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Kudos on this milestone! A very general question: what's the high-level plan for Servo regarding Firefox? I see a lot of requests/issues dealing with stuff tha

Kudos on this milestone! A very general question: what's the high-level plan for Servo regarding Firefox? I see a lot of requests/issues dealing with stuff that doesn't seem related to a layout engine. Is the plan to have browser.html as a temporary incubator for Servo and eventually migrate it to replace FF's layout engine, or is it to "grow" an entire new browser around this new engine?

Manishearth 10y ago
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation There are efforts to make various components work in Firefox. The largest effort is "Stylo", which replaces Firefox's selector matching with ours. I'm not sure what the future is on Firefox using Webrender or our layout; though I suspect it depends on how well stylo works. The plan seems to be to let Servo continue to evolve as a testbed for new ideas (like webrender), and share components with firefox whenever ready. An independent Servo product is not likely in the near future, since there's a lot of work to make it fully web compat. In the far future ... well, we can't tell :)
- Eridrus 10y ago
  I feel like mobile (Android, really) needs a fast, secure and extensible browser, I hope that Servo can help Firefox achieve those first two goals so that it could be my browser of choice
  - Manishearth 10y ago
    Servo is trying to be fast on mobile; there even has been some research work into the power efficiency of servo on mobile. Admittedly, android-specific efforts have slowed down in the past few months, but I believe it is still a goal :)
    - Eridrus 10y ago
      Given the fate of FirefoxOS and iOS' restrictions on browsers, is there any other mobile platform where Servo could actually be used?
      - Manishearth 10y ago
        Windows perhaps? I mean, Servo-as-a-product isn't even planned yet, and may never be, so by the time that question is relevant the ios rules may have changed, too :)
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
kibwen 10y ago
browser.html is just the browser chrome (er, not to be confused with the browser Chrome), it's an independent Mozilla project to create a frontend entirely in web technologies, which, since these are all standardized, should theoretically work with any browser engine, not just Servo. As for Firefox, later on this year we should see the integration of Servo's style engine ("Stylo") into Gecko, and going forward we should expect to see the two codebases share even more components. However, wholesale replacement of Gecko with Servo in Firefox isn't on the table at the moment.
- Manishearth 10y ago
  > theoretically work with any browser engine, not just Servo. Well, it depends on some privileged APIs, of course. But we've tried to keep that API surface minimal.
  - kibwen 10y ago
    Ah I wasn't aware of that, what do these priveliged APIs do?
    - tschneidereit 10y ago
      Things like history management. While tabs in browser.html are just iframes, browser.html needs more access to the contained documents to be able to fully do its job. For security reasons, you can't get at an iframe's current location/title/favicon if the loaded document is from another domain. We need this information to show a proper title in the title bar and the tabs list, and to show a back button and things like that. In addition, the browser needs to act as a sort of broker between sites and the OS. Storing cookies and session data, showing notifications or dialogs, and entering fullscreen mode are just a few examples of this. (Note that most of these things aren't even implemented yet. Browsers are complex applications in their own right, even after accounting for the browser engine.)
    - Manishearth 10y ago
      Punch through CORS like it's a sheet of paper, for example.
mol123 10y ago
aa

Manishearth 10y ago

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation There are efforts to make various components work in Firefox. The largest effort is "Stylo", which replaces Firefox's selector matching with ours. I'm not sure what the future is on Firefox using Webrender or our layout; though I suspect it depends on how well stylo works. The plan seems to be to let Servo continue to evolve as a testbed for new ideas (like webrender), and share components with firefox whenever ready. An independent Servo product is not likely in the near future, since there's a lot of work to make it fully web compat. In the far future ... well, we can't tell :)

Eridrus 10y ago
I feel like mobile (Android, really) needs a fast, secure and extensible browser, I hope that Servo can help Firefox achieve those first two goals so that it could be my browser of choice
- Manishearth 10y ago
  Servo is trying to be fast on mobile; there even has been some research work into the power efficiency of servo on mobile. Admittedly, android-specific efforts have slowed down in the past few months, but I believe it is still a goal :)
  - Eridrus 10y ago
    Given the fate of FirefoxOS and iOS' restrictions on browsers, is there any other mobile platform where Servo could actually be used?
    - Manishearth 10y ago
      Windows perhaps? I mean, Servo-as-a-product isn't even planned yet, and may never be, so by the time that question is relevant the ios rules may have changed, too :)
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]

kibwen 10y ago

browser.html is just the browser chrome (er, not to be confused with the browser Chrome), it's an independent Mozilla project to create a frontend entirely in web technologies, which, since these are all standardized, should theoretically work with any browser engine, not just Servo. As for Firefox, later on this year we should see the integration of Servo's style engine ("Stylo") into Gecko, and going forward we should expect to see the two codebases share even more components. However, wholesale replacement of Gecko with Servo in Firefox isn't on the table at the moment.

Manishearth 10y ago
> theoretically work with any browser engine, not just Servo. Well, it depends on some privileged APIs, of course. But we've tried to keep that API surface minimal.
- kibwen 10y ago
  Ah I wasn't aware of that, what do these priveliged APIs do?
  - tschneidereit 10y ago
    Things like history management. While tabs in browser.html are just iframes, browser.html needs more access to the contained documents to be able to fully do its job. For security reasons, you can't get at an iframe's current location/title/favicon if the loaded document is from another domain. We need this information to show a proper title in the title bar and the tabs list, and to show a back button and things like that. In addition, the browser needs to act as a sort of broker between sites and the OS. Storing cookies and session data, showing notifications or dialogs, and entering fullscreen mode are just a few examples of this. (Note that most of these things aren't even implemented yet. Browsers are complex applications in their own right, even after accounting for the browser engine.)
  - Manishearth 10y ago
    Punch through CORS like it's a sheet of paper, for example.

mol123 10y ago