12 ms·

Servo Engine contributions this year

238 points by maverick74 5y ago

dathinab 5y ago
Its still alive? I'm surprised as as far as I can tell it's "to big" in relation to it's benefits to (likely) be fully hobby maintained and currently not supported directly or indirectly by any company.
- zack6849 5y ago
  isn't Mozilla involved in this still? I know they WERE
  - CameronNemo 5y ago
    Mozilla either reassigned or laid off all engineers working on Servo, you can see when they did it in the graph.
  - erk__ 5y ago
    I think it is a Linux Foundation project now and Mozilla does not have any formal involvement
Y_Y 5y ago
So what's a good way to contribute money or code or time?
- Ygg2 5y ago
  You can checkout servo.org for details: For money visit https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/servo https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/servo For time and code: https://github.com/servo/servo https://github.com/servo/servo
brundolf 5y ago
I think it's dead unless Mozilla changes its mind or some other company decides to take up the mantle. I doubt an open-source project this ambitious can survive without paid maintainers. And then on top of that, a whole lot of institutional knowledge has been suddenly scattered to the winds.
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  Software is never alive nor dead. The question is if it can keep up with the moving target of modern web standards, or if it can even provide limited compatibility.
  - johnjj257 5y ago
    Yea and if it can't it's essentially dead...
    - CameronNemo 5y ago
      Again, it was never alive and it cannot be dead. It is software. It will probably always pass ACID 3.
- vfclists 5y ago
  Mozilla management have never been honest about their desires and motives for Firefox. How can an organization created by venture capitalists which depends on Google for most of its income commit itself to challenging Google?
  - vfclists 5y ago
    How do these downvotes arrive so fast? HN is clearly a forum where big companies have their guys monitoring to downvote an adverse opinions. I ought to join lobster.
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    You're being downvoted because you're airing an uncomfortable truth. Deep down they know you are right but they don't want to admit it so they downvote you. It's a natural human trait; I doubt Lobster is any better.
draw_down 5y ago
What are its dependents? Or is it mostly used as a reference implementation still?
thrower123 5y ago
The key dates here to look at would be August 10, 2020 to now https://twitter.com/directhex/status/1293352458308198401 https://twitter.com/directhex/status/1293352458308198401
- kunagi7 5y ago
  There's a really sharp drop after August 2020. It looks like the former devs increased their activity a bit in February-March of 2021 but after that is almost flat. A browser engine is something way too big to sustain by hobbyists or as a side job. Most of small user base browsers are Chromium derivatives, WebKit wrappers (iOS). There's forks of Firefox like Waterfox or Palemoon which end up slowly getting behind in features or security implementations.
slver 5y ago
If Mozilla no longer plans to move forward with it and use it, it's dead. Nothing can save it. So what does it mean "don't let it die". I mean are bunch of people supposed to develop a modern browser engine on the side as a hobby or something? That's hilarious considering even MICROSOFT couldn't keep up, and switched to Chromium.
- tester756 5y ago
  What do you mean by "couldn't keep up"? Edge (old) felt totally usable and some say that outperformed at 4K watching its competitors I don't think they couldn't keep up from tech standpoint
  - slver 5y ago
    By keep up I mean in terms of standards. Edge was always usable, but you'll always get second-grade experience if apps switch to the "fallback mode" on your browser. Google is playing this game of quickly introducing standards they're already implementing in Chrome, and choking out the competition. And it worked with Microsoft. Worked with Opera. Firefox is last man standing.
    - jsnell 5y ago
      The usage of Safari is 3-5x that of Firefox.
      - dmitriid 5y ago
        Safari and Firefox are increasingly on the same page and flat out refuse to implement Chrome's non-standards (see, e.g. https://webapicontroversy.com https://webapicontroversy.com). It's Safari and Firefox as the last competing browsers standing, and Firefox is increasingly irrelevant. Whatever your opinion of Safari is, soon it will be the only browser trying to resist Chrome. And judging by the amount of new "standards" Chrome ships enabled by default with each release, Google couldn't care less about Safari either.
CameronNemo 5y ago
1. Why? Firefox is good and polished for my use cases. What does Servo offer that Firefox does not? 2. How? Browsers are complicated, and I'm not sure I would be a help as a contributor. What can I do?
- pohl 5y ago
  In a way, #2 answers #1. Even if the only benefit of oxidizing subsystems in Firefox was to lower the barrier to entry for contributors, it would still be worth it. To answer #2, though, a good way is to search through the issues by the GitHub labels that mark easier issues to tackle: https://github.com/servo/servo/labels?q=E- https://github.com/servo/servo/labels?q=E-
SkyMarshal 5y ago
Some history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(software) Mozilla implemented some of the stable parts of Servo in Gecko, but abandoned the project in 2020 and handed its governance over to the Linux Foundation. It’s been in maintenance mode since.
Darmody 5y ago
I don't think Mozilla cares anymore. To me, all they do is look busy and try to milk the cow until it dies. I still use Firefox on all my devices and I don't plan to change but I don't see them even wanting to offer something good.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
sandstrom 5y ago
Continuing an open source project that used to be sponsored (paid developers) as a non-sponsored project is always very hard. The code base, project structure, automated tests, etc. is all sized for a certain number of developers. When 90% of them are gone it'll be hard to keep up. Feels somewhat similar to the faith of RethinkDB, which was an awesome database in many regards, but it was difficult to keep the steam up after the sponsoring company shut down. https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/graphs/contributors https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/graphs/contributors One thing that may work, is if Servo tries to carve out a very narrow niche, much smaller than just "general browser", where they are unique and useful. Take embedding as an example. If Servo became a great choice for embedding (similar to WebViews, Electron or maybe as an "engine" to Electron), where there is usually a single set of CSS and Javascript that it's expected to run (basically a bundled app), the downsides of Servo not supporting all Web APIs, or not handling all edge cases, is reduced. Basically, if it runs your code, that's enough. So it'll become "useful" (regardless of where you put the bar for useful) earlier in an embedding context, compared to it becoming useful as a general browser. Should it catch on as a tool for embedding, that would drive more usage and more contributions, which would be a beneficial circle. But this niche could also be something entirely different, of course, I'm not sure embedding is the one.
- dman 5y ago
  Excellent take!
- devit 5y ago
  I think it should be used to make a pure-Rust Tor Browser, since Rust memory safety is essential to preserve anonymity and there are already expectations that full web functionality isn't be available.
- krmboya 5y ago
  I guess it goes back to 'scratching an itch' when it comes to hobby contributions to open source. It's easy to contribute to something that solves one's own problems - and if the maintainer abandons it, someone else can fork and maintain it to fulfill their need. But for projects set up by corporations, geared towards large scale problems, it would be difficult to keep them alive by random drive-by contributions from individual contributors. Maybe what might save Servo is a company seeing a business opportunity by using it, like what happened with Firefox OS, or perhaps being adopted as something like a research project at a University department.
_hl_ 5y ago
Aren't parts of servo still part of Firefox, and hence those parts will continue to be maintained within the context of Firefox?
- dralley 5y ago
  Yes, Stylo and WebRender are still maintained by Firefox team.
Santosh83 5y ago
Mozilla seems to be having their plate full just keeping Firefox in running with Chromium and Safari, at least as a distant, but still alive, third. And slowly falling further behind. I'm coming across more than a few sites which are subtly broken in Firefox, something that virtually never happened all these years. It is sad that they have not managed to become the Linux of web browsers, though Linux on the desktop sort of is similar to Firefox, getting less relevant by the year. There was a window of several years during which you could almost believe free/open source software would really dominate the world, but instead it has been co-opted into providing the infrastructure layer while consumer facing software and devices have become more locked down, black boxes than ever before.
- stuaxo 5y ago
  Having Mozilla structured so that the money coming in doesn't go to developing the browser seems like a massive mistake.
- lordofgibbons 5y ago
  >though Linux on the desktop sort of is similar to Firefox, getting less relevant by the year. It seems like Linux on desktop has never been more popular according to these sites: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-201101-202105 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide... https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share... It's not surprising either, considering all of the ads and metrics collection Microsoft has added into windows recently.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Yeah, desktop Linux isn't losing any (or gaining much) marketshare. Firefox went from having more than half the market to being a rounding error.
    - akie 5y ago
      And we're all worse off because of it.
kzrdude 5y ago
Servo was good and contributed a lot to firefox and Rust
juancampa 5y ago
I hope someone picks up Servo for some sort of "Web Lite" project. A hypothetical subset of the web that is saner than what we have today.
CyberRabbi 5y ago
Set up a foundation. Set up a patreon or create another funding source. Hire developers. Congrats you saved servo (Ps this is how Mozilla started) Edit: lol how is this possibly downvoted? This is both a constructive and informational post. Absolute state
heidar 5y ago
Maybe modern web is the real problem here? The fact you need a large team of paid engineers just to keep up with whatever features big-tech is adding to their spyware browsers is probably not a great situation to be in.
- wyager 5y ago
  Of course the modern web is the real problem. It’s one of the worst application platforms ever invented, despite also being the single most popular.
  - vinkelhake 5y ago
    It's also one of the best. I'm working on a little game in my spare time. It's built on this platform that you consider to be one of the worst ever invented. If I want people to try it out, I just give them a link and they're in the game in seconds. There's no other application platform that comes even remotely close to that.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      I was already doing that with Flash 15 years ago.
      - magicalist 5y ago
        > I was already doing that with Flash 15 years ago. In a web browser, yes.
- wongarsu 5y ago
  If I was a cynic then I would say that Google is very happy with adding more features to keep the circle of viable browser engines as small as possible, while simultaneously "accidentally" adding more and more ways to track users.
postalrat 5y ago
Too big for rust?
The_rationalist 5y ago
See also this prescient issue https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/24026 https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/24026
liminal 5y ago
It was never clear to me if Servo was delivering on its promises. Does it deliver significantly better performance than Gecko or Blink? Is the benefit from a cleaner architecture and easier developer experience? Despite that, I was very hopeful that Servo would come through and be all that and more. But then they started focusing on weird tangential stuff like VR rendering and it felt like it had been managed into irrelevance in that way Mozilla seems to do for so many projects (e.g. FirefoxOS). I was also sad when MS chose Chrome over FF. I probably care too much, but these tools are our interface to a lot of the world's information.
- FreeFull 5y ago
  A bunch of code originally developed for Servo has ended up in Gecko, so it at least has definitely been useful as a testing ground.
freeopinion 5y ago
Josh is still doing amazing work. What does he need to hit -10 million?
NetOpWibby 5y ago
Mozilla doesn't give a damn about embedding. https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/28411 https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/28411 I've opened a couple issues about it over the past few years and even joined the mailing list to see if there was some interest. Alas.
- KirillPanov 5y ago
  Oh, they give a damn about it. The damn they give is this: they are actively hostile to anybody trying to embed firefox [*]. [*] (except on Android, due to Google Play policy nonsense)
  - NetOpWibby 5y ago
    Imagine having unrefined gold in your possession and throwing it away. That’s what this feels like.
sdesol 5y ago
Here's a deeper analysis for the last year. There were 78 contributors with 2 frequent (1 being a bot) and 2 occasional (1 being a bot). https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=impact&q=commit-changes%3A%3C100%2Bwindow%3A365&r=github%3Aservo%2Fservo&v=repo https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=impa... And if you look at the velocity which compares the last 365 days and last 365 - 730 days, there was a large drop in contributors. https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=velocity&q=commit-changes%3A%3C100%2Bwindow%3A365&r=github%3Aservo%2Fservo&v=repo https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=velo...

238 points by maverick74 5y ago

Its still alive? I'm surprised as as far as I can tell it's "to big" in relation to it's benefits to (likely) be fully hobby maintained and currently not supported directly or indirectly by any company.

zack6849 5y ago
isn't Mozilla involved in this still? I know they WERE
- CameronNemo 5y ago
  Mozilla either reassigned or laid off all engineers working on Servo, you can see when they did it in the graph.
- erk__ 5y ago
  I think it is a Linux Foundation project now and Mozilla does not have any formal involvement

Y_Y 5y ago

So what's a good way to contribute money or code or time?

Ygg2 5y ago
You can checkout servo.org for details: For money visit https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/servo https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/servo For time and code: https://github.com/servo/servo https://github.com/servo/servo

brundolf 5y ago

I think it's dead unless Mozilla changes its mind or some other company decides to take up the mantle. I doubt an open-source project this ambitious can survive without paid maintainers. And then on top of that, a whole lot of institutional knowledge has been suddenly scattered to the winds.

CameronNemo 5y ago
Software is never alive nor dead. The question is if it can keep up with the moving target of modern web standards, or if it can even provide limited compatibility.
- johnjj257 5y ago
  Yea and if it can't it's essentially dead...
  - CameronNemo 5y ago
    Again, it was never alive and it cannot be dead. It is software. It will probably always pass ACID 3.
vfclists 5y ago
Mozilla management have never been honest about their desires and motives for Firefox. How can an organization created by venture capitalists which depends on Google for most of its income commit itself to challenging Google?
- vfclists 5y ago
  How do these downvotes arrive so fast? HN is clearly a forum where big companies have their guys monitoring to downvote an adverse opinions. I ought to join lobster.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  You're being downvoted because you're airing an uncomfortable truth. Deep down they know you are right but they don't want to admit it so they downvote you. It's a natural human trait; I doubt Lobster is any better.

draw_down 5y ago

What are its dependents? Or is it mostly used as a reference implementation still?

thrower123 5y ago

The key dates here to look at would be August 10, 2020 to now https://twitter.com/directhex/status/1293352458308198401 https://twitter.com/directhex/status/1293352458308198401

kunagi7 5y ago
There's a really sharp drop after August 2020. It looks like the former devs increased their activity a bit in February-March of 2021 but after that is almost flat. A browser engine is something way too big to sustain by hobbyists or as a side job. Most of small user base browsers are Chromium derivatives, WebKit wrappers (iOS). There's forks of Firefox like Waterfox or Palemoon which end up slowly getting behind in features or security implementations.

slver 5y ago

If Mozilla no longer plans to move forward with it and use it, it's dead. Nothing can save it. So what does it mean "don't let it die". I mean are bunch of people supposed to develop a modern browser engine on the side as a hobby or something? That's hilarious considering even MICROSOFT couldn't keep up, and switched to Chromium.

tester756 5y ago
What do you mean by "couldn't keep up"? Edge (old) felt totally usable and some say that outperformed at 4K watching its competitors I don't think they couldn't keep up from tech standpoint
- slver 5y ago
  By keep up I mean in terms of standards. Edge was always usable, but you'll always get second-grade experience if apps switch to the "fallback mode" on your browser. Google is playing this game of quickly introducing standards they're already implementing in Chrome, and choking out the competition. And it worked with Microsoft. Worked with Opera. Firefox is last man standing.
  - jsnell 5y ago
    The usage of Safari is 3-5x that of Firefox.
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      Safari and Firefox are increasingly on the same page and flat out refuse to implement Chrome's non-standards (see, e.g. https://webapicontroversy.com https://webapicontroversy.com). It's Safari and Firefox as the last competing browsers standing, and Firefox is increasingly irrelevant. Whatever your opinion of Safari is, soon it will be the only browser trying to resist Chrome. And judging by the amount of new "standards" Chrome ships enabled by default with each release, Google couldn't care less about Safari either.

CameronNemo 5y ago

1. Why? Firefox is good and polished for my use cases. What does Servo offer that Firefox does not? 2. How? Browsers are complicated, and I'm not sure I would be a help as a contributor. What can I do?

pohl 5y ago
In a way, #2 answers #1. Even if the only benefit of oxidizing subsystems in Firefox was to lower the barrier to entry for contributors, it would still be worth it. To answer #2, though, a good way is to search through the issues by the GitHub labels that mark easier issues to tackle: https://github.com/servo/servo/labels?q=E- https://github.com/servo/servo/labels?q=E-

SkyMarshal 5y ago

Some history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servo_(software) Mozilla implemented some of the stable parts of Servo in Gecko, but abandoned the project in 2020 and handed its governance over to the Linux Foundation. It’s been in maintenance mode since.

Darmody 5y ago

I don't think Mozilla cares anymore. To me, all they do is look busy and try to milk the cow until it dies. I still use Firefox on all my devices and I don't plan to change but I don't see them even wanting to offer something good.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

sandstrom 5y ago

Continuing an open source project that used to be sponsored (paid developers) as a non-sponsored project is always very hard. The code base, project structure, automated tests, etc. is all sized for a certain number of developers. When 90% of them are gone it'll be hard to keep up. Feels somewhat similar to the faith of RethinkDB, which was an awesome database in many regards, but it was difficult to keep the steam up after the sponsoring company shut down. https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/graphs/contributors https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/graphs/contributors One thing that may work, is if Servo tries to carve out a very narrow niche, much smaller than just "general browser", where they are unique and useful. Take embedding as an example. If Servo became a great choice for embedding (similar to WebViews, Electron or maybe as an "engine" to Electron), where there is usually a single set of CSS and Javascript that it's expected to run (basically a bundled app), the downsides of Servo not supporting all Web APIs, or not handling all edge cases, is reduced. Basically, if it runs your code, that's enough. So it'll become "useful" (regardless of where you put the bar for useful) earlier in an embedding context, compared to it becoming useful as a general browser. Should it catch on as a tool for embedding, that would drive more usage and more contributions, which would be a beneficial circle. But this niche could also be something entirely different, of course, I'm not sure embedding is the one.

dman 5y ago
Excellent take!
devit 5y ago
I think it should be used to make a pure-Rust Tor Browser, since Rust memory safety is essential to preserve anonymity and there are already expectations that full web functionality isn't be available.
krmboya 5y ago
I guess it goes back to 'scratching an itch' when it comes to hobby contributions to open source. It's easy to contribute to something that solves one's own problems - and if the maintainer abandons it, someone else can fork and maintain it to fulfill their need. But for projects set up by corporations, geared towards large scale problems, it would be difficult to keep them alive by random drive-by contributions from individual contributors. Maybe what might save Servo is a company seeing a business opportunity by using it, like what happened with Firefox OS, or perhaps being adopted as something like a research project at a University department.

_hl_ 5y ago

Aren't parts of servo still part of Firefox, and hence those parts will continue to be maintained within the context of Firefox?

dralley 5y ago
Yes, Stylo and WebRender are still maintained by Firefox team.

Santosh83 5y ago

Mozilla seems to be having their plate full just keeping Firefox in running with Chromium and Safari, at least as a distant, but still alive, third. And slowly falling further behind. I'm coming across more than a few sites which are subtly broken in Firefox, something that virtually never happened all these years. It is sad that they have not managed to become the Linux of web browsers, though Linux on the desktop sort of is similar to Firefox, getting less relevant by the year. There was a window of several years during which you could almost believe free/open source software would really dominate the world, but instead it has been co-opted into providing the infrastructure layer while consumer facing software and devices have become more locked down, black boxes than ever before.

stuaxo 5y ago
Having Mozilla structured so that the money coming in doesn't go to developing the browser seems like a massive mistake.
lordofgibbons 5y ago
>though Linux on the desktop sort of is similar to Firefox, getting less relevant by the year. It seems like Linux on desktop has never been more popular according to these sites: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-201101-202105 https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide... https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx https://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share... It's not surprising either, considering all of the ads and metrics collection Microsoft has added into windows recently.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Yeah, desktop Linux isn't losing any (or gaining much) marketshare. Firefox went from having more than half the market to being a rounding error.
  - akie 5y ago
    And we're all worse off because of it.

kzrdude 5y ago

Servo was good and contributed a lot to firefox and Rust

juancampa 5y ago

I hope someone picks up Servo for some sort of "Web Lite" project. A hypothetical subset of the web that is saner than what we have today.

CyberRabbi 5y ago

Set up a foundation. Set up a patreon or create another funding source. Hire developers. Congrats you saved servo (Ps this is how Mozilla started) Edit: lol how is this possibly downvoted? This is both a constructive and informational post. Absolute state

heidar 5y ago

Maybe modern web is the real problem here? The fact you need a large team of paid engineers just to keep up with whatever features big-tech is adding to their spyware browsers is probably not a great situation to be in.

wyager 5y ago
Of course the modern web is the real problem. It’s one of the worst application platforms ever invented, despite also being the single most popular.
- vinkelhake 5y ago
  It's also one of the best. I'm working on a little game in my spare time. It's built on this platform that you consider to be one of the worst ever invented. If I want people to try it out, I just give them a link and they're in the game in seconds. There's no other application platform that comes even remotely close to that.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    I was already doing that with Flash 15 years ago.
    - magicalist 5y ago
      > I was already doing that with Flash 15 years ago. In a web browser, yes.
wongarsu 5y ago
If I was a cynic then I would say that Google is very happy with adding more features to keep the circle of viable browser engines as small as possible, while simultaneously "accidentally" adding more and more ways to track users.

postalrat 5y ago

Too big for rust?

The_rationalist 5y ago

See also this prescient issue https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/24026 https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/24026

liminal 5y ago

It was never clear to me if Servo was delivering on its promises. Does it deliver significantly better performance than Gecko or Blink? Is the benefit from a cleaner architecture and easier developer experience? Despite that, I was very hopeful that Servo would come through and be all that and more. But then they started focusing on weird tangential stuff like VR rendering and it felt like it had been managed into irrelevance in that way Mozilla seems to do for so many projects (e.g. FirefoxOS). I was also sad when MS chose Chrome over FF. I probably care too much, but these tools are our interface to a lot of the world's information.

FreeFull 5y ago
A bunch of code originally developed for Servo has ended up in Gecko, so it at least has definitely been useful as a testing ground.

freeopinion 5y ago

Josh is still doing amazing work. What does he need to hit -10 million?

NetOpWibby 5y ago

Mozilla doesn't give a damn about embedding. https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/28411 https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/28411 I've opened a couple issues about it over the past few years and even joined the mailing list to see if there was some interest. Alas.

KirillPanov 5y ago
Oh, they give a damn about it. The damn they give is this: they are actively hostile to anybody trying to embed firefox [*]. [*] (except on Android, due to Google Play policy nonsense)
- NetOpWibby 5y ago
  Imagine having unrefined gold in your possession and throwing it away. That’s what this feels like.

sdesol 5y ago

Here's a deeper analysis for the last year. There were 78 contributors with 2 frequent (1 being a bot) and 2 occasional (1 being a bot). https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=impact&q=commit-changes%3A%3C100%2Bwindow%3A365&r=github%3Aservo%2Fservo&v=repo https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=impa... And if you look at the velocity which compares the last 365 days and last 365 - 730 days, there was a large drop in contributors. https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=velocity&q=commit-changes%3A%3C100%2Bwindow%3A365&r=github%3Aservo%2Fservo&v=repo https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=velo...