked
| into anything (unless they signed really shitty contracts).
| They can leave and rebuild.
|
| Servo might finally provide the foundation for a browser
| that really is about privacy and not just a cash-cow for a
| bloated upper echelon.
| jamienicol wrote:
| what googleware is in Firefox, and what impact does
| pocket have on your privacy?
| LockAndLol wrote:
| Google is the default search engine of a "privacy aware"
| browser. It uses Google Safe browsing which, from what I
| understand, is practically an embedded call home to
| Google for each new domain you visit. For quite a while
| they were using Google as the default location provider.
|
| Pocket was an unnecessary acquisition that wasted money
| for an opt-out solution to... I don't even know what
| problem. The money spent on acquiring it could've gone
| into more developers, technical writers, testers, etc.
| Clickz (or however it's written) was also an unnecessary
| fail investment.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I don't see any irony there; people care about firefox, and
| there is literally no way to donate money to develop
| firefox. _Maybe_ donating to the foundation sorta
| indirectly helps firefox, but a reasonable person could
| easily view them as mostly unrelated.
| ygjb wrote:
| Sure, you can donate money to develop Firefox, but it's
| not a core part of Mozilla's business model to support
| that. Instead you would need to track down an OSS
| developer that is either an active contributor, or who is
| willing to work on Firefox, and then sponsor their work
| through a number of different contributor pathways. There
| are Github sponsorships, direct funding, or any of the
| options here - https://itsfoss.com/open-source-funding-
| platforms/
|
| It's not easy because supporting open source contributors
| is hard, and Mozilla is trying to keep their staff
| focused on corporate and foundation priorities.
|
| Even if users could directly donate money to develop
| Firefox, the implication is that any such donations
| should only be used for Firefox development, when in
| practice, shipping a modern browser in a way that is
| competitive requires an enormous amount of non-"Firefox"
| related work (safe browsing, sync, telemetry, marketing
| ,release engineering work, advocacy, documentation, etc,
| etc, etc). Earmarking donations for engineering work is
| kind of silly in the context of an OSS project designed
| to compete with some of the largest juggernauts in the
| industry.
| syshum wrote:
| >> Please rethink the hostility towards donating to Mozilla
| Foundation
|
| Once Mozilla rethink;s its hostility to its user base maybe
| the user base will rethink its hostility towards Mozilla
|
| Mozilla left us, we did not leave Mozilla
| zerocrates wrote:
| I suppose it depends on your definition of self-funding (or
| possibly of "largely"): the Foundation receives roughly
| half its total income from the Corporation, in the form of
| license fees for trademarks. Of course both figures are
| drops in the bucket compared to the Corporation's revenue.
| I don't know if that "half and half" nature is coincidence,
| an internal directive, or necessary to maintain their tax-
| exempt status, but it's pretty consistent.
|
| For-profit entities can, of course, lobby and sit on
| standards bodies just fine. We certainly see plenty of that
| behavior from the other vendors.
|
| I'm not saying the Foundation is worthless or that people
| shouldn't donate to it, just that they should know what
| they're paying for and what they're not.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Donations to a corrupt organization helps to make it even
| more corrupt. Just look at any destroyed country where
| ,,outside help'' is coming. Stopping the money flow is the
| only way to change corrupt management to people who care
| even if there's less money involved.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| I'm not in a position to donate right now, so thanks a lot for
| donating to this project.
|
| Though I do wonder how much influence Servo will have on
| preventing browser monoculture given that as a stand-alone
| thing it can't be or isn't involved in developing standards.
| Mozilla will still have to play that role. I hope they step up
| to the plate and stay focused on this most important thing.
| eitland wrote:
| > I'm not in a position to donate right now, so thanks a lot
| for donating to this project.
|
| I've been there myself for years.
|
| I'm happy to now be in a position not even have to think to
| donate tonight.
|
| Hopefully you too will get there soon too!
|
| Edit: and thanks for your contributions to netty and graphql-
| java!
| dannyobrien wrote:
| Yep, I threw them $10 -- it was pretty easy (there was some
| strange scrolling problem on the first page, but I just hit the
| donate button and it went away)
| https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/servo
| rfvrgvegbegn wrote:
| Do we really have to created an account to donate ?
|
| I donate to Blender from time to time and I like how they
| just put an IBAN on their donation page (
| https://www.blender.org/foundation/donation-payment/ )
|
| I copy paste the IBAN in my e-banking app, send, done.
|
| Why here do I have to read pages and pages of privacy policy,
| create an account, give my email, etc.
| BeatLeJuce wrote:
| Those are exciting news. Both for Rust and for the project -- I
| think that's a really cool direction. The web becomes more and
| more a commodity to execute code remotely, and I think this step
| will help leverage Website-as-Interface as the default GUI for
| our programs, and empower us to commoditize it even more. And the
| Linux Foundation is a very lovely home -- they're dedicated to
| open standards and great stewards. However, complete lack of talk
| about funding and "every bit helps" makes it sound like this is
| actually the death of commercial support for this project. And I
| think it's super sad that Mozilla can't fund it anymore and
| would've hoped someone else would have picked up the banner
| monetarily. Does anyone know if the project has a good chance of
| survival (Rust is a great dev community, but might alienate
| broader adoption) -- can this survive purely within the open
| source community?
| leeoniya wrote:
| the fact that you can now donate directly to Servo is fantastic.
|
| before, a donation for Firefox or Servo was just a donation to
| the Mozilla Foundation, which probably went to Mozilla's
| unrelated monetization efforts rather than the thing you
| intended.
|
| https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/servo
| techwizrd wrote:
| This is fantastic news. Servo has been doing exciting work, and
| it was disappointing to hear that Mozilla had disbanded the Servo
| team. I'm really excited to see where this will go. Will
| improvements from Servo continue to make their way down into
| Firefox?
| paulrouget wrote:
| > Will improvements from Servo continue to make their way down
| into Firefox?
|
| Unlikely.
| Technically wrote:
| It's difficult to characterize this as inherently bad,
| though. We could end up with three competing engines and
| major browsers, plus a long tail of webkit browsers. That's a
| pretty decent scenario for the rest of us.
| coldtea wrote:
| I don't know about the Linux foundation, but the Apache
| Foundation is where a lot of code goes to die...
| sweetlucipher wrote:
| Is WebGPU part of Servo? I know the guys at Mozilla were
| developing WebGPU API in Rust. Looking to see where it's going (I
| assume Firefox has to use it too. Chrome already has experimental
| support)
|
| Any idea?
| lastontheboat wrote:
| We had a summer of code student implementing support in Servo:
| https://blog.servo.org/2020/08/30/gsoc-webgpu/
| sweetlucipher wrote:
| Excellent news. Thank you!!
| Manishearth wrote:
| The wgpu crate is being developed by Firefox engineers for
| Firefox. As lastontheboat said we had a student integrate it
| into Servo this year.
| mrec wrote:
| No, separate project, although both Servo and Gecko (the C++
| Firefox codebase) are aiming to use it.
|
| This diagram [1] kvark posted the other day might help. (I
| _think_ dotted-outline boxes indicate external components, but
| couldn 't swear to it.)
|
| [1] https://gfx-rs.github.io/2020/11/16/big-picture.html
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Edit: It's clear to me Servo is vaporware right now. The
| discussions in this thread and crawling servo.org make that
| abundantly clear.
|
| Original post: As an embedder, I just don't get the point. Servo
| is a nonstarter. The idea of Servo minus Rust is great, because
| most embedders don't use Rust. They use C, because C is easy to
| embed with, and the availability of FFIs across languages that
| interface with C is tremendous.
|
| As someone who has used CEF, looked at Webkit ports, and has even
| written a compositor compliant with a subset of CSS 2.1, you just
| cannot sell Servo to me without a C interface.
|
| My problem isn't, "I need an embeddable web browser written in
| Rust." My problem is I need _any_ embeddable web software--at
| least a CSS 2.1 compliant compositor--as an alternative to CEF
| accessible through C, C++, or an FFI that talks to C, but almost
| no one makes one.
|
| I don't even necessarily need anything beyond a CSS 2.1
| compositor, because so much of "web development" is either CSS
| 2.1 or JavaScript, and I don't need the latter for my embedding
| purposes.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Rust has the ability to expose a C API. So, I don't see it as a
| non-starter.
|
| It's just that no one bothered to expose it.
|
| EDIT: I'm wrong, but I do think the documentation isn't that
| great.
|
| https://github.com/servo/servo/tree/master/ports/libsimplese...
|
| https://github.com/paulrouget/servo-embedding-example
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| > It's just that no one bothered to expose it.
|
| Almost the entire quick start guide is about using Rust. So
| you know, if I want to embed it, how do I do it?
|
| If I need a view offscreen rendered to a framebuffer, how do
| I get it? Can I blit? If so, how? How do I pass events to the
| browser abstraction?
|
| Servo talks about none of these things and leaves it up to
| you, but 110% emphasizes everything possible about Rust.
|
| I don't care about Rust, I care about embedding web
| technologies. So how do I do it? They don't explain.
|
| The front page prioritizes these things, in this order:
| * How to use Rust * How to contribute to Servo
| * Servo's blog * How Servo is governed * How
| to donate to Servo * Contacting those involved with
| Servo * Downloading Servo
|
| None of those things point me in the direction of how to
| embed it.
|
| Maybe they should spent more time catering to the people they
| claim to be providing the software for and less to the Rust
| crowd.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Having looked at it more, it seems servo does expose C API.
| The part I was working on doesn't.
|
| Anyway servo comes with libservo and libservosimple.
| Admittedly they don't seem to be well documented for people
| coming from C world.
|
| Perhaps you might want to comment on raise an issue for
| Servo?
|
| I haven't worked on it in quite a while.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Why would I ask people working on embeddable web
| technologies how to embed their software? They should
| just tell me. I don't care that there's 19 people on
| their "technical steering committee" if not a single one
| of those 19 people is responsible for actual adoption.
|
| If they don't have a getting started guide for people
| like me to actually embed and use the software it's a
| waste of my time and hypeware or vaporware depending on
| how you want to look at it.
|
| 18k stars and I know there aren't 18k embedders out
| there.
| lastontheboat wrote:
| Servo already has a C embedding API in https://github.com/servo
| /servo/tree/master/ports/libsimplese....
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| That's not an embedding API. It's definitely Rust exposed to
| C, but there's nothing meaningful there as an embedder to get
| started.
|
| Reading code isn't reading documentation. The fact that
| someone on HN had to search for it and paste it here tells me
| enough about where they emphasize their time.
| [deleted]
| dcgudeman wrote:
| I wish servo would adopt a more permissive license, something
| like MIT or BSD instead of MPL. I think that existing projects
| like chromium have a competitive advantage because they have
| permissive licenses. If the community around servo would like to
| see more projects like electron built around servo they should
| consider it.
| dralley wrote:
| MPL is a perfectly fine license. It has most of the benefits of
| permissive licenses (non-virality, worry-free integration with
| proprietary code) with most of the benefits of copyleft
| licenses also (changes to the library itself must be public).
|
| I fail to see what benefits a more permissive license would
| bring.
| baq wrote:
| With the growing concern about browser monopoly and engine
| monopoly going against everything the web was intended to be, are
| you planning on acquiring funding from government grants? EU at
| least used to give out money to interesting projects, is there
| hope for servo to get some?
| smarx007 wrote:
| Quite possible. But you need an EU entity for that and it's
| likely why Eclipse Foundation (Eclipse Foundation != Eclipse
| IDE for those who are not aware but rather a competitor to
| Apache and Linux foundations) has moved to Europe:
| https://newsroom.eclipse.org/news/announcements/open-source-...
| caniszczyk wrote:
| Indeed, as an FYI the LF is truly "Foundation as a Service"
| and has entities in the US, EU, Japan and China. The RISC-V
| Foundation (hosted by the LF) is even based out of
| Switzerland.
| O_H_E wrote:
| > Linux Foundation is truly "Foundation as a Service"
|
| That made me chuckle. If you have a reading about that, I
| think I would enjoy.
| caniszczyk wrote:
| heh, here's a couple links that should be useful:
|
| https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2020/05/building-a-
| succ...
| https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/2020/09/software-
| define...
|
| Along with an older presentation I gave on the topic: htt
| ps://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Q2jKVpeGkbDVdcUhrzxC
| ...
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| How many paid developers will it have now, and how many did it
| have at Mozilla?
| geogra4 wrote:
| Right - unfortunately I feel like this is the most important
| question. I would have loved for someone with deep pockets like
| MS to take over servo. (Or even like Alibaba or Tencent)
| paulrouget wrote:
| None at the moment. Help is welcome:
| https://servo.org/#support-and-donations :)
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| I have a hard time believing that a project as ambitious as
| servo can survive without several paid core developers.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| Look at the corporate sponsors (that include Samsung and
| Huawei) - they may provide paid contributors.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| I strongly believe that you could get funded by Google if
| you attempted to port stylo to chromium. Firefox still
| has state of the art css performance I believe, thanks to
| stylo.
| Nkuna wrote:
| The same Google that suffers from "Not Invented Here"
| syndrome? We're talking about a company that literally
| tried to supplant the defacto language of the web!!
| Highly doubt it.
|
| Besides, nothing's stopping them from porting it without
| funding the project.
| devit wrote:
| How about making a browser in addition to a "rendering engine for
| embedding in other applications", in the form of a standalone
| program and/or a Firefox (desktop and mobile) fork that can use
| Servo as well as Gecko?
|
| You could also go for the more ambitious plan of creating a brand
| that can take over Mozilla as a "trusted browser maker", which
| seems feasible given the falling reputation of Mozilla and the
| technical security advantages of Servo.
| dathinab wrote:
| You first need a regarding engine to write a browser just doing
| a embedded html rendering engine is a _lot_ of work so it 's a
| good idea to start with a more viable/reachable goal and then
| if viable expand to a bigger goal.
| wmf wrote:
| Is anyone paying Servo developers now? This is the real issue.
| Manishearth wrote:
| Many of us are looking for (or have found) dayjobs, but it's
| possible some folks may be open to contracting work on
| servo/etc. But nobody is being paid to work on servo right now.
| paulrouget wrote:
| Not at the moment. Help is welcome: https://servo.org/#support-
| and-donations :)
| atarian wrote:
| Does being part of the Linux Foundation mean financial
| support?
| caniszczyk wrote:
| The project will be forming a funding membership charter,
| similar to other foundations in the LF like say GraphQL
| Foundation (https://foundation.graphql.org/members/) which
| will pool financial resources and ensure a sustainable long
| term home, if your company is interested in helping out,
| shoot an email to info@servo.org
| reader_mode wrote:
| Any servo developers arround ? I remember reading that a lot of
| CSS layout problems stem from having to support legacy stuff like
| floats etc that complicates reflow etc.
|
| Would it be possible to create a rendering path that just
| supports flexbox/grid and stuff that's not performance limiting ?
|
| This wouldn't be great for existing websites but it would be
| amazing if you had a CSS "strict mode" for electron like apps and
| new content.
|
| Stoked this project isn't dead and isn't tied to Mozilla, I like
| lsf much more.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| Not the same but css: contain is a quite revolutionary strict
| mode, performance-wise
| ddevault wrote:
| Is Servo planning to get back to the whole "writing a web
| rendering engine" part, and backburner the "let's play around
| with VR and stuff" plans? Because until then, I don't think Servo
| is especially interesting as a project. As far as I can tell, the
| last few years of Servo have been characterized by an obsession
| with chasing shiny things, and not with the kind of rigid and
| dedicated engineering efforts necessary to write a new web
| engine.
| Manishearth wrote:
| We spent a significant amount of effort in the last year and a
| half working on a redesigned modular/parallel layout subsystem.
|
| The VR focus was because it was a good way to get servo out to
| end users early without needing to be fully web compat -- WebXR
| doesn't require complex layout. We didn't drop our focus on
| full web compat during this, but full web compat has always
| been a more long term goal given how complex the web platform
| is.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Get back to focusing on embedders and stop all the other
| nonsense that isn't directly related to embedding.
| ddevault wrote:
| WebXR is also completely inane. What users are you "shipping"
| to? A tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a tenth of a percent of
| internet users?
|
| You have a massive effort ahead of you, and you won't get
| there by chasing distractions. You need to have a singular
| focus if you're going to accomplish this goal.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| They're not interested in "[providing] an independent,
| modular, embeddable web engine," they're interested in
| writing software in Rust and having their name associated
| with a Mozilla/Linux Foundation project. Go look at their
| governance.[1]
|
| Their webpage tells you what they really care about, and it
| isn't embedding.
|
| [1]: https://servo.org/governance/tsc/readme/
| arendtio wrote:
| I am confused. I thought it is the raison d'etre of Mozilla to
| develop a browser. So how does it come that the brand new browser
| engine they developed is being given away?
|
| I mean, even if they need to cut costs, isn't Servo part of the
| team they should keep until the end?
| tyre wrote:
| There is some cost/effort to building a better browser engine.
| They might believe that the same cost/effort would better
| benefit the business if put elsewhere.
|
| You see this at companies when engineering teams get it into
| their heads that they _need_ to rewrite in a new framework.
| There 's a trade-off between that work and building new
| features for customers. The benefits might be worth it in the
| long term! They also might not be.
|
| That seems to be the call Mozilla made. I don't know if it's
| the right one, but it seems to be what they did.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _There is some cost /effort to building a better browser
| engine. They might believe that the same cost/effort would
| better benefit the business if put elsewhere._
|
| Yes, because all those years the Mozilla executive team has
| proved that they have a good grasp of where the cost/effort
| optimum lies... /s
| stuaxo wrote:
| From the outside it seems like eating the seeds for next
| years harvest.
| phonon wrote:
| Because they wanted to "put a crisper focus on new product
| development and go to market activities."[1] I'm sure that
| explains it well...
|
| [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2020/08/Message-...
| stuaxo wrote:
| I'm guessing that the "new products" are not the browser.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| They just launched a VPN Service
| Shared404 wrote:
| My understanding is that Servo was more experimental research,
| with an eye towards _possibly_ being integrated at some point.
| brabel wrote:
| Does Firefox have any Rust component at all if Servo is not
| apparently used at all by it, currently?
|
| People have been claiming Firefox components were written in
| Rust for ages, usually meaning Servo, but it seems now that
| those claims were just misleading.
| jfk13 wrote:
| > Does Firefox have any Rust component at all
|
| Yes, lots (and increasing). E.g.:
|
| https://searchfox.org/mozilla-
| central/source/servo/component...
|
| https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/gfx/wr
|
| https://searchfox.org/mozilla-
| central/source/third_party/rus...
| jcranmer wrote:
| The first Rust component in Firefox was the URL parser,
| followed by the MP4 metadata arser for audio. Then the
| charset conversion component was rewritten in Rust, and
| then some other tiny components. And then Firefox imported
| Stylo (the CSS parsing and rendering) from Servo as the
| biggest Rust component yet. The Web Assembly portion of the
| JS engine is shifting to cranelift (written in Rust) as its
| backend, another massive component, but I don't believe it
| has done so in a released browser version yet.
|
| In general, a lot of text handling, and parsing in general,
| is moving to Rust, although some code is moving far more
| slowly than others. Additionally, APIs that had been
| implemented in JS that are too slow (or memory-heavy) are
| being moved to a Rust implementation instead, such as the
| l10n implementation.
| coldtea wrote:
| They weren't misleading, and they didn't mean servo.
| Several Firefox parts are written in Rust. Stylo is the
| most famous, here's a list of various parts that have
| already shipped, and others that were/are in progress...
|
| https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation
| gilrain wrote:
| Except multiple parts of it had already been integrated into
| Firefox, providing its most recent performance gains
| (Webrender, Stylo).
| stuaxo wrote:
| Yes, they were developed in Servo first, then brought over
| when mature.
|
| I wonder if this is the end of that model, or more an
| effort to get external people to contribute more to Servo.
| dralley wrote:
| Based on their public communications, it's the former.
| They want to focus on rustifying Firefox directly rather
| than trying to integrate massive chunks of Rust code
| written in an external project.
| bytematic wrote:
| That seems to be what everyone was wondering about when they
| laid off a large portion of their web teams
| konjin wrote:
| >I am confused. I thought it is the raison d'etre of Mozilla to
| develop a browser.
|
| To put it bluntly: Mozilla is no longer a browser company. It
| is a patsy for google to point to and say "See we're not a
| monopoly.". Secondary goals are increasing the supply of devs
| for big tech and lowering wages.
| mlindner wrote:
| A lot of people misunderstand what Servo was. It was for
| developing components that could be integrated into a browser.
| Firefox integrated most of those and continues to develop more
| code in Rust. Servo lost it's use.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I most definitely agree.
|
| All I can think is that they took a look at Servo and decided
| it was cool tech but was really nowhere near delivering things
| they needed for Firefox aside from Stylo which it had already
| delivered.
| stuaxo wrote:
| But the things being delivered by it were mostly being
| developed by Mozilla devs.
| gilrain wrote:
| And Webrender.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Is there a chance the Servo code base could be used to develop a
| new browser? You know, like phoenix rising from the ashes much
| like FF rose from the Netscape code base (wasn't FF even called
| phoenix at some point)? Because that's certainly something to get
| HNers behind.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| Of course, but they won't be working on it.
| gigel82 wrote:
| Haven't heard of Servo before so was excited about the
| possibility of a lean new engine, but was pretty deflated when
| the preview build is 200Mb+ on disk (80Mb just for the main exe).
| It's possible some of it comes from the unoptimized extras like
| the JS engine, media libraries, etc.
| SimonSapin wrote:
| I don't recall that disk size was ever something we've
| optimized or tracked. Why is it important?
| gigel82 wrote:
| Other resources' usage (memory, I/O) tends to scale up with
| size on disk. And empirically, the more code you have, the
| slower your program runs.
|
| Lots of folks in this thread brought up Electron and Servo
| being a potential replacement for it, but the preview build
| is already larger than Electron today.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> I don't recall that disk size was ever something we've
| optimized or tracked. Why is it important?_
|
| If you're targeting application developers, minimizing the
| system requirements (including size-on-disk) for an installed
| app that embeds Servo is going to matter.
|
| I don't know how _much_ it matters, though.
| mthoms wrote:
| Can Servo be used as an Electron replacement?
| Narann wrote:
| Could be awesome! But it would need a JS engine.
| asajeffrey wrote:
| Not yet, there is an embedding API, but it's designed for
| embedding into native apps. Servo uses Spidermonkey rather than
| v8 as the JS engine, so integrating into the node ecosystem
| would be tricky. But it would be nice to see a JS-first runtime
| system built around Servo!
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| I'd guess many Electron users don't care about the node.js
| parts at all, they simply choose electron because it's more
| popular than the alternatives like CEF.
| Technically wrote:
| Node has done a lot of work in defining a runtime outside
| of the browser. I'm guessing much of this work would need
| to be done with spidermonkey in order to match common
| functionality. It'd also help out an electron equivalent
| for gecko, too.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Some electron users are certainly take advantage of the
| features node.js provides. But others just want a html+js
| based UI on top of a local webserver written in their
| preferred language.
|
| My ideal model would be having one piece of trusted
| javascript which works similar to web extensions which
| can control the window, trigger navigations, approve or
| deny permission requests by origins and can interact with
| the current web control. Any advanced integration with
| the host operating system would happen though the local
| webserver (which could be implemented in node.js if
| that's your thing, or in C#, Rust...). This would not
| require many changes to a browser runtime.
| skyfaller wrote:
| What about Deno, rather than Node? (I know almost nothing
| about either, sorry if this is a stupid question.)
| jayflux wrote:
| Deno uses V8 just like Node does so the problem would be
| the same
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Could Servo use v8 as the JS engine?
| rezmason wrote:
| That's the spirit!
| hobofan wrote:
| Pretty good news day for Rust between this, min_const_generics
| stabilizing[0], and CXX 1.0 (including a nice "book")[1] being
| released.
|
| EDIT: Oh, and the Rust performance book[2].
|
| [0]: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/79135
|
| [1]: https://cxx.rs
|
| [2]: https://nnethercote.github.io/perf-book/
| Touche wrote:
| Servo is starting to remind me a little of Minix, where it is an
| ambitious project attempting to fix underlying architectural
| problems, but the scale of the project being so large that
| ecosystem progress outpaces it's ability to adapt. I hope I'm
| wrong.
| wmf wrote:
| That's a well-known problem unfortunately.
| http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/utah2000.html
|
| _To be a viable computer system, one must honor a huge list of
| large, and often changing, standards ... A huge amount of work,
| but if you don 't honor the standards, you're marginalized. ...
| At another level, instruction architectures, buses, etc. have
| the same influence. With so much externally imposed structure,
| there's little slop left for novelty. Even worse, commercial
| companies that "own" standards, such as Microsoft and Cisco,
| deliberately make standards hard to comply with, to frustrate
| competition._
| newscracker wrote:
| I haven't been following Servo closely for the last few years
| (I'd looked at it during its early days). I recall that parts of
| it were already integrated into Firefox, but could someone state
| what percentage of the Firefox engine is based out of Servo and
| what the roadmap is for bringing Servo to a stage where it could
| almost replace Gecko? Does this new home for Servo (and
| detachment from Mozilla) still mean that Firefox would continue
| to aim to use it?
|
| Tangentially, what's the headless browser space with Firefox at
| the core looking like? When would it be able to provide something
| like Electron (possibly without being such a RAM hungry piece of
| software)?
| asajeffrey wrote:
| FF is using the CSS engine (Stylo) and rendering engine
| (WebRender) from Servo. Webcompat is certainly on our radar!
| the_other wrote:
| On the face of it, this sounds great! I hope it leads to bold new
| things.
|
| It also produces an interesting coherence:
|
| Google + MS -> Blink
|
| Apple -> Webkit
|
| Linux -> Servo
|
| All the main OSs now have their own web rendering engine.
|
| The 00s saw anti-trust against MS for this practice (ok, for the
| rigid way MS forced their engine onto their users)... but today
| the market has coalesced around the same core idea, cementing the
| notion that general purpose OSs need a web rendering engine.
|
| Might this pave the way for a better cross-platform UI
| development? Rather than shipping Electron to every device for
| every app, apps might leverage the web renderer tied to the OS?
|
| I'm just wondering out loud. I was actually hoping we'd
| collectively move back towards native apps with better cross-
| platform tools, rather than integrating web apps deeper into OSs
| (even tho' I'm a web developer by trade and stand to gain from
| this).
| rstat1 wrote:
| So feel free to correct me if you think I'm wrong.
|
| I thought the biggest draw to Electron was that it was a single
| stable platform that worked and looked the same everywhere.
|
| I feel like (based on that) any attempts to move to OS bundled
| web engines would completely miss the point of why Electron is
| popular.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| I think the biggest advantage of Electron is that you can
| write one code and it will run on all major desktop platforms
| AND web. There isn't really any other good solution for this.
|
| > I feel like (based on that) any attempts to move to OS
| bundled web engines would completely miss the point of why
| Electron is popular.
|
| If the web platform is modern enough (chrome, firefox and
| mayybe safari) then supporting these different platforms is
| not that difficult.
| rstat1 wrote:
| Not difficult no.
|
| But certainly not anywhere close to the 0 extra effort
| required by an app developer to support other platforms
| with Electron as it currently is.
| Manishearth wrote:
| The Linux Foundation is basically a catch-all foundation for
| smaller open source projects, this is not "Linux owns a browser
| engine".
|
| The "Linux" there is more of an indicator of its origins than
| its purpose.
| the_other wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification.
| SimonSapin wrote:
| Despite the name the Linux kernel is only one of many projects
| hosted by the Linux Foundation these days. Browser engine to
| operating system relationships haven't changed with this move.
| danShumway wrote:
| Thank God, I am so happy to hear that Servo isn't being
| abandoned, and I'm very happy to see the Linux foundation getting
| involved.
|
| It's still going to be an uphill battle for Servo to really make
| an impact on the overall browser/web industry/ecosystem, but at
| least for now this is very positive news.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| I'm happy to hear servo is going to continue to exist.
|
| Please forgive the beginner's question: my understanding is that
| servo is "just" an engine, which needs to be wrapped into a
| browser to really become usable. I've just tried (not for the
| first time, btw) your tech demo, which I think illustrates this
| perfectly. The rendering was lightning fast, but it's not a full
| browser.
|
| You state that your goals are "to provide a high-performance,
| safe rendering engine for embedding in other applications."
|
| Given that browsers are notoriously big software projects, do you
| think it will be an obstacle that servo is no longer tightly
| integrated with any sizeable browser project?
|
| Of course, I'm asking because I'm really afraid that the amazing
| effort that is servo might dwindle into irrelevance simply
| because there is no "killer app" for it, and embedding it into
| several small/niche products simply doesn't generate the same
| involvement as a web browser.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Presumably any app that wants this kind of rendering could make
| use of it, not just browsers--consider all the apps that now
| use Electron for this.
| coddle-hark wrote:
| Electron (WebKit) is much more than a rendering engine
| though. Sure, you could use Servo in a desktop app, but you'd
| have to also bundle all the other browser components (a JS
| engine, for example) individually. You're basically building
| a browser at that point.
| danShumway wrote:
| Well, to be honest though, a lot of the criticism of
| Electron stems from the fact that it's more than just a
| rendering engine.
|
| There are a lot of applications where you'd want to take
| advantage of a browser view or a renderer or a JS engine,
| but not the rest of the stack. There are native apps where
| you might want a well-sandboxed JS engine for extension
| support, or where you're writing all of your core logic in
| C/Rust but you want to use HTML/CSS for your interface.
|
| Splitting up those components would be useful in a lot of
| situations.
| smnthermes wrote:
| > or where you're writing all of your core logic in
| C/Rust but you want to use HTML/CSS for your interface
|
| DOM is highly intertwined with JavaScript, so that
| wouldn't be possible.
| RussianCow wrote:
| This is clearly not true, since the DOM interface is
| implemented in something like C++ (or Rust, in this case)
| in browser engines, so you could write your logic in the
| same language, or even write a binding for any language
| you like.
| lastontheboat wrote:
| Servo currently incorporates a network stack, a JS engine,
| the DOM, JS APIs, an HTML parser, a CSS styling engine,
| graphical rendering, media parsing and playback, etc. It is
| not a browser, since it doesn't impose requirements about
| how to load specific pages, interact with tabs, expose
| history or bookmarks, etc.
| M2Ys4U wrote:
| I thought Servo linked with SpiderMonkey rather than
| including their own JS engine
| Manishearth wrote:
| Servo was never tightly integrated with a sizeable browser
| project. It shared some components with Firefox, but the only
| time Servo itself was inside an actual browser release was
| Firefox Reality for AR. Which still exists, though I'm not sure
| what the future of development for it will look like.
| dralley wrote:
| I was holding out some hope that maybe Valve or Microsoft
| would consider it a worthwhile project to invest in.
| edoceo wrote:
| Awesome! I've been tire kicking their nightlys. I was thinking
| about building a "browser" but really mean just wrapping an
| engine. With the shakeup at M I was nervous that Servo would die,
| it's got a lot of promise. This is great news. Now, thoughts on a
| UI framework for Rust?
| brian_herman__ wrote:
| https://azul.rs/ Maybe?
| edoceo wrote:
| Neat! Thanks for this!
| mrec wrote:
| I'm not sure azul is being actively developed any more; the
| repo looks a bit tumbleweedy.
|
| The best place if you want to keep tabs on this area is
| probably https://www.areweguiyet.com/
| paulrouget wrote:
| My personal opinion is that, for a servo based browser, it's
| probably better to just use UWP/C++ on Windows, C/GTK on Linux,
| and SwiftUI on Mac, and just embed Servo via its C-API layer.
|
| Rust shine when it comes to building a safe and fast web
| engine. For the OS "glue" code, I would stick to whatever is
| best for each platform.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| You missed Android. Firefox for mobile is so far behind
| Chrome, it's unusable for me, most plugins don't work.
|
| I would vote for HTML/CSS based browser (React / React
| Native?), though I know that a lot of operating system
| specific code needs to be written.
| moogly wrote:
| Chrome on Android doesn't even have plugins and never will.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| You can with e.g kiwi browser
| mkl wrote:
| I find Firefox more usable than Chrome on Android. uBlock
| Origin works perfectly, and that's part of the reason.
| The_rationalist wrote:
| I use kiwi which provide uBlock Origin for chromium
| xiphias2 wrote:
| I tried to install Google Translate extension and it was
| not supported. So when I have to choose between Google
| Translate or adblocking, it's already bad for me, as I
| like to use both of them on the PC.
| SimonSapin wrote:
| The C API has JNI bindings, which is relevant to Android. h
| ttps://github.com/servo/servo/tree/master/ports/libsimplese
| ...
| hawkaguilar wrote:
| Amazing
| lucideer wrote:
| On the surface, this seems like great news.
|
| Does anyone have any insight into what level of influence Linux
| Foundation's Platinum Corporate Members have over it's priorities
| and direction?
|
| Beyond the obvious (Google), MS are invested in Blink and
| Tencent/QQ in Webkit. I guess there's scope for branching out in
| terms of engine use but... MS have already tried that quite a
| lot.
|
| I'm not saying that it's necessary for all Foundation Corporate
| Members to be actively adopting Foundation projects, but more
| that some may have commercial interest in those projects not
| competing with their own.
| SimonSapin wrote:
| Setting priorities and direction is the responsibility of the
| Technical Steering Committee: https://servo.org/governance/
|
| The plan is to later have a Board responsible for financial
| decisions. Paid sponsorship to Servo (not just to LF) can grant
| a seat on the Board but not on the TSC.
| formermozillian wrote:
| Happy to hear that Servo lives on! Anyone knows if Firefox Lite
| will be rescued too, now that the FF Lite team has been laid off
| as well?
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(page generated 2020-11-17 23:00 UTC)