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I'm really hopeful for this. The world needs a new browser engine, there is dwindling competition in this space and time and time again I find myself dissatisfi
by AdamSC1 9y ago
I'm really hopeful for this. The world needs a new browser engine, there is dwindling competition in this space and time and time again I find myself dissatisfied with browser offerings.
I've tried every obscure browser out there, and many of them are great at specific things but nearly all of them lack a few key features or present an experience that frequently crashes.
I think the Servo project is the biggest chance that Mozilla has to make an impact in its "Internet for the people mantra."
As a non-dev I will do my part by guinea pigging nightly builds and submitting issues!
- hacker_9 9y ago> The world needs a new browser engine > As a non-dev I expect you are just responding to the inherent lack of performance that the javascript + html + css bundle shamelessly provides, which Servo will do nothing to sort out. Webassembly on the other hand is the first step to bringing superior performance to all browsers.
- notriddle 9y agoServo doesn't really do anything for JavaScript (which is pretty much as fast as it's going to get, thanks to all the hard work of the V8, Spidermonkey, and SquirrelFish teams). But speeding CSS up is kind of the whole point of Servo.
- Klathmon 9y agoAnd not just "CSS" but the whole DOM itself, which is more often than not what most people "perceive" as the slowness with web apps (and the entire reason why virtual-DOMs have caught on)
- tmzt 9y agoOne of the things Servo gives us is the ability to experiment with new models for scripts to interact with a page. Imagine an IPC-based API exposed to WASM for instance. The concurrency story could also expand on the limited capabilities of web workers support for shared memory.
- kibwen 9y agoImproving HTML + CSS performance is absolutely one of the goals of Servo. Here's a video from pcwalton demonstrating reflow (HTML), repainting, and CSS animations on the GPU in Servo: https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/#@25m50s https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/#... (much of this code is being uplifted to Firefox as WebRender). It's true that Servo won't have any effect on Javascript performance, but WASM won't have any effect on HTML or CSS performance.
- hacker_9 9y agoI understand that, but the idea that HTML + CSS can only be sped up by some hugely parallel structure requiring a whole new programming language and browser engine is really quite shocking. I think once webassembly is established and in use, we will start to see steps in the direction of replacing HTML + CSS altogether, with something that has performance in mind.
- UtherII 9y agoA new programming language is not required, it's just a bonus to help developers handling safety and concurrency.
- pekk 9y agoIt seems like a valid point that many of the details of HTML and CSS, while you can use all kinds of fancy techniques to make them a little faster, impose limits on performance.
- kibwen 9y agoIt's true that the DOM is a bottleneck on many apps (I don't think anybody is disputing that), but "a little faster" undersells what Servo is trying to achieve: order-of-magnitude speedups on GPU-parallelizable tasks, and at least factor-of-two speedups on CPU-parallelizable tasks, all while providing stronger guarantees WRT user security than any contemporary browser.
- 9y ago
- uncletaco 9y agoWould web assembly help out with desktop web applications running on stuff like electron?
- Rusky 9y agoIt can help there exactly as much as it can help non-desktop web apps.
- AdamSC1 9y agoMore that half the browsers I experience crash or freeze on a constant basis, and yet Chrome seems to handle it in significantly more cases.
- j3097736 9y agoServo plus browserhtml could become a nice alternative considering that mozilla plans to kill XUL and thus firefox interface customization.