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

335 points| worez | 2 years ago |news.itsfoss.com

135 comments

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thinkingemote|2 years ago

I would like to see Positron rebooted. Positron is to Firefox what electron is to chromium.

https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/

pier25|2 years ago

And in that vein, a reduced version of Servo for rendering desktop/games GUIs.

There's a lot of stuff in CSS and HTML nobody uses anymore like floats, blink, marquee, etc.

Ultralight has a product based on that idea but I think they use WebKit.

https://ultralig.ht/

jojobas|2 years ago

Yeah, it's an awesome idea to waste few hundred megabytes of RAM to run your app.

This browser-in-a-box cancer needs to die a painful death.

zerr|2 years ago

Thunderbird is developed on top of Firefox.

stefanos82|2 years ago

How about quickjs or tauri?

coolelectronics|2 years ago

why? firefox performance will always be worse than blink, if only because of spidermonkey

the last thing people want from electron is a worse version of it hogging more resources

pmontra|2 years ago

They have a video of Servo running on a Raspberry 400 faster than Chromium. However there are no downloads or build instructions specifically for the Raspberry in the repository on GitHub or in the issues. Maybe it's just build for Linux.

Googling servo and raspberry together gives a lot of hardware projects with motors, even when including mozilla in the query.

Did anybody here made it run on a Pi?

k8svet|2 years ago

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.

laerus|2 years ago

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.

sa-code|2 years ago

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

GuB-42|2 years ago

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.

fyrn_|2 years ago

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

theusus|2 years ago

It was a supposedly replacement for Firefox that's written in Rust.

germandiago|2 years ago

Was not Servo a super nice thing it would allow better multithreading through Rust's power as compared to old, ancient C++ that everyone and her neighbour says it is so bad?

What happened exactly to Servo? Why it was discontinued?

sgift|2 years ago

Servo was always intended as a way to proof certain technologies without the restrictions of a full browser engine like Gecko, so they could integrate them into Firefox/Gecko later if they panned out. They did and things got integrated into Firefox with https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum.

Then Mozilla had a sustainability crisis and - imho unwisely - decided that one of the things that they could do without in the future was the Servo team.

Without funding Servo effectively was put into sleep mode since people need to eat. Then it got donated to the Linux foundation and got new funding and progress has started again.

stuaxo|2 years ago

Parts of Servo were integrated fully, but they stopped doing this and let everyone go.

Now it's going again, I think this could happen again in future.

claudex|2 years ago

Mozilla found it will be easier to change gecko part per part once the initial tests with Servo was done and successful.

andrewmcwatters|2 years ago

I hope that being at Igalia forces the team to have laser focus in being a real embeddable solution for developers. The last I checked maybe a year ago or more, it isn’t.

I commented over the years how Servo isn’t a real alternative because they don’t actually provide any API surface comparable to using CEF or full Chromium or WebKit, and as a result it’s a nonstarter.

I think someone working on it had mentioned they were looking into creating a CEF-like API for embedding, but if the project says it’s an embed-able engine before anything else and it can’t even be used for that purpose, I have no idea what that team is focusing on other than rendering itself. I’d be more interested in even just a partially compliant engine whose primary focus was actually embedding.

It might be OK if you want to build a Firefox? It’s not if you want to use it as an actual embedded renderer.

terabytest|2 years ago

This page keeps crashing for me on iOS Safari. Is anyone else experiencing this?

h0l0cube|2 years ago

Yep. It keeps refreshing on me on Firefox iOS. Super annoying

devaiops9001|2 years ago

A 100% Rust based browser engine is sorely needed.

postalrat|2 years ago

That sounds pretty difficult unless it's also the operating system.

beretguy|2 years ago

I just want native tab group support.

EasyMark|2 years ago

Don't know if it helps anyone but darkreader in "light" mode absolutely destroys the linked page for some reason, works fine in DR dark mode tho

jhoechtl|2 years ago

Servo is a waste of time. If we want a fast rendering engine, Mozilla already has it.

If we want a secure rendering engine we could leverage code checks.

It's all there. The meme of Rust equals safety (or C equals I safety) has to go away.

sanxiyn|2 years ago

Servo was about parallelism.

Mozilla tried multiple times to parallelize CSS style calculation in Gecko which is written in C++, and failed all of them. When they tried again in Servo with Rust, they succeeded first time.

They integrated Rust-written parallel CSS style calculation to Gecko. As a result, to this day, Firefox is the only web browser which can parallelize CSS style calculation, and beats every other browser in CSS style calculation performance.

The meme that Rust is easier to parallelize is true.

boxed|2 years ago

Firefox owes quite a bit of its speed to Servo... so that's a weird take.

jacoblambda|2 years ago

Honestly I think servo is a worthwhile endeavor if solely because it has the potential to introduce some needed variety into the browser engine space.

Especially if they can dial it in with tauri as a viable electron/blink alternative.