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So - is this a NEW browser? He mentions that he won't run this on firefox. Is "Servo" their "next" browser? What does the mozilla ecosystem look like? Will t

by alexc05 11y ago

So - is this a NEW browser? He mentions that he won't run this on firefox. Is "Servo" their "next" browser? What does the mozilla ecosystem look like? Will this technology get folded in to firefox? This is really cool but there's a tonne of stuff here that I've never heard of. Can anyone explain it like I'm five? How does this fit into the big picture?

icebraining 11y ago
It's a research project to build a browser written in Rust. A few components will be merged into Firefox, but Servo itself probably won't be the "next" browser. https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_%28layout_engine%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_%28layout_engine%29
robin_reala 11y ago
Mozilla have been developing a programming language called Rust for a while now. Two of the things it explicitly attempts to address are removing classes of potential memory bugs (like buffer overflows) and making it easier to write concurrent multicore programs. These two traits map nicely onto the browser landscape, as most devices have 2-8 cores now and memory bugs are a perennial problem. To capitalise on this, and to give Rust a ‘halo’ project that uncovers potential issues early, Mozilla kicked off a project called Servo to research the ways that Rust could be used to produce a browser rendering engine. This has let them explore technologies like multicore rendering of a single page without dealing with the practical considerations (tried to find a nice way of putting it ) that Gecko has scattered throughout its codebase. After Mozilla had made some progress Samsung became interested and started contributing a reasonable amount of code. I’m not sure if this is still happening, but you can see their interest given their prediliction for 8-core mobile CPUs. Mozilla currently have no plans to replace Gecko with Servo outright, but they are folding Servo components back into Gecko when they’re portable and have obvious benefits. Gecko’s build chain can now handle Rust and I believe the URL parser is a port of Servo code (though I’m not sure it has landed yet). I think I recall a Mozilla engineer saying that Servo had progressed beyond a research project now, and it is pretty good at rendering reasonably complex sites, but they’ve still got a long way to go before it could be a drop-in replacement for Gecko.
- steveklabnik 11y ago
  This is a great summary. Some very minor details that you didn't cover: Rust and Servo were basically announced to the world at the same time, as "the Servo project." It was really important that we build Servo at the same time as Rust, to make sure that the language was actually useful at building a real practical thing. The experience of building Servo helped Rust's development immeasurably. Furthermore, it also helped Rust be built in Rust itself. There's a danger when you build a boot strapped compiler: you might make a language that's great for making compilers, but not much else. Servo made sure that wasn't true. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1135640 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1135640 is the overall tracking bug for moving Rust stuff into Firefox. Firefox 45 on Mac and Linux will contain a teeny bit of Rust, and just got turned on for Windows a few days ago. It's an MP4 metadata parser. The URL parser has a patch, but it hasn't landed yet.
  - hobofan 11y ago
    It should be mentioned that even though they started out as one project the Rust language team has done a great job at not letting the development of the language be influenced by the needs of the Servo project.
    - tatterdemalion 11y ago
      This is not at all true. The needs of Servo have had a huge impact on the development of the Rust language. The Rust team prioritizes feedback from Rust users, the largest of which (larger than rustc itself) is currently Servo.
      - steveklabnik 11y ago
        It is true in some sense, we don't just implement things Servo wants. If Rust was beholden to Servo, we would have put inheritance in the language over a year ago, for example. That said, the eventual work for "something inheritance like" is absolutely predicated on Servo's needs. But we put it on the roadmap and weight it like anything else. That said, we do take their needs into account rather highly, just like any project with a large upstream user. Just like we wouldn't want Rust to be useful for only compilers, "only compilers and web rendering engines" isn't much better.
espadrine 11y ago
Externally, Firefox has become a brand. Servo is comparable to Gecko or WebKit (it is a browser engine), although it is new, not finished, and uses novel techniques. What follows is speculation on my part. I am not a Mozilla employee. Mozilla might, in about five years, offer a new product for desktops which features Servo, SpiderMonkey (the JS engine currently used in Firefox), and an as-of-yet undefined chrome (the UI bits around the rendered page). It may be a mobile product instead, or a product for a different type of hardware, although the current thinking seems to be to target it for desktops. Whatever that product is, it may still be called Firefox or a derivation of that brand (as Firefox OS was), although it might have a completely new name (it worked for Microsoft Edge, after all). (Updated for clarity.)
- steveklabnik 11y ago
  > Mozilla might, in about five years, Since some of us in this thread work for Mozilla and on Rust/Servo, I would like to point out that this number is your own speculation and nothing official, timeline wise. Nothing the matter with that! Just don't want people to get confused.
Manishearth 11y ago
(Servo team member here) So. There's a programming language called Rust[1] which Mozilla pushed for and developed (it's now developed by a larger community, though Mozilla is still involved). Among other things, it guarantees freedom from memory safety issues and data races. Both are important here. Freedom from memory safety issues gets rid of a whole class of security bugs (common in browsers) in one fell swoop. Lack of data races lets one write concurrent code without worrying; without needing to program defensively everywhere. "Fearless Concurrency" is what we call this colloquially, after a blog post with the same name[2]. Fearless Concurrency lets us try ambitious things like making layout parallel. Layout in browsers is the step that takes all the nodes on the page with their hierarchy (the DOM) and computed CSS style, and figures out what goes where. All browsers currently do this in a single threaded way. Servo[3] is a research project by Mozilla. It's a browser engine[4] which does layout (amongst other things) in parallel. It's written in Rust to make this possible (and to avoid security bugs due to memory safety issues). Webrender is a (succesful!) sub-experiment to see if we can be more like game engines and do as much on the GPU as possible. Here are a bunch of (non mutually exclusive) ways it can go from here: - Bits and pieces of Servo's code get uplifted into Firefox/Gecko (Gecko is the browser engine behind Firefox). This is already happening[5] (integrating webrender into Firefox is something being discussed, too). This means that Firefox can get some wins without having to wait for Servo to be completed. - Servo gets its own UI and is shipped as a new browser. A promising UI being worked on is browser.html[6]. - Servo becomes an embedding thingy to be used like a webview. - Servo replaces Gecko for Firefox for Android: Whilst replacing Gecko in Firefox Desktop is rather hard (the two are tightly intertwined), this is less of a problem in the Android app. It's possible that Servo would have its own app that's either released under a new name or branded as the new Firefox for Android. - Servo replaces Gecko within Firefox: Hard (not impossible). Probably won't happen. [1]: http://rust-lang.org http://rust-lang.org [2]: http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/10/Fearless-Concurrency.html http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/10/Fearless-Concurrency.ht... [3]: http://servo.org http://servo.org [4]: This is not the same thing as a browser. A browser engine handles the displaying and interaction of a given webpage, but doesn't bother itself with concerns like a URL bar, bookmarks, history, a proper UI, etc. [5]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation [6]: https://github.com/browserhtml/browser.html https://github.com/browserhtml/browser.html
hyperpape 11y ago
Their roadmap also specifies how some parts of Servo might get incorporated into Firefox: https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap.

by alexc05 11y ago

icebraining 11y ago

It's a research project to build a browser written in Rust. A few components will be merged into Firefox, but Servo itself probably won't be the "next" browser. https://servo.org/ https://servo.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_%28layout_engine%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_%28layout_engine%29

robin_reala 11y ago

Mozilla have been developing a programming language called Rust for a while now. Two of the things it explicitly attempts to address are removing classes of potential memory bugs (like buffer overflows) and making it easier to write concurrent multicore programs. These two traits map nicely onto the browser landscape, as most devices have 2-8 cores now and memory bugs are a perennial problem. To capitalise on this, and to give Rust a ‘halo’ project that uncovers potential issues early, Mozilla kicked off a project called Servo to research the ways that Rust could be used to produce a browser rendering engine. This has let them explore technologies like multicore rendering of a single page without dealing with the practical considerations (tried to find a nice way of putting it ) that Gecko has scattered throughout its codebase. After Mozilla had made some progress Samsung became interested and started contributing a reasonable amount of code. I’m not sure if this is still happening, but you can see their interest given their prediliction for 8-core mobile CPUs. Mozilla currently have no plans to replace Gecko with Servo outright, but they are folding Servo components back into Gecko when they’re portable and have obvious benefits. Gecko’s build chain can now handle Rust and I believe the URL parser is a port of Servo code (though I’m not sure it has landed yet). I think I recall a Mozilla engineer saying that Servo had progressed beyond a research project now, and it is pretty good at rendering reasonably complex sites, but they’ve still got a long way to go before it could be a drop-in replacement for Gecko.

steveklabnik 11y ago
This is a great summary. Some very minor details that you didn't cover: Rust and Servo were basically announced to the world at the same time, as "the Servo project." It was really important that we build Servo at the same time as Rust, to make sure that the language was actually useful at building a real practical thing. The experience of building Servo helped Rust's development immeasurably. Furthermore, it also helped Rust be built in Rust itself. There's a danger when you build a boot strapped compiler: you might make a language that's great for making compilers, but not much else. Servo made sure that wasn't true. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1135640 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1135640 is the overall tracking bug for moving Rust stuff into Firefox. Firefox 45 on Mac and Linux will contain a teeny bit of Rust, and just got turned on for Windows a few days ago. It's an MP4 metadata parser. The URL parser has a patch, but it hasn't landed yet.
- hobofan 11y ago
  It should be mentioned that even though they started out as one project the Rust language team has done a great job at not letting the development of the language be influenced by the needs of the Servo project.
  - tatterdemalion 11y ago
    This is not at all true. The needs of Servo have had a huge impact on the development of the Rust language. The Rust team prioritizes feedback from Rust users, the largest of which (larger than rustc itself) is currently Servo.
    - steveklabnik 11y ago
      It is true in some sense, we don't just implement things Servo wants. If Rust was beholden to Servo, we would have put inheritance in the language over a year ago, for example. That said, the eventual work for "something inheritance like" is absolutely predicated on Servo's needs. But we put it on the roadmap and weight it like anything else. That said, we do take their needs into account rather highly, just like any project with a large upstream user. Just like we wouldn't want Rust to be useful for only compilers, "only compilers and web rendering engines" isn't much better.

espadrine 11y ago

Externally, Firefox has become a brand. Servo is comparable to Gecko or WebKit (it is a browser engine), although it is new, not finished, and uses novel techniques. What follows is speculation on my part. I am not a Mozilla employee. Mozilla might, in about five years, offer a new product for desktops which features Servo, SpiderMonkey (the JS engine currently used in Firefox), and an as-of-yet undefined chrome (the UI bits around the rendered page). It may be a mobile product instead, or a product for a different type of hardware, although the current thinking seems to be to target it for desktops. Whatever that product is, it may still be called Firefox or a derivation of that brand (as Firefox OS was), although it might have a completely new name (it worked for Microsoft Edge, after all). (Updated for clarity.)

steveklabnik 11y ago
> Mozilla might, in about five years, Since some of us in this thread work for Mozilla and on Rust/Servo, I would like to point out that this number is your own speculation and nothing official, timeline wise. Nothing the matter with that! Just don't want people to get confused.

Manishearth 11y ago

(Servo team member here) So. There's a programming language called Rust[1] which Mozilla pushed for and developed (it's now developed by a larger community, though Mozilla is still involved). Among other things, it guarantees freedom from memory safety issues and data races. Both are important here. Freedom from memory safety issues gets rid of a whole class of security bugs (common in browsers) in one fell swoop. Lack of data races lets one write concurrent code without worrying; without needing to program defensively everywhere. "Fearless Concurrency" is what we call this colloquially, after a blog post with the same name[2]. Fearless Concurrency lets us try ambitious things like making layout parallel. Layout in browsers is the step that takes all the nodes on the page with their hierarchy (the DOM) and computed CSS style, and figures out what goes where. All browsers currently do this in a single threaded way. Servo[3] is a research project by Mozilla. It's a browser engine[4] which does layout (amongst other things) in parallel. It's written in Rust to make this possible (and to avoid security bugs due to memory safety issues). Webrender is a (succesful!) sub-experiment to see if we can be more like game engines and do as much on the GPU as possible. Here are a bunch of (non mutually exclusive) ways it can go from here: - Bits and pieces of Servo's code get uplifted into Firefox/Gecko (Gecko is the browser engine behind Firefox). This is already happening[5] (integrating webrender into Firefox is something being discussed, too). This means that Firefox can get some wins without having to wait for Servo to be completed. - Servo gets its own UI and is shipped as a new browser. A promising UI being worked on is browser.html[6]. - Servo becomes an embedding thingy to be used like a webview. - Servo replaces Gecko for Firefox for Android: Whilst replacing Gecko in Firefox Desktop is rather hard (the two are tightly intertwined), this is less of a problem in the Android app. It's possible that Servo would have its own app that's either released under a new name or branded as the new Firefox for Android. - Servo replaces Gecko within Firefox: Hard (not impossible). Probably won't happen. [1]: http://rust-lang.org http://rust-lang.org [2]: http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/10/Fearless-Concurrency.html http://blog.rust-lang.org/2015/04/10/Fearless-Concurrency.ht... [3]: http://servo.org http://servo.org [4]: This is not the same thing as a browser. A browser engine handles the displaying and interaction of a given webpage, but doesn't bother itself with concerns like a URL bar, bookmarks, history, a proper UI, etc. [5]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation [6]: https://github.com/browserhtml/browser.html https://github.com/browserhtml/browser.html

hyperpape 11y ago

Their roadmap also specifies how some parts of Servo might get incorporated into Firefox: https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap.