8 ms·

Agreed that Mozilla's original mission has been accomplished in spades, but I wouldn't count Mozilla out of the browser race just yet. Servo and Webrender[0] w

Agreed that Mozilla's original mission has been accomplished in spades, but I wouldn't count Mozilla out of the browser race just yet. Servo and Webrender[0] will completely shake up the browser landscape, and will allow web apps to match (maybe even surpass?) native mobile apps in terms of rendering performance. Unless Chrome, IE, and Safari can develop an answer to Servo and Webrender by the time those technologies are ready for prime time, I wouldn't be surprised to see "Best viewed in Firefox" badges start popping up everywhere. [0] https://github.com/servo/webrender/wiki https://github.com/servo/webrender/wiki https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/ https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/

bobajeff 9y ago
Servo won't be ready for quite some time. (I'm thinking maybe 5 years) Project Quantum might be out sooner but it won't be that big of a leap ahead of other browsers.
- lewisl9029 9y ago
  Fair point, and I'm not suggesting that other browser vendors can't possibly have an answer to Servo and Webrender by the time they're ready, but just that I haven't heard about any such efforts from them yet. So it's not entirely unreasonable to suggest that Mozilla's next-gen engine efforts could be first-to-market, and that everyone else might have to play catch up.
gkoberger 9y ago
Mozilla has had "we'll be #1 again once X is launched!" things since I was there 5 years ago (and servo was one of those things back then). It won't happen. Mozilla won the browser war. Firefox lost the browser fight. But there's many wars left to fight, and I hope Mozilla dives into a new one.
- pcwalton 9y ago
  Servo barely existed 5 years ago.
  - gkoberger 9y ago
    But it did exist, no?
    - kibwen 9y ago
      Yes, but even five years ago people acknowledged that it was going to take more than five years to write a browser engine from scratch. I'm on the record as stating in ~2012 not to expect a usable Servo any sooner than 2017 at the earliest (basing my estimation on the time it took to write V8 from scratch). And that was indeed optimistic, but we are seeing bits of Servo (most importantly WebRender and Stylo) being integrated into Firefox this year.
      - lelandbatey 9y ago
        Hey, you weren't totally wrong. If you want to use a simple and fast web-browser on the bleeding edge of development, you can use Servo today. On all the computers I've tried it on it's been really fast, though with plenty of rendering issues.
    - pcwalton 9y ago
      It started in 2012. It was a total toy for most of that year, though. I would barely consider it a real engineering project in that state--heck, for quite a while it was a readme and nothing else :)
- andreasgal 9y ago
  "Mozilla won the browser war. Firefox lost the browser fight. But there's many wars left to fight, and I hope Mozilla dives into a new one." Very poetic way of putting it. Couldn't agree more!
  - diminish 9y ago
    Mozilla lost the mobile OS war unfortunately if that what's inspiring you. What's next isn't clear to me
    - qznc 9y ago
      The Mobile OS war can still be continued. Mozilla should join forces with Lineage OS instead of wasting time with their own. Do the embrace, extend, extinguish strategy with Android. Secure messaging is also still a hot topic. Join forces with Signal or Wire or Matrix or XMPP. For example, Wire intends to open source their server code and enable federation [0]. Voice control requires some weight for an Open Source solution. Specifically, we could use something which does not rely on the internet. PocketSphinx is an ok foundation, but needs more work. [0] https://medium.com/@wireapp/open-sourcing-wire-server-code-ef7866a731d5 https://medium.com/@wireapp/open-sourcing-wire-server-code-e...
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        I don't know a single Android user that even knows what Lineage OS is all about.
        kogepathic 9y ago
        A vast majority of Android users know nothing about custom ROMs. However I would say that among those who do know, Lineage OS has a fairly good reputation for quality. You wouldn't be targeting mass adoption with this, you'd be targeting the influencers.
        LamaOfRuin 9y ago
        Fork/Successor to Cyanogen would probably net slightly more recognition.
- larsberg 9y ago
  I'm not quite ready to throw in the towel yet, though that's certainly a sentiment I hear a lot of around town :-) As technology shifts to a world where most people do not have a monitor on their home computer or a screen on their phone, what it means to be a browser will dramatically change. Certainly, we could post-it the current user experience into whatever we will have tomorrow, but if VR, AR, Speech, and AI and ample cheap private computing power don't excite people for the future of browsers and user agency, I don't know what will. I know we've been working on tech such as Servo for a long time, but sometimes even just being "better" isn't enough, especially when there's a large legacy gap to close. You also need to get lucky with a point where consumers are making massive changes and open to new things. I think that time is much sooner than the "always 5--10 years quoted", and you're going to see mind-blowing things on the web in general and supported by the browser and related services specifically. And I'm betting (at least with my current career) that Mozilla will lead the charge.
- mozillatw 9y ago
  Mozilla also lost its proud feature - freedom of internet. There is no going back ever.
- arontopp 9y ago
  https://vivaldi.com https://vivaldi.com The Vivaldi browser has copied the original Firefox user interface and stole the best ideas from the Firefox extension makers so if you want the Chromium web rendering engine with the original Firefox user interface you are served by the Vivaldi browser. Hopefully they will become profitable and release their modification under a free software license.
- arontopp 9y ago
  https://vivaldi.com https://vivaldi.com The Vivaldi browser has copied the original Firefox user interface and stole the best ideas from the Firefox extension makers so if you want the Chromium web rendering engine with the original Firefox user interface you are served by the Vivaldi browser. Hopefully they will become profitable and release their modification under a free software license.
Mathnerd314 9y ago
Firefox already wins the "Best viewed in Firefox" badge for native MathML. See e.g. http://caniuse.com/mathml http://caniuse.com/mathml Not that anyone cares, because MathJax...
- na85 9y ago
  I care, because I browse with JavaScript disabled. The web is better without JavaScript.
cbryan 9y ago
The problem with your point is that it assumes users' are using Chrome because of its rendering speed. I don't think that's the case.
- lewisl9029 9y ago
  No, I'm not actually assuming that, because I realize there is only negligible difference between major browsers today in terms of rendering performance, and none can approach the rendering performance of native UI frameworks on mobile. But I am assuming that a browser offering a gigantic leap in UX through native-like rendering performance will entice web app developers to recommend that browser over others, because it's nigh impossible to build a consistently 60fps non trivial app with native-like interactions and transitions on the web today, while Servo and Webrender aim to make 60fps on the web the norm rather than the exception.
- rspeer 9y ago
  I occasionally run Firefox (out of nostalgia, idealism, or the need to test a site), and the fact that it is so slow is absolutely what stops me from switching back to it.
  - wolco 9y ago
    If you ran it again it would be fast. Chances are you are going through an update/check process
    - rspeer 9y ago
      Nah. One piece of rendering I particularly care about is interactive SVG performance, and -- while, as another thread says, we can't expect smooth 60 FPS experiences from current desktop browsers -- the difference between Chrome and Firefox is the difference between 15 FPS and 1 FPS.
      - johnp_ 9y ago
        Recently all toolbar icons in Firefox have been converted to SVGs [1] and in the process several performance problems were found and fixed or are in the process of being fixed [2]. You may want to try out a recent Nightly build. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1347543 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1347543 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1054016 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1054016
lurenjia 9y ago
Major browser engines all have about 20 years of development history. Web specs are ever growing and piled higher and higher. Major web browsers have large engineering team and lot resources. It's unlikely Servo can catch up.
- lelandbatey 9y ago
  Servo is already a runnable browser, and I'm amazed how fast it is. It still has rendering issues with plenty (any reasonably complicated media-heavy site, i.e.: cnn.com) of sites, but even then, it's already an amazing piece of technology. On top of that, the point of Servo isn't to be a brand new full on browser, it's to be a proving ground for a next-gen engine. And it's proving to be fast, safe, and the future of browsers.
  - markdog12 9y ago
    > Servo is already a runnable browser, and I'm amazed how fast it is First of all, I think the idea behind Servo is awesome, and I follow it. But I've been testing it on Mac OS and Windows, and it is not a runnable browser, nor fast (as expected!). CPU is often fully pegged and it's very iffy if any UI elements or page loads work. Not to say they won't get there, but it's still very, very early and buggy.
    - Manishearth 9y ago
      Yeah, we don't track perf regressions like released browsers so often we land something that negates the performance benefit. The current servo releases are just alpha, so it's not too important to stay on top of, but we should probably start caring about this more. We had a similar issue with Stylo (Servo style system in gecko) recently where there were bugs in the parallelism code making us slower than gecko. Fixed, now we're faster again. We only recently started tracking performance properly, and it was caught and fixed in a few weeks.
jhasse 9y ago
> (maybe even surpass?) As Servo would be a mobile app itself, I think no ;)
coldtea 9y ago
>Servo and Webrender[0] will completely shake up the browser landscape, and will allow web apps to match (maybe even surpass?) native mobile apps in terms of rendering performance. Unless Firefox (and Servo) gets it GUI to not feel alien and clunky, it wont matter if it has a faster rendering engine. Rendering engines are plenty fast as it is anyway, it's CPU use and battery impact that matters to users. And when performance does matter, it's mostly Javascript performance, which Servo doesn't address. It also wont matter for mobile, since Android will still keep Chrome browser, and iOS will still keep Mobile Safari -- they're both made by the platform's creators.
- majewsky 9y ago
  > it wont matter if it has a faster rendering engine [...] its CPU use and battery impact that matters to users You make it sound like these are two orthogonal aspects. When rendering is faster, CPU usage obviously goes down. As does battery impact, since the CPU can go back to a sleep state faster.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    >You make it sound like these are two orthogonal aspects. When rendering is faster, CPU usage obviously goes down. Only as much as its the rendering, and not the core logic that consumes the CPU. Degenerative case: a page with a single text entry field, where you enter a number and it calculates e.g. the fibonnaci sequence up to that number or factor primes etc. There's hardly any rendering, but lots of CPU.
- Klathmon 9y ago
  Actually JS performance isn't the bottleneck in the vast majority of cases now. JS is more than fast enough, it's the DOM that's slow. And that is what Servo is going to help with. And as for Firefox on Android, I have plenty of hope for it. I'm seeing more and more people switch to alternative browsers for speed (the most common one is samsung's "browser" which everyone says is "super fast" but really only is a weird hack to make scrolling smooth which breaks a few standards). Ios is another story, but at least on android if they make a damn good product, people will use it.

bobajeff 9y ago

Servo won't be ready for quite some time. (I'm thinking maybe 5 years) Project Quantum might be out sooner but it won't be that big of a leap ahead of other browsers.

lewisl9029 9y ago
Fair point, and I'm not suggesting that other browser vendors can't possibly have an answer to Servo and Webrender by the time they're ready, but just that I haven't heard about any such efforts from them yet. So it's not entirely unreasonable to suggest that Mozilla's next-gen engine efforts could be first-to-market, and that everyone else might have to play catch up.

gkoberger 9y ago

Mozilla has had "we'll be #1 again once X is launched!" things since I was there 5 years ago (and servo was one of those things back then). It won't happen. Mozilla won the browser war. Firefox lost the browser fight. But there's many wars left to fight, and I hope Mozilla dives into a new one.

pcwalton 9y ago
Servo barely existed 5 years ago.
- gkoberger 9y ago
  But it did exist, no?
  - kibwen 9y ago
    Yes, but even five years ago people acknowledged that it was going to take more than five years to write a browser engine from scratch. I'm on the record as stating in ~2012 not to expect a usable Servo any sooner than 2017 at the earliest (basing my estimation on the time it took to write V8 from scratch). And that was indeed optimistic, but we are seeing bits of Servo (most importantly WebRender and Stylo) being integrated into Firefox this year.
    - lelandbatey 9y ago
      Hey, you weren't totally wrong. If you want to use a simple and fast web-browser on the bleeding edge of development, you can use Servo today. On all the computers I've tried it on it's been really fast, though with plenty of rendering issues.
  - pcwalton 9y ago
    It started in 2012. It was a total toy for most of that year, though. I would barely consider it a real engineering project in that state--heck, for quite a while it was a readme and nothing else :)
andreasgal 9y ago
"Mozilla won the browser war. Firefox lost the browser fight. But there's many wars left to fight, and I hope Mozilla dives into a new one." Very poetic way of putting it. Couldn't agree more!
- diminish 9y ago
  Mozilla lost the mobile OS war unfortunately if that what's inspiring you. What's next isn't clear to me
  - qznc 9y ago
    The Mobile OS war can still be continued. Mozilla should join forces with Lineage OS instead of wasting time with their own. Do the embrace, extend, extinguish strategy with Android. Secure messaging is also still a hot topic. Join forces with Signal or Wire or Matrix or XMPP. For example, Wire intends to open source their server code and enable federation [0]. Voice control requires some weight for an Open Source solution. Specifically, we could use something which does not rely on the internet. PocketSphinx is an ok foundation, but needs more work. [0] https://medium.com/@wireapp/open-sourcing-wire-server-code-ef7866a731d5 https://medium.com/@wireapp/open-sourcing-wire-server-code-e...
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      I don't know a single Android user that even knows what Lineage OS is all about.
      - kogepathic 9y ago
        A vast majority of Android users know nothing about custom ROMs. However I would say that among those who do know, Lineage OS has a fairly good reputation for quality. You wouldn't be targeting mass adoption with this, you'd be targeting the influencers.
      - LamaOfRuin 9y ago
        Fork/Successor to Cyanogen would probably net slightly more recognition.
larsberg 9y ago
I'm not quite ready to throw in the towel yet, though that's certainly a sentiment I hear a lot of around town :-) As technology shifts to a world where most people do not have a monitor on their home computer or a screen on their phone, what it means to be a browser will dramatically change. Certainly, we could post-it the current user experience into whatever we will have tomorrow, but if VR, AR, Speech, and AI and ample cheap private computing power don't excite people for the future of browsers and user agency, I don't know what will. I know we've been working on tech such as Servo for a long time, but sometimes even just being "better" isn't enough, especially when there's a large legacy gap to close. You also need to get lucky with a point where consumers are making massive changes and open to new things. I think that time is much sooner than the "always 5--10 years quoted", and you're going to see mind-blowing things on the web in general and supported by the browser and related services specifically. And I'm betting (at least with my current career) that Mozilla will lead the charge.
mozillatw 9y ago
Mozilla also lost its proud feature - freedom of internet. There is no going back ever.
arontopp 9y ago
https://vivaldi.com https://vivaldi.com The Vivaldi browser has copied the original Firefox user interface and stole the best ideas from the Firefox extension makers so if you want the Chromium web rendering engine with the original Firefox user interface you are served by the Vivaldi browser. Hopefully they will become profitable and release their modification under a free software license.
arontopp 9y ago
https://vivaldi.com https://vivaldi.com The Vivaldi browser has copied the original Firefox user interface and stole the best ideas from the Firefox extension makers so if you want the Chromium web rendering engine with the original Firefox user interface you are served by the Vivaldi browser. Hopefully they will become profitable and release their modification under a free software license.

Mathnerd314 9y ago

Firefox already wins the "Best viewed in Firefox" badge for native MathML. See e.g. http://caniuse.com/mathml http://caniuse.com/mathml Not that anyone cares, because MathJax...

na85 9y ago
I care, because I browse with JavaScript disabled. The web is better without JavaScript.

cbryan 9y ago

The problem with your point is that it assumes users' are using Chrome because of its rendering speed. I don't think that's the case.

lewisl9029 9y ago
No, I'm not actually assuming that, because I realize there is only negligible difference between major browsers today in terms of rendering performance, and none can approach the rendering performance of native UI frameworks on mobile. But I am assuming that a browser offering a gigantic leap in UX through native-like rendering performance will entice web app developers to recommend that browser over others, because it's nigh impossible to build a consistently 60fps non trivial app with native-like interactions and transitions on the web today, while Servo and Webrender aim to make 60fps on the web the norm rather than the exception.
rspeer 9y ago
I occasionally run Firefox (out of nostalgia, idealism, or the need to test a site), and the fact that it is so slow is absolutely what stops me from switching back to it.
- wolco 9y ago
  If you ran it again it would be fast. Chances are you are going through an update/check process
  - rspeer 9y ago
    Nah. One piece of rendering I particularly care about is interactive SVG performance, and -- while, as another thread says, we can't expect smooth 60 FPS experiences from current desktop browsers -- the difference between Chrome and Firefox is the difference between 15 FPS and 1 FPS.
    - johnp_ 9y ago
      Recently all toolbar icons in Firefox have been converted to SVGs [1] and in the process several performance problems were found and fixed or are in the process of being fixed [2]. You may want to try out a recent Nightly build. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1347543 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1347543 [2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1054016 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1054016

lurenjia 9y ago

Major browser engines all have about 20 years of development history. Web specs are ever growing and piled higher and higher. Major web browsers have large engineering team and lot resources. It's unlikely Servo can catch up.

lelandbatey 9y ago
Servo is already a runnable browser, and I'm amazed how fast it is. It still has rendering issues with plenty (any reasonably complicated media-heavy site, i.e.: cnn.com) of sites, but even then, it's already an amazing piece of technology. On top of that, the point of Servo isn't to be a brand new full on browser, it's to be a proving ground for a next-gen engine. And it's proving to be fast, safe, and the future of browsers.
- markdog12 9y ago
  > Servo is already a runnable browser, and I'm amazed how fast it is First of all, I think the idea behind Servo is awesome, and I follow it. But I've been testing it on Mac OS and Windows, and it is not a runnable browser, nor fast (as expected!). CPU is often fully pegged and it's very iffy if any UI elements or page loads work. Not to say they won't get there, but it's still very, very early and buggy.
  - Manishearth 9y ago
    Yeah, we don't track perf regressions like released browsers so often we land something that negates the performance benefit. The current servo releases are just alpha, so it's not too important to stay on top of, but we should probably start caring about this more. We had a similar issue with Stylo (Servo style system in gecko) recently where there were bugs in the parallelism code making us slower than gecko. Fixed, now we're faster again. We only recently started tracking performance properly, and it was caught and fixed in a few weeks.

jhasse 9y ago

> (maybe even surpass?) As Servo would be a mobile app itself, I think no ;)

coldtea 9y ago

>Servo and Webrender[0] will completely shake up the browser landscape, and will allow web apps to match (maybe even surpass?) native mobile apps in terms of rendering performance. Unless Firefox (and Servo) gets it GUI to not feel alien and clunky, it wont matter if it has a faster rendering engine. Rendering engines are plenty fast as it is anyway, it's CPU use and battery impact that matters to users. And when performance does matter, it's mostly Javascript performance, which Servo doesn't address. It also wont matter for mobile, since Android will still keep Chrome browser, and iOS will still keep Mobile Safari -- they're both made by the platform's creators.

majewsky 9y ago
> it wont matter if it has a faster rendering engine [...] its CPU use and battery impact that matters to users You make it sound like these are two orthogonal aspects. When rendering is faster, CPU usage obviously goes down. As does battery impact, since the CPU can go back to a sleep state faster.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >You make it sound like these are two orthogonal aspects. When rendering is faster, CPU usage obviously goes down. Only as much as its the rendering, and not the core logic that consumes the CPU. Degenerative case: a page with a single text entry field, where you enter a number and it calculates e.g. the fibonnaci sequence up to that number or factor primes etc. There's hardly any rendering, but lots of CPU.
Klathmon 9y ago
Actually JS performance isn't the bottleneck in the vast majority of cases now. JS is more than fast enough, it's the DOM that's slow. And that is what Servo is going to help with. And as for Firefox on Android, I have plenty of hope for it. I'm seeing more and more people switch to alternative browsers for speed (the most common one is samsung's "browser" which everyone says is "super fast" but really only is a weird hack to make scrolling smooth which breaks a few standards). Ios is another story, but at least on android if they make a damn good product, people will use it.