4 ms·

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 s

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?
  - kibwen 10y ago
    > it's unclear whether one can write a new browser engine from scratch without spending years reverse-engineering the competition That's to Mozilla's advantage, given that no company in the world has more historical experience reverse-engineering browsers. :P > how does that interact with things like the Grid Module? Servo devs have definitely identified places in the HTML spec which, entirely by accident, require serial behavior. Having a pervasively-parallel browser will hopefully go a long way towards preventing such accidents in the future.
    - gsnedders 10y ago
      > That's to Mozilla's advantage, given that no company in the world has more historical experience reverse-engineering browsers. :P I'd claim Opera (or rather the consortium that now own the Opera browser) have the most experience of reverse-engineering browsers, given Firefox's market-share solved a lot of the site-compat issues a long time before Opera gained market-share (oh, wait, it never did significantly after the rise of IE). On the other hand, almost nobody from the old Presto team is still at Opera, so… ;P

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?
- kibwen 10y ago
  > it's unclear whether one can write a new browser engine from scratch without spending years reverse-engineering the competition That's to Mozilla's advantage, given that no company in the world has more historical experience reverse-engineering browsers. :P > how does that interact with things like the Grid Module? Servo devs have definitely identified places in the HTML spec which, entirely by accident, require serial behavior. Having a pervasively-parallel browser will hopefully go a long way towards preventing such accidents in the future.
  - gsnedders 10y ago
    > That's to Mozilla's advantage, given that no company in the world has more historical experience reverse-engineering browsers. :P I'd claim Opera (or rather the consortium that now own the Opera browser) have the most experience of reverse-engineering browsers, given Firefox's market-share solved a lot of the site-compat issues a long time before Opera gained market-share (oh, wait, it never did significantly after the rise of IE). On the other hand, almost nobody from the old Presto team is still at Opera, so… ;P