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Well, I think Servo is their leapfrog but in a very different way. Both IE/Edge and Chrome (and the current Firefox) are based on really old tech stacks with y

Well, I think Servo is their leapfrog but in a very different way. Both IE/Edge and Chrome (and the current Firefox) are based on really old tech stacks with years of legacy code and design decisions. Servo, if it pans out, will be the only "real" modern browser, which should provide a boost in performance and experience that it will take Chrome and IE/Edge years to match. It would also make iterating on the browser much faster, which could slowly erode Chrome and IE/Edge's lead. If Firefox can capitalize and successfully market their new browser it could mean becoming the lead browser for years.

wooptoo 10y ago
> it will take Chrome and IE/Edge years to match. Or just a few months to fork and improve. I'd really like to see the Chrome and Firefox teams converge over Servo. But maybe Google suffers from too much NIH syndrome to do that at this point.
- Sylos 10y ago
  So, I was wondering about licensing, if this would mean that Google/Microsoft would have to open-source their browsers in order to use Servo, but seems like Servo's license (MPL) does permit linking to it from code which is under a different license. The MPL is similar to the LGPL in that way, and KHTML is licensed under LGPL, which is what WebKit was forked from, so should be legally settled at this point, too. I'm not a lawyer, though, so no guarantees that this is correct.
garaetjjte 10y ago
Servo is written in Rust. That isn't going to improve performance.
- Sylos 10y ago
  It should improve performance in the sense that Rust helps to produce code which can be easily parallelized. But Servo being written in Rust isn't the argument that he's making. Servo is built with a modern architecture, which all current browsers don't have, because they all started out somewhen pre-2000, before multi-core processors were really a thing, and before the web was really graphical. What Servo can improve is mainly, that the rendering of HTML itself is parallelized in Servo, and that with WebRender, they utilize graphics cards quite similar to the way that videogames do it, which both do result in noticeable performance improvements.
- Illniyar 10y ago
  Your comment implictly assumes that the programming langauge has a major impact on browser performance. My expierence with other product development tells me otherwise, and I trust that the people behind mozilla who are specifically building a more performant browser using rust are aware of what does or does not greatly affects performance.
- yoklov 10y ago
  That's not the only difference, or even an important one for performance. Servo's WebRender engine gets 60fps (or in the hundreds if uncapped) on many pages where Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc. all struggle in the 5-15fps range. (Of course, Servo is still a long way from production ready).

wooptoo 10y ago

> it will take Chrome and IE/Edge years to match. Or just a few months to fork and improve. I'd really like to see the Chrome and Firefox teams converge over Servo. But maybe Google suffers from too much NIH syndrome to do that at this point.

Sylos 10y ago
So, I was wondering about licensing, if this would mean that Google/Microsoft would have to open-source their browsers in order to use Servo, but seems like Servo's license (MPL) does permit linking to it from code which is under a different license. The MPL is similar to the LGPL in that way, and KHTML is licensed under LGPL, which is what WebKit was forked from, so should be legally settled at this point, too. I'm not a lawyer, though, so no guarantees that this is correct.

garaetjjte 10y ago

Servo is written in Rust. That isn't going to improve performance.

Sylos 10y ago
It should improve performance in the sense that Rust helps to produce code which can be easily parallelized. But Servo being written in Rust isn't the argument that he's making. Servo is built with a modern architecture, which all current browsers don't have, because they all started out somewhen pre-2000, before multi-core processors were really a thing, and before the web was really graphical. What Servo can improve is mainly, that the rendering of HTML itself is parallelized in Servo, and that with WebRender, they utilize graphics cards quite similar to the way that videogames do it, which both do result in noticeable performance improvements.
Illniyar 10y ago
Your comment implictly assumes that the programming langauge has a major impact on browser performance. My expierence with other product development tells me otherwise, and I trust that the people behind mozilla who are specifically building a more performant browser using rust are aware of what does or does not greatly affects performance.
yoklov 10y ago
That's not the only difference, or even an important one for performance. Servo's WebRender engine gets 60fps (or in the hundreds if uncapped) on many pages where Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc. all struggle in the 5-15fps range. (Of course, Servo is still a long way from production ready).