17 ms·

Transitioning Firefox's rendering engine from Gecko to Servo

461 points by bpierre 10y ago

wfunction 10y ago
I was disappointed after reading the title when I saw the article...
- hueving 10y ago
  Yeah, talk about setting people up for a letdown. :) I was expecting some insane experiment from the golden era of aviation.
  - cakoose 10y ago
    And the analogy is a bad one, too. I think it's trying to make the task sound more difficult than it is. If we stick with the airplane analogy, maybe this is better: it's like incrementally converting an older model jet engine to a newer model jet engine in between flights. Every incremental version must work correctly, which isn't easy, but the upgrades are definitely performed on the ground.
GrumpyNl 10y ago
This didnt deliver.
mxstbr 10y ago
Even though the title might disappoint, it's super interesting to see where Firefox is going. I can't wait for 2017!
- osullivj 10y ago
  Looking forward to it too; this is a big deal because it will put a Rust implementation on many millions of desktops. I'm totally fed up with CPU and memory hogging browser bloat on my laptop. My dev env runs so much better when I kill all Chrome processes. I know that the article is only talking about the render engine, and not JavaScript, which I suspect is the main browser bloat culprit , but I'm still hopeful. Bring on the Rust JS engine I say!
  - hvidgaard 10y ago
    It's not going to change that. No matter how efficient you make the JS engine, crappy JS will still steal all your ressouces.
    - osullivj 10y ago
      Yes. However, a crappy, leaky, JS engine running crappy JS code will steal all resources even quicker. I hope a JS engine built with Rust smart ptrs will be less leaky than one built in C/C++. In my experience, hand rolled memory pooling systems can be very leaky.
      - gsnedders 10y ago
        There's no plan to write a new JS engine at Mozilla, FWIW.
        Cshelton 10y ago
        And they shouldn't...let's move forward... to WASM (Web Assembly)! Which, also posted on front page of HN recently, a user's medium blog on compiling Rust to WASM. https://medium.com/@chicoxyzzy/compiling-rust-to-webassembly-guide-411066a69fde#.r8qex53c3 https://medium.com/@chicoxyzzy/compiling-rust-to-webassembly...
        gsnedders 10y ago
        Except, like, JS isn't going to die any time soon, and realistically, implementing a new JS or WASM VM isn't actually that interesting to do: the big risk in a JITing VM that Rust cannot save you from is behaviour of your JITed code, which makes memory safety far harder to enforce.
        Cshelton 10y ago
        Right, JS isn't going anywhere. But once WASM is able to run everywhere, anybody attempting to make high performance web apps would ideally want to write it in WASM. A lot of what JS does on the web is plenty fast and won't really benefit much from JS being multi-threaded/faster. Sites using JS to run simple scripts or to fire api calls/etc. will continue to use JS, no reason to use WASM. Also, I believe WASM is truly compiled code and not JIT ran? I may be wrong...but pretty sure that was the whole point of creating it. Native app performance in the browser... that will take a big bite out of the app stores that take a good cut of revenue and control what can and can not be in the store. And sure, WASM can also have memory safety problems, especially with C/C++ being the primary languages to target WASM from. But that's also where Rust would shine, making it much more safe when compiled to WASM.
moomin 10y ago
Missed opportunity to name the CSS engine replacement project "Gangnam".
- FloatingGhost 10y ago
  That's already an ancient meme - in a few years it'll be nothing more than a weird pop-culture reference
maggit 10y ago
The submission title has been changed from "Replacing the Jet Engine While Still Flying" to "Mozilla’s project to replace Gecko with Servo" (at the time of this writing). Some of the other comments are pertaining to the "Jet Engine" title. For anybody that might be confused, like I was :)
- belorn 10y ago
  Does that mean that the original title was bad, as the HN guidelines states, "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."?
  - phaed 10y ago
    The title wasn't misleading at all, I totally understood it was about web browser rendering engines.
  - ealexhudson 10y ago
    I genuinely don't get all the hoo-haa about titles. In pretty much every comments section I read here, there will be at least one person who complains that the title is "linkbait" or (more often) "clickbait" - even the most boring, anodyne description of the article. They're not allowed to seem interesting in any possible way. The original title wasn't particularly descriptive. That doesn't mean it was misleading, and actually, I thought it was very apt: they're talking about a technology to swap pieces of Servo in over time, and the jet engine analogy was appropriate (particularly with respect to the complexity). I quite liked it.
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      There is a real concern among a number of users here, including me, that HN might turn into reddit if we aren't careful. That said in this case I agree with you. I also think we are mostly fine for now but I still hesitate to upvote funny comments.
      - andai 10y ago
andrewvijay 10y ago
I'm on this rust hype train for a long time. This move by mozilla is probably going to be the biggest success story that might give rust a lot of attention. I hope the new engine is fast as heck and uses less battery in all my devices. Please!
- krylon 10y ago
  If performance is not competitive, it will not be much of a success story, but it will be more interesting to see how much better it will be in terms of security issues.
  - viraptor 10y ago
    It was better 2 years ago (with caveats) - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA But there's definitely place for speed gains due to multithreading.
    - k__ 10y ago
      After years of the multicore hype, we finally can reap its benefits.
  - ZenoArrow 10y ago
    >"If performance is not competitive" I don't think this will be a problem. One example... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTURkjYJ_uk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTURkjYJ_uk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erfnCaeLxSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erfnCaeLxSI
- Grue3 10y ago
  Not if in the process they'll make all the existing add-ons incompatible and therefore lose all their remaining market share.
  - JD557 10y ago
    I disagree. If they are able to deliver a browser that's much faster and consumes less battery, I believe that would be enough to make a lot of users change their browser. Maybe I'm wrong and I'm not a good example, but I the only add-ons that I have installed that I really care about is 1password (which is easy to live without, as I can use the stand-alone application) and HTTPS everywhere (which just means that I have to be extra careful when browsing). I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of internet users that do not even have add-ons in their browsers, but I doubt that there's any user who would not care about browser speed/battery life.
_joel 10y ago
It will definitely be welcome to see the fairly aging Gecko replaced. The nightly build of servo barely renders a number of websites and won't at all for more media laden sites (as you'd expect). I hope this merge via Quantum[1] will be forthcoming soon, so we can test it. [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum
octoploid 10y ago
By the time they will finally make the switch, Firefox' market share will probably have plunged to a very low single digit percentage.
- bobajeff 10y ago
  Actually, it's already there. Has been since last year.
Yaggo 10y ago
> And Firefox runs on Gecko. Which is old. Like really old. I think it's the oldest rendering engine still in wide use. Gecko may be oldest, but not with wide margin: KHTML (the origin of webkit and blink) was started in 1998, only a year after Gecko. Of course, probably not much (if any?) of the original KHTML source is still present in webkit, and because of the nature of open source development, there is blurry line between projects. I actually ran KDE 1.0 as my main DE and used KHTML as my primary browser (falling back to Netscape when particular site was incompatible). I did immediately appreciate the coherence & elegance of KDE. It lasted for several years before OS X came and finally won me. Oh, those were times.
- dublinclontarf 10y ago
  You are still on KDE 1?
  - blauditore 10y ago
    Maybe because upgrading would require a reboot. :)
  - dmytrish 10y ago
    No, "run" is Past Simple here. It took me a few moments to get that though.
    - monk_e_boy 10y ago
      Is that an Americanism? Ran is most common in the UK.
      - NamTaf 10y ago
        I think they omitted 'had' from run. The past tense of run is 'had run', 'was running' or 'ran' depending on how you want to use it after all.
        Yaggo 10y ago
raverbashing 10y ago
I am very happy seeing C/C++ getting replaced by something more modern and safer as Rust (though the debug version in Rust is probably slow - that will be something interesting to see)
quincunx 10y ago
This seems apt: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... Mozilla spending time on this suggests Mozilla doesn't know what to spend time on.
- statictype 10y ago
  Mozilla was a rewrite of Netscape and Firefox was a restructuring of Mozilla. The only reason they still exist today and have relevance is their willingness to rewrite. I don't disagree with Joel - but his main point seems to be - be prepared to spend longer than you expect on a rewrite - that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
  - quincunx 10y ago
    Wasn't Mozilla the open source version of Netscape Communicator, rather than a rewrite?
    - statictype 10y ago
      You're probably right. An earlier version of Netscape was a rewrite. Mozilla was a refactored version of Netscape (to remove closed-source dependencies)
    - nailer 10y ago
      Netscape 4 was pre XUL. Mozilla browser was Netscape 6 with XUL 'hotness' and massive UI lag. Firefox was stripped down and fast (though XUL is apparently still around).
    - toyg 10y ago
      Mozilla started as a big rewrite of Communicator 4, which was then open-sourced at an early stage. It wasn't great because it concentrated a bit too much on rewriting underpinnings (XUL, Gecko etc), resulting in a relatively poor UI. Eventually a skunkwork project was started to drop all non-browser components and focus on user UI, and that became Firefox.
    - 10y ago
ishitatsuyuki 10y ago
They are still using many unsafe blocks and there was an use-after-free before :P
- andy_ppp 10y ago
  Yes. But the point is any unsafe code can be reviewed separately and be subject to more stringent checking than the majority of code which is safe. I've been looking at the HTML parser they are writing (servo/html5ever) which is incredibly impressive and parses the hideous Daily Mail homepage in my tests in < 30ms. It uses the tendril library which contains lots and lots of unsafe code, but this library is set out to do a very specific thing which is make parsing strings much much more efficient. This is a design tradeoff that is desirable; as long as tendril can be shown to be robust it's a good decision over a slower parser.
- Manishearth 10y ago
  The use after free basically had to do with spidermonkey, which has a GC, and is not 100% safe to use in Servo (we try to make it safe). The quantum projects don't involve moving Servo's DOM into Firefox (they do involve implementing lessons learned from Servo's DOM, but not the DOM itself), so this isn't an issue.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
hiiakabs 10y ago
I didn't look at the name of the writer when I started reading it but by the way the article is written I was suspecting it was written by a woman. Stupid analogies and fluff, lots of commas... What a loss of time...
- jazoom 10y ago
  I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but that sounded a little bit sexist.
- jakewins 10y ago
  I don't know how to say this in a civil way, so I won't: Please take your sexist bullshit somewhere else if you can't behave like an adult.
  - wruza 10y ago
    You did know, but didn't want, actually. Now we have this thread appeared from nowhere. But main point, besides what catched your eye, is that an article is written with pretty lame stylistic and is hard to read and get seriously.
  - dang 10y ago
    Please don't feed trolls. Instead, flag egregious comments by clicking on their timestamp to go to their page, then clicking 'flag' at the top. (You need > 30 karma to see flag links.) We monitor the flags and take action based on them. In the present case, we banned the GP account.
- theparanoid 10y ago
  She tried a conversational writing style and failed.
  - wruza 10y ago
    Seems that you can't even combine 'she' and 'failed' in one sentence here on HN. Looking for alternatives, since the issue still persists.
losvedir 10y ago
Is this an announcement of a change in strategy? I'm a big fan of rust and Servo, but my understanding was that it's still "experimental" and they're learning stuff about concurrent rendering and stuff like that, with no concrete plan to use Servo in Firefox (or make Servo a standalone, supported browser). I know there's a few odds and ends in Firefox that use rust, but I thought the future of Servo was still ambiguous. Am I (was I) wrong about that? But it sounds like now the official plan is to get Servo into Firefox. Great!
- Brakenshire 10y ago
  It's called Project Quantum, they announced it a few months back, as a formal project to integrate Servo components into Gecko.
  - losvedir 10y ago
    Ah, great. Must have missed that announcement. Thanks! I noticed the blog post using that term but didn't realize it was from an old announcement.
- yeukhon 10y ago
  I think calling Servo "experimental" is still somewhat confusing as it stands today. I think the initiatives to implement engine in Rust is no longer an experiment. The language has gained some serious production attractions in the last year or so as Rust reached 1.0. While Rust isn't as "popular" as Go, Rust community is strong. I think however it is better off to interpret that Mozilla is getting more serious on replacing many parts of Firefox in Rust. Mozilla already started doing that last year [1]. [1]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/07/shipping-rust-in-firefox/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/07/shipping-rust-in-firefox/
  - gsnedders 10y ago
    While writing a browser in Rust might not be, per-se, particularly experimental anymore, nobody has written a browser engine from scratch since KHTML in 1998, and with the growth in complexity of the web since then it's unclear whether one can write a new browser engine from scratch without spending years reverse-engineering the competition—we've come a long way in the past decade in better defining many historically undefined fundamental parts of the platform, particularly in HTML5 and CSS2.1. At the same time, there are still parts of the platform that remain largely undefined. Apple's work on WebKit for several years after forking KHTML was essentially just reverse-engineering IE and fixing site-compatibility bugs; Opera had maybe 10% of all people working on Presto up until the end largely reverse-engineering the competition and fixing site-compatibility bugs; etc., etc., etc. That's not even the only interesting question: nobody has tried to parallelise layout before, and how does that interact with things like the Grid Module? How about Houdini?
mozumder 10y ago
Wouldn't it be more appropriate to have written rust in a GPU language like OpenGL or OpenCL, since the aim here was to replace the display engine? Curious as to why use a CPU language for the display engine rewrite? It seems to be wasting the GPU all modern systems now contain.. Also, is it fully replacing the display engine, including the font renderer and image codecs?
- daenney 10y ago
  > Wouldn't it be more appropriate to have written rust in a GPU language like OpenGL or OpenCL, since the aim here was to replace the display engine? That's not the aim of Rust. Rust, according to its own website is: > Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.
  - mozumder 10y ago
    Sorry I meant 'servo' not Rust.
    - lucb1e 10y ago
      Editing might be a good idea, it now sounds as if you have no clue what's going on while in a subcomment you mention it was just a mistake (can happen).
- jdub 10y ago
  Servo makes incredibly good use of the GPU. Being able to do that, and iterate so fast on that work, is part of what Rust brings to the table. (I don't think they've swapped out the font renderer and image codecs yet, but there are quite a few bits and pieces they have swapped out as the Rust community delivers more pure Rust libraries.)
  - dingaling 10y ago
    > Servo makes incredibly good use of the GPU. Too good, in fact: it won't run on any laptops that I own because their GPUs don't support a sufficient level of OpenGL. One great aspect of Firefox-with-Gecko is that you can throw it onto just about any machine with more than 512MB of RAM and it will provide bootstrap web access ( slow or otherwise ). That's going to be lost when everything is Servoised. I guess it's back to links2 at that point.
Aoyagi 10y ago
Makes me wonder what's going to happen to Presto now that the Chinese bought Opera ASA...
- robin_reala 10y ago
  Presto was only still being used in Opera Mini, it had been swapped out for Blink in the desktop and full-fat mobile versions.
  - gsnedders 10y ago
    And in principle is still supported in some embedded devices, AIUI.
  - Aoyagi 10y ago
    I know, but I'm replying from a Presto-powered desktop browser :) . People have been asking for open-sourcing of it ever since the switch happened, but I guess we'll never see that happen.
    - gsnedders 10y ago
      Realistically, at this point, I'd say it won't happen. I wouldn't have ruled out Opera Software ASA open-sourcing it once it was a mere historical curiosity, but with it having gone to the new owners of the consumer browser business, I can't see it happening.
kweinber 10y ago
What do folks think of internetisms that the author uses like "Because Mor Better Ideas™."? I see a number of engineers use broken phrasing like that in posts and presentations and it comes off really badly to others not in on the "joke". Does anyone really find that sort of thing actually funny or additive or is it the equivalent of trite office humor gone online?
- andai 10y ago
  I enjoy reading words which indicate the person who wrote them is not entirely dead inside. It provides, i feel, for a Mor Better Reading Experience™
  - falsedan 10y ago
    I'll be dead on the outside eventually as Grim Death's grasping claw squeezes the life out of me. Please, my time on earth is precious and I would rather spend it with my loved ones in preference to skimming over forced references.
    - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
      Oh yeah, that 0.5s you lost while reading that totally ruined your day, enough to make you waste even more time to comment on it. It's an informal blog, I read the same reference, thought, "must be some joke I've missed", and got on with reading the rest of the blog.
      - falsedan 10y ago
        Will you lie on your deathbed recalling all the times you spend reading forced memes and thinking, "… for teh win!!1"? That blog is informal in style but not in content; it's a professional blog by a Mozilla employee. I don't feel like it respects its audiences' time, which is sadly the norm for software-related technical writing. Whings won't get better by saying nothing, and asking people to improve is never a waste of time (if done nicely). Related: Normalization of deviance in software: how broken practices become standard[0] [0]: http://danluu.com/wat/ http://danluu.com/wat/
diimdeep 10y ago
There is really interesting podcast episode about Rust and Servo https://changelog.com/podcast/228 https://changelog.com/podcast/228 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Moffitt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Moffitt Definitely worth listening to, tons of info there. from show notes interesting presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-FSfNO-oT9Wqo2swvm6UnsybYzsmKcb_DScJpd-4PIA/edit https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-FSfNO-oT9Wqo2swvm6U...
reitanqild 10y ago
Wow, I think the comments section below was ugly. I have been worried about Firefox and seriously questioned some of the decisions along the road but I think and hope I always respected the devs who volunteer for this.
mwexler 10y ago
Unclear on the audience for this post. All the "jet engine" stuff sounds like it's aimed at consumers, but this is of no interest to average consumers; instead, shouldn't this be of interest to devs who build web apps or embed rendering engines?
qz_ 10y ago
Did the comment section on this website look weird to anyone else?
mariusz79 10y ago
Wouldn't it be easier to build a new plane around the new engine, do some flight tests and after it's ready transfer all passengers?
- bzbarsky 10y ago
  That has two problems: 1) A lot of flight tests can't be done without a large fraction of passengers on the plane. 2) It may make getting to the final end state faster (though maybe not), but it means you don't get any benefits until you make the switch. Doing things incrementally means you start seeing benefits much earlier. Classic throughput/latency tradeoff.
  - mariusz79 10y ago
    What's better to end up in the final end state later, or lose customers because your software is crashing and is harder to maintain because you're introducing totally new way to do stuff?
    - zbraniecki 10y ago
      That's a leading question and a false dillema.
    - bzbarsky 10y ago
      I'm not sure what sort of distinction you are trying to make here. Again, the two options are: 1) One big switch. Can probably be done faster, but has more risk that big problems won't be discovered until late in the game and has user-visible benefits until the switch happens. 2) Incremental changes. Take longer to complete, but allow for better mid-course correction and can show user-visible benefits much earlier in the process. Which of those will lose more customers? It really depends on the market reality and at how successfully the incremental changes can be made.
nraynaud 10y ago
Call caniuse, flexbugs, quirksmode, stackoverflow and it's companion codepen on the deck, there will be some action! creating a renderer in 90% of the work, the other 90% is documenting its bugs and quirks.
- zbraniecki 10y ago
  Correct. That's why it's such a massive task. Servo is pretty decent at supporting a lot of web standards now. Unfortunately, the real web is made of quirks and implementation targeting workarounds. I think the biggest lesson from Servo is that entry barrier to the web market is already much higher than we would like it to be. Having a great new web engine supporting 100% of web standards does not get you even close to being ready to serve the web. And the willingness of web developer community to take the "one browser only feature" bait is a major part of the problem.
- gsnedders 10y ago
  I for one hope we're getting better at that: we're sharing more tests across browsers than ever before, and I think that's quite possibly going to end up being the de-facto norm for all new tests this year. Of course, that doesn't mean that we'll get rid of all bugs, but it does mean that more bugs should be found before shipping. (As a disclaimer: this is essentially the majority of what I've got paid to do over the past year-and-a-bit.)
phkahler 10y ago
I've seen this before: >> At some point in mid-2017, all new CSS will be built with Quantum plane parts, not Gecko. Going forward, it will be much easier and more enjoyable to implement new CSS properties. Which makes it easier for folks in the open source community to contribute. If you're not careful this can drag on for years with half the stuff done one way and half the new way - especially once you reach the point where "all new stuff is built the new way". There can come a point where you need to just purge the old stuff. We've seen this in places like GIMP moving to GEGL, and several project moving to GTK3 (GIMP, Inkscape, and others), the purge of java from LibreOffice, and now there's this mushy migration to Wayland. Firefox is not the only project migrating to rust either. In all these cases I'm actually in favor of the migrations, and many of those have been completed over years. It's just that once a path has been defined I feel like there needs to be a more concerted effort to actually complete the transition sooner rather than later. Let new features take a back seat and get your internals switched over. I know it's a balance but working on a project that's straddling the fence is almost always slower in the long run. Having said that, firefox is huge so subsystems will need to switch to rust one at a time. I'm just saying that once CSS can be done the new way they need to require it to all be done that way, not just new stuff. Perhaps that is the case and it wasn't spelled out clearly in TFA.
- syncsynchalt 10y ago
  A good way to force this along is to have a champion for the work, and an automated burndown metric that random devs can watch and influence. Mozilla is pretty good at the latter, cf. https://arewefastyet.com https://arewefastyet.com
  - flyingramen 10y ago
    Seems like Safari is doing better than everything else if I'm reading the charts right.
    - vdnkh 10y ago
      > Why is Safari not tested on 32-bit machine? >Safari defaults to 64-bit machines and doesn't need to worry about 32-bit anymore. Big pieces of their engine is 64-bit only. As a result showing Safari on 32-bit machines would give incorrect results. Maybe this has something to do with it?
dawnerd 10y ago
I was honestly expecting an interesting story about a real jet engine being replaced in flight.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  The story changed its title from being about Gecko and Servo to this literally in between me viewing the frontpage and clicking on the comments link. This story here is IMO should be extempt from the "original title" rule - the original title is annoyingly misleading.
  - jdmichal 10y ago
    Leave the title, append it with "Transitioning from Gecko to Servo".
    - mdrzn 10y ago
      Yup, as soon as possible. I was also looking forward to read about jet engine being replaced in mid air.
    - dang 10y ago
      Ok, we'll use that wording instead. Thanks!
- dingaling 10y ago
  Some piston-engined aicraft had crawlways in the wing to permit inflight engine servicing ( Ju-90, XB-15 and B-36 come to mind ) but sadly I'm unaware of any jet aircraft with such a clever feature. Potentially the YB-49 flying-wing but I haven't located a cutaway to confirm.
- 27182818284 10y ago
  Me too! I was like "Whoa that's a novel idea...and it is about browsers...damn!" I was already conjuring up crazy scenarios similar to in-flight refueling.
- rafinha 10y ago
digi_owl 10y ago
I just wish that their UI (UX? ugh...) team was as competent as their engine team appears to be.
- ghostly_s 10y ago
  What is your complaint, exactly? Considering it includes support for almost total customization of the user interface by third-party code, I think they've done an excellent job with the UX.
  - digi_owl 10y ago
    I expect that support to vanish under the dual guise of multi-process and "security". Never mind that more and more Firefox have been taking on the appearance of a Chrome clone, rather than offering a distinct look.
    - steveklabnik 10y ago
      Have you seen the browser.html project?
Touche 10y ago
> Going forward, it will be much easier and more enjoyable to implement new CSS properties. Which makes it easier for folks in the open source community to contribute. Which makes new things come out faster. I had never really thought of Servo in these terms before, but it makes a lot of sense. Mozilla, being a nonprofit, can't compete with Google / Apple / Microsoft doing things their way. They inherently have a greater need for the free-time contributions. Given that, if you can make contributions easier and "fun", by choosing a more modern language and toolchain, it could theoretically be a competitive advantage. Thinking about it like this, the recent Rust marketing articles make a lot of sense. Rust marketing matters because the more Rust developers there are, the more potential Servo (and thus Firefox) developers there are. Whether it pans out or not remains to be seen, but as a way to attempt to hack a problem, I really like it.
- wmf 10y ago
  Mozilla is really just another software company owned by a nonprofit. They have hundreds of millions in revenue and have been "profitable" in many/all years. But they are definitely much smaller than Google/Apple/MS and can't benefit from ecosystem lock-in effects.
  - Touche 10y ago
    Everything's comparative, of course. Mozilla isn't a solo dev's weekend project, but it's also not a top 10 most valuable company in the world, like all of its competitors are.
    - addicted 10y ago
      Also, Mozilla, the way it is setup, does not have the same incentives as its competitors do, all of which are publicly traded firms.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    > Mozilla is really just another software company owned by a nonprofit It depends on how one defines "just another software company", but I don't agree with that characterization: Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent. Much more of the same here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ I don't see Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or other software companies aggressively, creatively pursuing those goals (and achieving them). If Mozilla was just another software company, would there even be an open web today?
milankragujevic 10y ago
Note to author, please change your font, It's really hard to read on my screen. http://i.imgur.com/C9RdFHv.png http://i.imgur.com/C9RdFHv.png Windows 10 + Chrome.
Too 10y ago
Good to see some internal motivation from Mozilla's side for a bridge between rust and c++. This will be needed to drive major adaptation of rust.
beezischillin 10y ago
I'm so happy to read this and all I can say is I hope they succeed - the faster, the better. I used to run Firefox and loved it so much, but it started falling behind in performance so much that I had to switch out of necessity. I haven't really seen it improve much over the years. On the contrary, Safari, while it always felt a bit slower than Chrome, is feeling faster and faster with each update. Working at a company where I occasionally create presentational sites, I often have to create and optimise animations that some designer thought would be so very radical and the two browsers that are extremely painful to support are usually Firefox and Internet Edge-splorer (pardon the pun). I have animations that run at a smooth 60fps in Chrome and Safari effortlessly, quite often producing 1-2 FPS in Firefox. Their updates are quite weird too, between the last 3 updates, I've seen the project I was working on run bad enough that I had to fallback to the mobile-lite version on FF to running acceptably (30+ fps) to running like crap again. And maybe we'll see 16 year old style rendering bugs get fixed finally, too? Please, pretty, please? After ripping on it a bit, tho, I have to say: I'm looking forward to running Firefox again in the future, as much as I like Safari at the moment, it's closed source and I don't like being exposed to Apple's whims (especially lately), where if they decide to destroy by making it unusable I'm left out to dry and quite frankly Google Chrome just creeps me out now.
- nnethercote 10y ago
  > I have animations that run at a smooth 60fps in Chrome and Safari effortlessly, quite often producing 1-2 FPS in Firefox. Can you give an example? I'm sure Mozilla's animation people would love to hear about this.
agumonkey 10y ago
Curious about the results. Most of luck to the team.

461 points by bpierre 10y ago

wfunction 10y ago

I was disappointed after reading the title when I saw the article...

hueving 10y ago
Yeah, talk about setting people up for a letdown. :) I was expecting some insane experiment from the golden era of aviation.
- cakoose 10y ago
  And the analogy is a bad one, too. I think it's trying to make the task sound more difficult than it is. If we stick with the airplane analogy, maybe this is better: it's like incrementally converting an older model jet engine to a newer model jet engine in between flights. Every incremental version must work correctly, which isn't easy, but the upgrades are definitely performed on the ground.

GrumpyNl 10y ago

This didnt deliver.

mxstbr 10y ago

Even though the title might disappoint, it's super interesting to see where Firefox is going. I can't wait for 2017!

osullivj 10y ago
Looking forward to it too; this is a big deal because it will put a Rust implementation on many millions of desktops. I'm totally fed up with CPU and memory hogging browser bloat on my laptop. My dev env runs so much better when I kill all Chrome processes. I know that the article is only talking about the render engine, and not JavaScript, which I suspect is the main browser bloat culprit , but I'm still hopeful. Bring on the Rust JS engine I say!
- hvidgaard 10y ago
  It's not going to change that. No matter how efficient you make the JS engine, crappy JS will still steal all your ressouces.
  - osullivj 10y ago
    Yes. However, a crappy, leaky, JS engine running crappy JS code will steal all resources even quicker. I hope a JS engine built with Rust smart ptrs will be less leaky than one built in C/C++. In my experience, hand rolled memory pooling systems can be very leaky.
    - gsnedders 10y ago
      There's no plan to write a new JS engine at Mozilla, FWIW.
      - Cshelton 10y ago
        And they shouldn't...let's move forward... to WASM (Web Assembly)! Which, also posted on front page of HN recently, a user's medium blog on compiling Rust to WASM. https://medium.com/@chicoxyzzy/compiling-rust-to-webassembly-guide-411066a69fde#.r8qex53c3 https://medium.com/@chicoxyzzy/compiling-rust-to-webassembly...
        gsnedders 10y ago
        Except, like, JS isn't going to die any time soon, and realistically, implementing a new JS or WASM VM isn't actually that interesting to do: the big risk in a JITing VM that Rust cannot save you from is behaviour of your JITed code, which makes memory safety far harder to enforce.
        Cshelton 10y ago
        Right, JS isn't going anywhere. But once WASM is able to run everywhere, anybody attempting to make high performance web apps would ideally want to write it in WASM. A lot of what JS does on the web is plenty fast and won't really benefit much from JS being multi-threaded/faster. Sites using JS to run simple scripts or to fire api calls/etc. will continue to use JS, no reason to use WASM. Also, I believe WASM is truly compiled code and not JIT ran? I may be wrong...but pretty sure that was the whole point of creating it. Native app performance in the browser... that will take a big bite out of the app stores that take a good cut of revenue and control what can and can not be in the store. And sure, WASM can also have memory safety problems, especially with C/C++ being the primary languages to target WASM from. But that's also where Rust would shine, making it much more safe when compiled to WASM.

moomin 10y ago

Missed opportunity to name the CSS engine replacement project "Gangnam".

FloatingGhost 10y ago
That's already an ancient meme - in a few years it'll be nothing more than a weird pop-culture reference

maggit 10y ago

The submission title has been changed from "Replacing the Jet Engine While Still Flying" to "Mozilla’s project to replace Gecko with Servo" (at the time of this writing). Some of the other comments are pertaining to the "Jet Engine" title. For anybody that might be confused, like I was :)

belorn 10y ago
Does that mean that the original title was bad, as the HN guidelines states, "Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."?
- phaed 10y ago
  The title wasn't misleading at all, I totally understood it was about web browser rendering engines.
- ealexhudson 10y ago
  I genuinely don't get all the hoo-haa about titles. In pretty much every comments section I read here, there will be at least one person who complains that the title is "linkbait" or (more often) "clickbait" - even the most boring, anodyne description of the article. They're not allowed to seem interesting in any possible way. The original title wasn't particularly descriptive. That doesn't mean it was misleading, and actually, I thought it was very apt: they're talking about a technology to swap pieces of Servo in over time, and the jet engine analogy was appropriate (particularly with respect to the complexity). I quite liked it.
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    There is a real concern among a number of users here, including me, that HN might turn into reddit if we aren't careful. That said in this case I agree with you. I also think we are mostly fine for now but I still hesitate to upvote funny comments.
    - andai 10y ago

andrewvijay 10y ago

I'm on this rust hype train for a long time. This move by mozilla is probably going to be the biggest success story that might give rust a lot of attention. I hope the new engine is fast as heck and uses less battery in all my devices. Please!

krylon 10y ago
If performance is not competitive, it will not be much of a success story, but it will be more interesting to see how much better it will be in terms of security issues.
- viraptor 10y ago
  It was better 2 years ago (with caveats) - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgzNDA But there's definitely place for speed gains due to multithreading.
  - k__ 10y ago
    After years of the multicore hype, we finally can reap its benefits.
- ZenoArrow 10y ago
  >"If performance is not competitive" I don't think this will be a problem. One example... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTURkjYJ_uk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTURkjYJ_uk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erfnCaeLxSI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erfnCaeLxSI
Grue3 10y ago
Not if in the process they'll make all the existing add-ons incompatible and therefore lose all their remaining market share.
- JD557 10y ago
  I disagree. If they are able to deliver a browser that's much faster and consumes less battery, I believe that would be enough to make a lot of users change their browser. Maybe I'm wrong and I'm not a good example, but I the only add-ons that I have installed that I really care about is 1password (which is easy to live without, as I can use the stand-alone application) and HTTPS everywhere (which just means that I have to be extra careful when browsing). I'm pretty sure that there are a lot of internet users that do not even have add-ons in their browsers, but I doubt that there's any user who would not care about browser speed/battery life.

_joel 10y ago

It will definitely be welcome to see the fairly aging Gecko replaced. The nightly build of servo barely renders a number of websites and won't at all for more media laden sites (as you'd expect). I hope this merge via Quantum[1] will be forthcoming soon, so we can test it. [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum

octoploid 10y ago

By the time they will finally make the switch, Firefox' market share will probably have plunged to a very low single digit percentage.

bobajeff 10y ago
Actually, it's already there. Has been since last year.

Yaggo 10y ago

> And Firefox runs on Gecko. Which is old. Like really old. I think it's the oldest rendering engine still in wide use. Gecko may be oldest, but not with wide margin: KHTML (the origin of webkit and blink) was started in 1998, only a year after Gecko. Of course, probably not much (if any?) of the original KHTML source is still present in webkit, and because of the nature of open source development, there is blurry line between projects. I actually ran KDE 1.0 as my main DE and used KHTML as my primary browser (falling back to Netscape when particular site was incompatible). I did immediately appreciate the coherence & elegance of KDE. It lasted for several years before OS X came and finally won me. Oh, those were times.

dublinclontarf 10y ago
You are still on KDE 1?
- blauditore 10y ago
  Maybe because upgrading would require a reboot. :)
- dmytrish 10y ago
  No, "run" is Past Simple here. It took me a few moments to get that though.
  - monk_e_boy 10y ago
    Is that an Americanism? Ran is most common in the UK.
    - NamTaf 10y ago
      I think they omitted 'had' from run. The past tense of run is 'had run', 'was running' or 'ran' depending on how you want to use it after all.
      - Yaggo 10y ago

raverbashing 10y ago

I am very happy seeing C/C++ getting replaced by something more modern and safer as Rust (though the debug version in Rust is probably slow - that will be something interesting to see)

quincunx 10y ago

This seems apt: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-... Mozilla spending time on this suggests Mozilla doesn't know what to spend time on.

statictype 10y ago
Mozilla was a rewrite of Netscape and Firefox was a restructuring of Mozilla. The only reason they still exist today and have relevance is their willingness to rewrite. I don't disagree with Joel - but his main point seems to be - be prepared to spend longer than you expect on a rewrite - that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it.
- quincunx 10y ago
  Wasn't Mozilla the open source version of Netscape Communicator, rather than a rewrite?
  - statictype 10y ago
    You're probably right. An earlier version of Netscape was a rewrite. Mozilla was a refactored version of Netscape (to remove closed-source dependencies)
  - nailer 10y ago
    Netscape 4 was pre XUL. Mozilla browser was Netscape 6 with XUL 'hotness' and massive UI lag. Firefox was stripped down and fast (though XUL is apparently still around).
  - toyg 10y ago
    Mozilla started as a big rewrite of Communicator 4, which was then open-sourced at an early stage. It wasn't great because it concentrated a bit too much on rewriting underpinnings (XUL, Gecko etc), resulting in a relatively poor UI. Eventually a skunkwork project was started to drop all non-browser components and focus on user UI, and that became Firefox.
  - 10y ago

ishitatsuyuki 10y ago

They are still using many unsafe blocks and there was an use-after-free before :P

andy_ppp 10y ago
Yes. But the point is any unsafe code can be reviewed separately and be subject to more stringent checking than the majority of code which is safe. I've been looking at the HTML parser they are writing (servo/html5ever) which is incredibly impressive and parses the hideous Daily Mail homepage in my tests in < 30ms. It uses the tendril library which contains lots and lots of unsafe code, but this library is set out to do a very specific thing which is make parsing strings much much more efficient. This is a design tradeoff that is desirable; as long as tendril can be shown to be robust it's a good decision over a slower parser.
Manishearth 10y ago
The use after free basically had to do with spidermonkey, which has a GC, and is not 100% safe to use in Servo (we try to make it safe). The quantum projects don't involve moving Servo's DOM into Firefox (they do involve implementing lessons learned from Servo's DOM, but not the DOM itself), so this isn't an issue.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

hiiakabs 10y ago

I didn't look at the name of the writer when I started reading it but by the way the article is written I was suspecting it was written by a woman. Stupid analogies and fluff, lots of commas... What a loss of time...

jazoom 10y ago
I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but that sounded a little bit sexist.
jakewins 10y ago
I don't know how to say this in a civil way, so I won't: Please take your sexist bullshit somewhere else if you can't behave like an adult.
- wruza 10y ago
  You did know, but didn't want, actually. Now we have this thread appeared from nowhere. But main point, besides what catched your eye, is that an article is written with pretty lame stylistic and is hard to read and get seriously.
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't feed trolls. Instead, flag egregious comments by clicking on their timestamp to go to their page, then clicking 'flag' at the top. (You need > 30 karma to see flag links.) We monitor the flags and take action based on them. In the present case, we banned the GP account.
theparanoid 10y ago
She tried a conversational writing style and failed.
- wruza 10y ago
  Seems that you can't even combine 'she' and 'failed' in one sentence here on HN. Looking for alternatives, since the issue still persists.

losvedir 10y ago

Is this an announcement of a change in strategy? I'm a big fan of rust and Servo, but my understanding was that it's still "experimental" and they're learning stuff about concurrent rendering and stuff like that, with no concrete plan to use Servo in Firefox (or make Servo a standalone, supported browser). I know there's a few odds and ends in Firefox that use rust, but I thought the future of Servo was still ambiguous. Am I (was I) wrong about that? But it sounds like now the official plan is to get Servo into Firefox. Great!

Brakenshire 10y ago
It's called Project Quantum, they announced it a few months back, as a formal project to integrate Servo components into Gecko.
- losvedir 10y ago
  Ah, great. Must have missed that announcement. Thanks! I noticed the blog post using that term but didn't realize it was from an old announcement.
yeukhon 10y ago
I think calling Servo "experimental" is still somewhat confusing as it stands today. I think the initiatives to implement engine in Rust is no longer an experiment. The language has gained some serious production attractions in the last year or so as Rust reached 1.0. While Rust isn't as "popular" as Go, Rust community is strong. I think however it is better off to interpret that Mozilla is getting more serious on replacing many parts of Firefox in Rust. Mozilla already started doing that last year [1]. [1]: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/07/shipping-rust-in-firefox/ https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/07/shipping-rust-in-firefox/
- gsnedders 10y ago
  While writing a browser in Rust might not be, per-se, particularly experimental anymore, nobody has written a browser engine from scratch since KHTML in 1998, and with the growth in complexity of the web since then it's unclear whether one can write a new browser engine from scratch without spending years reverse-engineering the competition—we've come a long way in the past decade in better defining many historically undefined fundamental parts of the platform, particularly in HTML5 and CSS2.1. At the same time, there are still parts of the platform that remain largely undefined. Apple's work on WebKit for several years after forking KHTML was essentially just reverse-engineering IE and fixing site-compatibility bugs; Opera had maybe 10% of all people working on Presto up until the end largely reverse-engineering the competition and fixing site-compatibility bugs; etc., etc., etc. That's not even the only interesting question: nobody has tried to parallelise layout before, and how does that interact with things like the Grid Module? How about Houdini?

mozumder 10y ago

Wouldn't it be more appropriate to have written rust in a GPU language like OpenGL or OpenCL, since the aim here was to replace the display engine? Curious as to why use a CPU language for the display engine rewrite? It seems to be wasting the GPU all modern systems now contain.. Also, is it fully replacing the display engine, including the font renderer and image codecs?

daenney 10y ago
> Wouldn't it be more appropriate to have written rust in a GPU language like OpenGL or OpenCL, since the aim here was to replace the display engine? That's not the aim of Rust. Rust, according to its own website is: > Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.
- mozumder 10y ago
  Sorry I meant 'servo' not Rust.
  - lucb1e 10y ago
    Editing might be a good idea, it now sounds as if you have no clue what's going on while in a subcomment you mention it was just a mistake (can happen).
jdub 10y ago
Servo makes incredibly good use of the GPU. Being able to do that, and iterate so fast on that work, is part of what Rust brings to the table. (I don't think they've swapped out the font renderer and image codecs yet, but there are quite a few bits and pieces they have swapped out as the Rust community delivers more pure Rust libraries.)
- dingaling 10y ago
  > Servo makes incredibly good use of the GPU. Too good, in fact: it won't run on any laptops that I own because their GPUs don't support a sufficient level of OpenGL. One great aspect of Firefox-with-Gecko is that you can throw it onto just about any machine with more than 512MB of RAM and it will provide bootstrap web access ( slow or otherwise ). That's going to be lost when everything is Servoised. I guess it's back to links2 at that point.

Aoyagi 10y ago

Makes me wonder what's going to happen to Presto now that the Chinese bought Opera ASA...

robin_reala 10y ago
Presto was only still being used in Opera Mini, it had been swapped out for Blink in the desktop and full-fat mobile versions.
- gsnedders 10y ago
  And in principle is still supported in some embedded devices, AIUI.
- Aoyagi 10y ago
  I know, but I'm replying from a Presto-powered desktop browser :) . People have been asking for open-sourcing of it ever since the switch happened, but I guess we'll never see that happen.
  - gsnedders 10y ago
    Realistically, at this point, I'd say it won't happen. I wouldn't have ruled out Opera Software ASA open-sourcing it once it was a mere historical curiosity, but with it having gone to the new owners of the consumer browser business, I can't see it happening.

kweinber 10y ago

What do folks think of internetisms that the author uses like "Because Mor Better Ideas™."? I see a number of engineers use broken phrasing like that in posts and presentations and it comes off really badly to others not in on the "joke". Does anyone really find that sort of thing actually funny or additive or is it the equivalent of trite office humor gone online?

andai 10y ago
I enjoy reading words which indicate the person who wrote them is not entirely dead inside. It provides, i feel, for a Mor Better Reading Experience™
- falsedan 10y ago
  I'll be dead on the outside eventually as Grim Death's grasping claw squeezes the life out of me. Please, my time on earth is precious and I would rather spend it with my loved ones in preference to skimming over forced references.
  - Ar-Curunir 10y ago
    Oh yeah, that 0.5s you lost while reading that totally ruined your day, enough to make you waste even more time to comment on it. It's an informal blog, I read the same reference, thought, "must be some joke I've missed", and got on with reading the rest of the blog.
    - falsedan 10y ago
      Will you lie on your deathbed recalling all the times you spend reading forced memes and thinking, "… for teh win!!1"? That blog is informal in style but not in content; it's a professional blog by a Mozilla employee. I don't feel like it respects its audiences' time, which is sadly the norm for software-related technical writing. Whings won't get better by saying nothing, and asking people to improve is never a waste of time (if done nicely). Related: Normalization of deviance in software: how broken practices become standard[0] [0]: http://danluu.com/wat/ http://danluu.com/wat/

diimdeep 10y ago

There is really interesting podcast episode about Rust and Servo https://changelog.com/podcast/228 https://changelog.com/podcast/228 with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Moffitt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Moffitt Definitely worth listening to, tons of info there. from show notes interesting presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-FSfNO-oT9Wqo2swvm6UnsybYzsmKcb_DScJpd-4PIA/edit https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1-FSfNO-oT9Wqo2swvm6U...

reitanqild 10y ago

Wow, I think the comments section below was ugly. I have been worried about Firefox and seriously questioned some of the decisions along the road but I think and hope I always respected the devs who volunteer for this.

mwexler 10y ago

Unclear on the audience for this post. All the "jet engine" stuff sounds like it's aimed at consumers, but this is of no interest to average consumers; instead, shouldn't this be of interest to devs who build web apps or embed rendering engines?

qz_ 10y ago

Did the comment section on this website look weird to anyone else?

mariusz79 10y ago

Wouldn't it be easier to build a new plane around the new engine, do some flight tests and after it's ready transfer all passengers?

bzbarsky 10y ago
That has two problems: 1) A lot of flight tests can't be done without a large fraction of passengers on the plane. 2) It may make getting to the final end state faster (though maybe not), but it means you don't get any benefits until you make the switch. Doing things incrementally means you start seeing benefits much earlier. Classic throughput/latency tradeoff.
- mariusz79 10y ago
  What's better to end up in the final end state later, or lose customers because your software is crashing and is harder to maintain because you're introducing totally new way to do stuff?
  - zbraniecki 10y ago
    That's a leading question and a false dillema.
  - bzbarsky 10y ago
    I'm not sure what sort of distinction you are trying to make here. Again, the two options are: 1) One big switch. Can probably be done faster, but has more risk that big problems won't be discovered until late in the game and has user-visible benefits until the switch happens. 2) Incremental changes. Take longer to complete, but allow for better mid-course correction and can show user-visible benefits much earlier in the process. Which of those will lose more customers? It really depends on the market reality and at how successfully the incremental changes can be made.

nraynaud 10y ago

Call caniuse, flexbugs, quirksmode, stackoverflow and it's companion codepen on the deck, there will be some action! creating a renderer in 90% of the work, the other 90% is documenting its bugs and quirks.

zbraniecki 10y ago
Correct. That's why it's such a massive task. Servo is pretty decent at supporting a lot of web standards now. Unfortunately, the real web is made of quirks and implementation targeting workarounds. I think the biggest lesson from Servo is that entry barrier to the web market is already much higher than we would like it to be. Having a great new web engine supporting 100% of web standards does not get you even close to being ready to serve the web. And the willingness of web developer community to take the "one browser only feature" bait is a major part of the problem.
gsnedders 10y ago
I for one hope we're getting better at that: we're sharing more tests across browsers than ever before, and I think that's quite possibly going to end up being the de-facto norm for all new tests this year. Of course, that doesn't mean that we'll get rid of all bugs, but it does mean that more bugs should be found before shipping. (As a disclaimer: this is essentially the majority of what I've got paid to do over the past year-and-a-bit.)

phkahler 10y ago

I've seen this before: >> At some point in mid-2017, all new CSS will be built with Quantum plane parts, not Gecko. Going forward, it will be much easier and more enjoyable to implement new CSS properties. Which makes it easier for folks in the open source community to contribute. If you're not careful this can drag on for years with half the stuff done one way and half the new way - especially once you reach the point where "all new stuff is built the new way". There can come a point where you need to just purge the old stuff. We've seen this in places like GIMP moving to GEGL, and several project moving to GTK3 (GIMP, Inkscape, and others), the purge of java from LibreOffice, and now there's this mushy migration to Wayland. Firefox is not the only project migrating to rust either. In all these cases I'm actually in favor of the migrations, and many of those have been completed over years. It's just that once a path has been defined I feel like there needs to be a more concerted effort to actually complete the transition sooner rather than later. Let new features take a back seat and get your internals switched over. I know it's a balance but working on a project that's straddling the fence is almost always slower in the long run. Having said that, firefox is huge so subsystems will need to switch to rust one at a time. I'm just saying that once CSS can be done the new way they need to require it to all be done that way, not just new stuff. Perhaps that is the case and it wasn't spelled out clearly in TFA.

syncsynchalt 10y ago
A good way to force this along is to have a champion for the work, and an automated burndown metric that random devs can watch and influence. Mozilla is pretty good at the latter, cf. https://arewefastyet.com https://arewefastyet.com
- flyingramen 10y ago
  Seems like Safari is doing better than everything else if I'm reading the charts right.
  - vdnkh 10y ago
    > Why is Safari not tested on 32-bit machine? >Safari defaults to 64-bit machines and doesn't need to worry about 32-bit anymore. Big pieces of their engine is 64-bit only. As a result showing Safari on 32-bit machines would give incorrect results. Maybe this has something to do with it?

dawnerd 10y ago

I was honestly expecting an interesting story about a real jet engine being replaced in flight.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
The story changed its title from being about Gecko and Servo to this literally in between me viewing the frontpage and clicking on the comments link. This story here is IMO should be extempt from the "original title" rule - the original title is annoyingly misleading.
- jdmichal 10y ago
  Leave the title, append it with "Transitioning from Gecko to Servo".
  - mdrzn 10y ago
    Yup, as soon as possible. I was also looking forward to read about jet engine being replaced in mid air.
  - dang 10y ago
    Ok, we'll use that wording instead. Thanks!
dingaling 10y ago
Some piston-engined aicraft had crawlways in the wing to permit inflight engine servicing ( Ju-90, XB-15 and B-36 come to mind ) but sadly I'm unaware of any jet aircraft with such a clever feature. Potentially the YB-49 flying-wing but I haven't located a cutaway to confirm.
27182818284 10y ago
Me too! I was like "Whoa that's a novel idea...and it is about browsers...damn!" I was already conjuring up crazy scenarios similar to in-flight refueling.
rafinha 10y ago

digi_owl 10y ago

I just wish that their UI (UX? ugh...) team was as competent as their engine team appears to be.

ghostly_s 10y ago
What is your complaint, exactly? Considering it includes support for almost total customization of the user interface by third-party code, I think they've done an excellent job with the UX.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  I expect that support to vanish under the dual guise of multi-process and "security". Never mind that more and more Firefox have been taking on the appearance of a Chrome clone, rather than offering a distinct look.
  - steveklabnik 10y ago
    Have you seen the browser.html project?

Touche 10y ago

> Going forward, it will be much easier and more enjoyable to implement new CSS properties. Which makes it easier for folks in the open source community to contribute. Which makes new things come out faster. I had never really thought of Servo in these terms before, but it makes a lot of sense. Mozilla, being a nonprofit, can't compete with Google / Apple / Microsoft doing things their way. They inherently have a greater need for the free-time contributions. Given that, if you can make contributions easier and "fun", by choosing a more modern language and toolchain, it could theoretically be a competitive advantage. Thinking about it like this, the recent Rust marketing articles make a lot of sense. Rust marketing matters because the more Rust developers there are, the more potential Servo (and thus Firefox) developers there are. Whether it pans out or not remains to be seen, but as a way to attempt to hack a problem, I really like it.

wmf 10y ago
Mozilla is really just another software company owned by a nonprofit. They have hundreds of millions in revenue and have been "profitable" in many/all years. But they are definitely much smaller than Google/Apple/MS and can't benefit from ecosystem lock-in effects.
- Touche 10y ago
  Everything's comparative, of course. Mozilla isn't a solo dev's weekend project, but it's also not a top 10 most valuable company in the world, like all of its competitors are.
  - addicted 10y ago
    Also, Mozilla, the way it is setup, does not have the same incentives as its competitors do, all of which are publicly traded firms.
- hackuser 10y ago
  > Mozilla is really just another software company owned by a nonprofit It depends on how one defines "just another software company", but I don't agree with that characterization: Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent. Much more of the same here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/ I don't see Google, Facebook, Microsoft, or other software companies aggressively, creatively pursuing those goals (and achieving them). If Mozilla was just another software company, would there even be an open web today?

milankragujevic 10y ago

Note to author, please change your font, It's really hard to read on my screen. http://i.imgur.com/C9RdFHv.png http://i.imgur.com/C9RdFHv.png Windows 10 + Chrome.

Too 10y ago

Good to see some internal motivation from Mozilla's side for a bridge between rust and c++. This will be needed to drive major adaptation of rust.

beezischillin 10y ago

I'm so happy to read this and all I can say is I hope they succeed - the faster, the better. I used to run Firefox and loved it so much, but it started falling behind in performance so much that I had to switch out of necessity. I haven't really seen it improve much over the years. On the contrary, Safari, while it always felt a bit slower than Chrome, is feeling faster and faster with each update. Working at a company where I occasionally create presentational sites, I often have to create and optimise animations that some designer thought would be so very radical and the two browsers that are extremely painful to support are usually Firefox and Internet Edge-splorer (pardon the pun). I have animations that run at a smooth 60fps in Chrome and Safari effortlessly, quite often producing 1-2 FPS in Firefox. Their updates are quite weird too, between the last 3 updates, I've seen the project I was working on run bad enough that I had to fallback to the mobile-lite version on FF to running acceptably (30+ fps) to running like crap again. And maybe we'll see 16 year old style rendering bugs get fixed finally, too? Please, pretty, please? After ripping on it a bit, tho, I have to say: I'm looking forward to running Firefox again in the future, as much as I like Safari at the moment, it's closed source and I don't like being exposed to Apple's whims (especially lately), where if they decide to destroy by making it unusable I'm left out to dry and quite frankly Google Chrome just creeps me out now.

nnethercote 10y ago
> I have animations that run at a smooth 60fps in Chrome and Safari effortlessly, quite often producing 1-2 FPS in Firefox. Can you give an example? I'm sure Mozilla's animation people would love to hear about this.

agumonkey 10y ago

Curious about the results. Most of luck to the team.