Personally I'm more optimistic about Servo - because originating at Mozilla, I imagine more web browser experience and expertise went into its architecture, and also because Rust.
I don't know.. Servo has been in development for a decade and still has quite underwhelming performance and UX. The binary is 100MB+ on Mac, scrolling is janky, a google image search takes 10+ seconds to render and goes through very buggy states. Meanwhile Ladybird renders a legacy UI, but feels really fast and stable.
“Servo is more than a browser engine—it’s a collection of crates used widely across the Rust ecosystem. Maintaining these libraries benefits not just Servo, but the broader web platform.“
I was curious how you arrived at that figure so I checked the dates. Servo began in 2012 as a Mozilla skunkworks project, died off in 2020, and was revived in late 2023. If you simply subtract the "dead" period, sure, it doesn't look like it was going anywhere fast, but that's ignoring the multiple major changes in direction and the 5+ years during which Servo development was fully subordinate to Firefox development. It only became a fully independent browser development effort after the project was revived by Igalia.
Seeing Servo and full-fat Electron [1] both at 100 MB made me wonder if that's the minimum for an "Everything bagel" browser engine that does WebRTC, video playback, etc., etc.
How big is Ladybird?
[1] I believe you can make Electron smaller by cutting parts of Chromium out, but the default is around 100 MB
Can you elaborate what you mean by pushover license?
Ladybird uses bsd-2 license which is OSI, I mean its not fsf/copyleft but permissive which should be better sometimes for things like embedding etc. no?
It looks like servo uses mozilla public license 2, can you please explain me the difference and why you think one is pushover and other is not?
I think Ladybird will beat Servo at making an usable and good product, Mozilla might have more resources but that's not the only thing that you need if you want to build great software.
Ladybird is C++ and that still has the same issues as every other engine.
I suspect Ladybird will/has already leapfrogged Servo in performance and usage due to the Ladybird team and its momentum. Mozilla isn't doing anything with Servo anymore.
But I also don't really see a compelling reason for Ladybird's existence - we already have Chromium, Blink, Gecko, etc. It's hard for me to imagine a world where Ladybird is a healthy contender for marketshare.
The only real novel thing to do in this space is "rewrite it in Rust".
nicoburns|4 months ago
Andreas Kling who created Ladybird had prior experience working on KHTML/WebKit so there is expertise there too.
ricardobeat|4 months ago
evolve2k|4 months ago
Per: https://www.igalia.com/2025/10/09/Igalia,-Servo,-and-the-Sov...
Hemospectrum|4 months ago
I was curious how you arrived at that figure so I checked the dates. Servo began in 2012 as a Mozilla skunkworks project, died off in 2020, and was revived in late 2023. If you simply subtract the "dead" period, sure, it doesn't look like it was going anywhere fast, but that's ignoring the multiple major changes in direction and the 5+ years during which Servo development was fully subordinate to Firefox development. It only became a fully independent browser development effort after the project was revived by Igalia.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF|4 months ago
How big is Ladybird?
[1] I believe you can make Electron smaller by cutting parts of Chromium out, but the default is around 100 MB
Y_Y|4 months ago
If you're worrying about that size then Mac OS is not the platform for you.
F3nd0|4 months ago
Imustaskforhelp|4 months ago
Ladybird uses bsd-2 license which is OSI, I mean its not fsf/copyleft but permissive which should be better sometimes for things like embedding etc. no?
It looks like servo uses mozilla public license 2, can you please explain me the difference and why you think one is pushover and other is not?
ionelaipatioaei|4 months ago
nicoburns|4 months ago
Servo is no longer a Mozilla project, and hasn't been since 2020. It's now developed by Igalia, Huawei, and a collection of volunteers.
echelon|4 months ago
Ladybird is C++ and that still has the same issues as every other engine.
I suspect Ladybird will/has already leapfrogged Servo in performance and usage due to the Ladybird team and its momentum. Mozilla isn't doing anything with Servo anymore.
But I also don't really see a compelling reason for Ladybird's existence - we already have Chromium, Blink, Gecko, etc. It's hard for me to imagine a world where Ladybird is a healthy contender for marketshare.
The only real novel thing to do in this space is "rewrite it in Rust".
tracker1|4 months ago