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Servo is a research project by Mozilla as a part of their Rust programming language. It gives them a "real world" app to build in Rust, so they don't end up doi

by e1ven 11y ago

Servo is a research project by Mozilla as a part of their Rust programming language. It gives them a "real world" app to build in Rust, so they don't end up doing ivory-tower designs that don't work well in real apps. Despite the way some news articles might write about it, Mozilla does not intend this to be a new browser for regular people - It's an extension of their new language, and R&D. Over time, Firefox may incorporate components written in Rust, potentially including parts from Servo, but AFAIK there is no timeline for that.

ibotty 11y ago
There is an open bug report on firefox' bugzilla to incorporate servo's css engine (afaict): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1243581 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1243581
ZenoArrow 11y ago
> "It's an extension of their new language, and R&D." I'd suggest there's another set of aims that comes out of the work to make Servo easier to embed than Gecko, but the time isn't right to make the most of that yet.
drzaiusapelord 11y ago
Gecko is something of a pig. I find it hard to believe that Servo will be developed and then thrown away as purely a research exercise. I suspect Mozilla is hesitant to lay out a roadmap considering how young Rust is and how long rendering engines take to write, but it seems to me that its likely Servo will replace Gecko when its mature.
- Manishearth 11y ago
  Note that not replacing Gecko with Servo doesn't mean that Servo will be "thrown away", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295698
Manishearth 11y ago
> Mozilla does not intend this to be a new browser for regular people - It's an extension of their new language, and R&D. I disagree. While I'm not sure what the internal planning is, we are doing a bunch of things to move towards having a shippable Servo browser. If Servo was more of an experiment with no possibility of shipping there would be a whole host of features that we wouldn't even bother implementing it. Servo's existence is also not to serve as a use case for Rust. If anything, it's the other way around, Mozilla was interested in Rust development because of Servo. However, over time Rust has gained a life of its own which is pretty awesome. (Yes, Servo does serve as a pretty good canary for Rust, but it's not the raison d'etre) As far as Servo's future is concerned, there are a bunch of non-mutually-exclusive steps that can be taken going forward: - Start moving components into Gecko (already being done) and write new ones (already being done): https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation . Gecko can use Servo's URL parser, and wrote its own MP4 metadata parser. There's active work going on replacing Gecko's style/CSS system, and discussions about webrender. I've also seen some interest in dropping Rust into Spidermonkey. - Expose a webview-like library (not being done yet, but there's interest) - Release servo as its own browser, perhaps using browser.html (this is being coordinated at browser.html) - Replace Gecko on Firefox for Android (this is not too hard, since the browser UI is simpler. Not being done yet) - Replace Gecko in Firefox for Desktop (this is pretty hard -- there's no clear delineation between "Gecko" and "Firefox" and the UI uses things like XUL which I'd rather keep out of Servo). This is not being done yet.

by e1ven 11y ago

ibotty 11y ago

There is an open bug report on firefox' bugzilla to incorporate servo's css engine (afaict): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1243581 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1243581

ZenoArrow 11y ago

> "It's an extension of their new language, and R&D." I'd suggest there's another set of aims that comes out of the work to make Servo easier to embed than Gecko, but the time isn't right to make the most of that yet.

drzaiusapelord 11y ago

Gecko is something of a pig. I find it hard to believe that Servo will be developed and then thrown away as purely a research exercise. I suspect Mozilla is hesitant to lay out a roadmap considering how young Rust is and how long rendering engines take to write, but it seems to me that its likely Servo will replace Gecko when its mature.

Manishearth 11y ago
Note that not replacing Gecko with Servo doesn't mean that Servo will be "thrown away", see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295698

Manishearth 11y ago

> Mozilla does not intend this to be a new browser for regular people - It's an extension of their new language, and R&D. I disagree. While I'm not sure what the internal planning is, we are doing a bunch of things to move towards having a shippable Servo browser. If Servo was more of an experiment with no possibility of shipping there would be a whole host of features that we wouldn't even bother implementing it. Servo's existence is also not to serve as a use case for Rust. If anything, it's the other way around, Mozilla was interested in Rust development because of Servo. However, over time Rust has gained a life of its own which is pretty awesome. (Yes, Servo does serve as a pretty good canary for Rust, but it's not the raison d'etre) As far as Servo's future is concerned, there are a bunch of non-mutually-exclusive steps that can be taken going forward: - Start moving components into Gecko (already being done) and write new ones (already being done): https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation . Gecko can use Servo's URL parser, and wrote its own MP4 metadata parser. There's active work going on replacing Gecko's style/CSS system, and discussions about webrender. I've also seen some interest in dropping Rust into Spidermonkey. - Expose a webview-like library (not being done yet, but there's interest) - Release servo as its own browser, perhaps using browser.html (this is being coordinated at browser.html) - Replace Gecko on Firefox for Android (this is not too hard, since the browser UI is simpler. Not being done yet) - Replace Gecko in Firefox for Desktop (this is pretty hard -- there's no clear delineation between "Gecko" and "Firefox" and the UI uses things like XUL which I'd rather keep out of Servo). This is not being done yet.