Servo is a prototype – closest to your "Pie-in-the-sky" option.
I'm not affiliated with Mozilla or Servo but from the information on the Servo page and the number of Acid2 and other issues they're tracking, it's clear that there's still plenty of work to do. Throw in the fact that the Rust language itself is targeting the end of the year before they hit version 1.0 and you'd have to guess that Servo as a separate project likely has minimum 6 months (more likely a year) before they examine whether it's successful enough to start integrating with Firefox.
Then they'd need to integrate and test.
Think about how long the new "Australis" UI was in development (more than 2 years). It was just a user-interface change without changing programming language or other dev-tools.
The renderer is the core of the program. And integrating Servo would involve integrating and testing a new language along with the new code. I doubt a large, capable team could perform that much integration and testing in under 12 months – even after Servo itself was considered "complete" (which it isn't).
My prediction: a release of Firefox with Servo code is 2 years away or more (assuming Servo is considered a "success" in 6-12 months).
My guess is not so optimistic. # of real rust programmers is low. If integrating Firefox with Servo means having 1 small part of Firefox integrated with Servo, mabye, a month of work? But the entire Firefox render engine with Servo will probably be at least 5 years away. While 5 years seems a long time, don't forget time fly and bug blockers come up.
The idea is to start being dogfoodable for the team by the end of the year, but that only covers as tiny subset of sites that are used by the team, maybe Etherpad (which is used for meetings) and /r/rust. The main focus with Servo so far has been to look at the real performance bottlenecks that other engines face during layout and parallelize them. The plethora of other features that need to be supported will come later after these problems have been solved (they mostly have been). That said, replacing Gecko is a looong way off.
gilgoomesh|11 years ago
I'm not affiliated with Mozilla or Servo but from the information on the Servo page and the number of Acid2 and other issues they're tracking, it's clear that there's still plenty of work to do. Throw in the fact that the Rust language itself is targeting the end of the year before they hit version 1.0 and you'd have to guess that Servo as a separate project likely has minimum 6 months (more likely a year) before they examine whether it's successful enough to start integrating with Firefox.
Then they'd need to integrate and test.
Think about how long the new "Australis" UI was in development (more than 2 years). It was just a user-interface change without changing programming language or other dev-tools.
The renderer is the core of the program. And integrating Servo would involve integrating and testing a new language along with the new code. I doubt a large, capable team could perform that much integration and testing in under 12 months – even after Servo itself was considered "complete" (which it isn't).
My prediction: a release of Firefox with Servo code is 2 years away or more (assuming Servo is considered a "success" in 6-12 months).
yeukhon|11 years ago
bjz_|11 years ago