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Tangentially, but on the subject of alternate browser engines, how is Servo doing these days? Has anyone managed to keep that project alive after the Mozilla la

Tangentially, but on the subject of alternate browser engines, how is Servo doing these days? Has anyone managed to keep that project alive after the Mozilla layoffs in 2020?

rvz 4y ago
Interesting that there is little to no mention of Servo here. The once hyped up browser engine 'Written in Rust™' that was meant to be a revolutionary new alternative browser engine meant to be used in Firefox for its fearless safety features. Yet the entire project headed for the scraps at Mozilla and is sitting somewhere on GitHub with no-one using it. When I see hype around a new browser engine from scratch I am immediately skeptical, unless those 'donations' turn into 'corporate sponsorships'.
- M2Ys4U 4y ago
  Servo was never meant to be an alternative browser engine that would replace Gecko. It was an R&D project and, if you look at the bits that made their way in to Firefox, a fairly successful one. Stylo, WebRender, various parsers etc...
  - azakai 4y ago
    (sorry to post twice on the same topic, but your first sentence is not accurate, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32813714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32813714)
    - kibwen 4y ago
      I know better than to dispute Alon Zakai on Mozilla internals, but it remains true that Mozilla's external messaging unwaveringly insisted that Servo was not going to replace Gecko. Even in the later years it emphasized the strategy of gradual replacement of select components.
      - azakai 4y ago
        Interesting. I may be less aware of the external messaging than you. Do you have some examples of that perhaps? I'm not doubting you, I'm just curious what was written. I'd expect stuff like "Servo is an experimental browser engine," or, "We don't currently have plans to replace Gecko with Servo" (which was obviously true at all times in history), but I'd be surprised to see something like "Servo will never replace Gecko." But maybe I just didn't see that messaging - could be! It's also worth mentioning that "replacing Gecko" may be the wrong way to look at it. More reasonable is for Gecko and Servo to eventually come into alignment - somehow. That's what happened in practice, in a way that has a lot more of Gecko than Servo, but in theory it could have happened the other way, with a lot more Servo. Even in that situation, I wouldn't say Servo "replaced" Gecko - it's more complicated than that. For Mozilla, Servo was an experiment. Experiments can end up as full products, or parts of them, or not at all. I think it's clear one possible outcome of the experiment was a full browser (I was personally rooting for that all along). It didn't end up that way, but when people say a full browser was never the intention, I think that's not accurate history.
        kibwen 4y ago
        > Do you have some examples of that perhaps? Not off hand (and Mozilla's official marketing rarely goes so low-level as to mention the browser engine itself by name), but (as someone who has been hanging out in Rust spaces since 2011) I recall the Servo devs always being very careful to disclaim any intentions to wholesale replace Gecko in Firefox (though I did always wonder if they were instructed to do so, as a way to keep Gecko contributors from rebelling).
        azakai 4y ago
        Yeah, I also didn't see a culture of saying "we're going to replace Gecko." Not because there was any instruction to speak carefully AFAIK, but because that's not the goal. The goal was for Servo to succeed, hopefully both technically and as a product. Product success could happen through convergence with Gecko (as actually happened, but again, the convergence could have been tilted the other way), or through Servo powering something separate from Gecko (for an example of that, in later years Servo was meant to power Mixed Reality projects, which is a story in itself; but other ideas include Servo as an embedded engine, or powering distinct tabs in Firefox and other obvious ideas). In some of those options Servo could have been a full browser engine or even a full browser. I think there was always a hope for that. I'm sad it didn't happen, but it's still a big success in several important ways. Anyhow, I just hope the history doesn't get rewritten as "the goal was always exactly what happened in the end."
- sanxiyn 4y ago
  Note that if you are running Firefox now, you are using Servo's graphics stack.
  - jfk13 4y ago
    As well as its style system.
- TakeBlaster16 4y ago
  Servo wasn't funded by donations, it was funded by Mozilla. That single point of failure was their downfall. I'll take 100 monthly donations over one corporate sponsor any day.
  - rvz 4y ago
    > Servo wasn't funded by donations, it was funded by Mozilla. All thanks to Google; 'funding' more than 85% of Mozilla, which not only having a direct competitor browser going against what Mozilla is standing for, they continue to fall behind features that Google pushes into the web standards committee at the W3C with Mozilla sitting there doing nothing, but going along with it, but late. Mozilla failed because for 14+ years it was unable to make money for itself other than Google and could not move away from them when they ate their lunch and quickened their decline. > I'll take 100 monthly donations over one corporate sponsor any day. I didn't say 'one corporate sponsor', but let's go with the '100 monthly donations'. How many of those developers are active and full time like awesomekling? Less than 5? With a simple observation on their Patreon / GitHub sponsorship page, paying $4 a month average with 100 people is hardly enough to support a single developer, even with the $1K monthly going to only one developer for building a browser and especially with less than 5 active developers. Realistically, corporate sponsors would make this more sustainable.
    - JBits 4y ago
      I'm not very knowledgable about this, but did failing to a new revenue source really lead to Mozilla's decline? From articles about their CEO's massive salarly, I'm (perhaps naively) thinking mismanagement is a far greater issue.
Ygg2 4y ago
Poorly. It's updated, but looking at 3k issues and just 30 PRs requests paints a dark picture. Servo had trouble getting 10k per year funding for just basic CI expenses.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
andrewmcwatters 4y ago
- TakeBlaster16 4y ago
  Components of Servo were integrated just fine into Firefox. WebRender is the big one, and iirc many smaller ones too (the css parser maybe? memory hazy) There's also non-web-related software that uses WebRender, such as Azul. https://azul.rs/ https://azul.rs/ Maybe there aren't integration points at the layer you were hoping for, but that doesn't mean the entire project is "bullshit"
  - andrewmcwatters 4y ago
- chc4 4y ago
  Servo supported the CEF (Chronium embedded framework) API for embedding. See https://github.com/paulrouget/servoshell https://github.com/paulrouget/servoshell and https://github.com/jdm/servo-embedding-example https://github.com/jdm/servo-embedding-example
- fabrice_d 4y ago
  Servo produced a very fast CSS rules matching engine now used in Firefox (see https://nolanlawson.com/2022/06/22/style-scoping-versus-shadow-dom-which-is-fastest/ https://nolanlawson.com/2022/06/22/style-scoping-versus-shad...), and WebRender which underpins Gecko's rendering. That's not nothing. About embedding Servo, I have some experience around that (https://github.com/fabricedesre/servonk/ https://github.com/fabricedesre/servonk/) and it's been easy to embed: you just need to provide a GL surface and hook up your input events into their event loop. Clearly there were not zero integration points, and a some other examples exist (like https://github.com/paulrouget/servoshell https://github.com/paulrouget/servoshell).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tannhaeuser 4y ago

Tangentially, but on the subject of alternate browser engines, how is Servo doing these days? Has anyone managed to keep that project alive after the Mozilla layoffs in 2020?

rvz 4y ago

Interesting that there is little to no mention of Servo here. The once hyped up browser engine 'Written in Rust™' that was meant to be a revolutionary new alternative browser engine meant to be used in Firefox for its fearless safety features. Yet the entire project headed for the scraps at Mozilla and is sitting somewhere on GitHub with no-one using it. When I see hype around a new browser engine from scratch I am immediately skeptical, unless those 'donations' turn into 'corporate sponsorships'.

M2Ys4U 4y ago
Servo was never meant to be an alternative browser engine that would replace Gecko. It was an R&D project and, if you look at the bits that made their way in to Firefox, a fairly successful one. Stylo, WebRender, various parsers etc...
- azakai 4y ago
  (sorry to post twice on the same topic, but your first sentence is not accurate, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32813714 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32813714)
  - kibwen 4y ago
    I know better than to dispute Alon Zakai on Mozilla internals, but it remains true that Mozilla's external messaging unwaveringly insisted that Servo was not going to replace Gecko. Even in the later years it emphasized the strategy of gradual replacement of select components.
    - azakai 4y ago
      Interesting. I may be less aware of the external messaging than you. Do you have some examples of that perhaps? I'm not doubting you, I'm just curious what was written. I'd expect stuff like "Servo is an experimental browser engine," or, "We don't currently have plans to replace Gecko with Servo" (which was obviously true at all times in history), but I'd be surprised to see something like "Servo will never replace Gecko." But maybe I just didn't see that messaging - could be! It's also worth mentioning that "replacing Gecko" may be the wrong way to look at it. More reasonable is for Gecko and Servo to eventually come into alignment - somehow. That's what happened in practice, in a way that has a lot more of Gecko than Servo, but in theory it could have happened the other way, with a lot more Servo. Even in that situation, I wouldn't say Servo "replaced" Gecko - it's more complicated than that. For Mozilla, Servo was an experiment. Experiments can end up as full products, or parts of them, or not at all. I think it's clear one possible outcome of the experiment was a full browser (I was personally rooting for that all along). It didn't end up that way, but when people say a full browser was never the intention, I think that's not accurate history.
      - kibwen 4y ago
        > Do you have some examples of that perhaps? Not off hand (and Mozilla's official marketing rarely goes so low-level as to mention the browser engine itself by name), but (as someone who has been hanging out in Rust spaces since 2011) I recall the Servo devs always being very careful to disclaim any intentions to wholesale replace Gecko in Firefox (though I did always wonder if they were instructed to do so, as a way to keep Gecko contributors from rebelling).
        azakai 4y ago
        Yeah, I also didn't see a culture of saying "we're going to replace Gecko." Not because there was any instruction to speak carefully AFAIK, but because that's not the goal. The goal was for Servo to succeed, hopefully both technically and as a product. Product success could happen through convergence with Gecko (as actually happened, but again, the convergence could have been tilted the other way), or through Servo powering something separate from Gecko (for an example of that, in later years Servo was meant to power Mixed Reality projects, which is a story in itself; but other ideas include Servo as an embedded engine, or powering distinct tabs in Firefox and other obvious ideas). In some of those options Servo could have been a full browser engine or even a full browser. I think there was always a hope for that. I'm sad it didn't happen, but it's still a big success in several important ways. Anyhow, I just hope the history doesn't get rewritten as "the goal was always exactly what happened in the end."
sanxiyn 4y ago
Note that if you are running Firefox now, you are using Servo's graphics stack.
- jfk13 4y ago
  As well as its style system.
TakeBlaster16 4y ago
Servo wasn't funded by donations, it was funded by Mozilla. That single point of failure was their downfall. I'll take 100 monthly donations over one corporate sponsor any day.
- rvz 4y ago
  > Servo wasn't funded by donations, it was funded by Mozilla. All thanks to Google; 'funding' more than 85% of Mozilla, which not only having a direct competitor browser going against what Mozilla is standing for, they continue to fall behind features that Google pushes into the web standards committee at the W3C with Mozilla sitting there doing nothing, but going along with it, but late. Mozilla failed because for 14+ years it was unable to make money for itself other than Google and could not move away from them when they ate their lunch and quickened their decline. > I'll take 100 monthly donations over one corporate sponsor any day. I didn't say 'one corporate sponsor', but let's go with the '100 monthly donations'. How many of those developers are active and full time like awesomekling? Less than 5? With a simple observation on their Patreon / GitHub sponsorship page, paying $4 a month average with 100 people is hardly enough to support a single developer, even with the $1K monthly going to only one developer for building a browser and especially with less than 5 active developers. Realistically, corporate sponsors would make this more sustainable.
  - JBits 4y ago
    I'm not very knowledgable about this, but did failing to a new revenue source really lead to Mozilla's decline? From articles about their CEO's massive salarly, I'm (perhaps naively) thinking mismanagement is a far greater issue.

Ygg2 4y ago

Poorly. It's updated, but looking at 3k issues and just 30 PRs requests paints a dark picture. Servo had trouble getting 10k per year funding for just basic CI expenses.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

andrewmcwatters 4y ago

TakeBlaster16 4y ago
Components of Servo were integrated just fine into Firefox. WebRender is the big one, and iirc many smaller ones too (the css parser maybe? memory hazy) There's also non-web-related software that uses WebRender, such as Azul. https://azul.rs/ https://azul.rs/ Maybe there aren't integration points at the layer you were hoping for, but that doesn't mean the entire project is "bullshit"
- andrewmcwatters 4y ago
chc4 4y ago
Servo supported the CEF (Chronium embedded framework) API for embedding. See https://github.com/paulrouget/servoshell https://github.com/paulrouget/servoshell and https://github.com/jdm/servo-embedding-example https://github.com/jdm/servo-embedding-example
fabrice_d 4y ago
Servo produced a very fast CSS rules matching engine now used in Firefox (see https://nolanlawson.com/2022/06/22/style-scoping-versus-shadow-dom-which-is-fastest/ https://nolanlawson.com/2022/06/22/style-scoping-versus-shad...), and WebRender which underpins Gecko's rendering. That's not nothing. About embedding Servo, I have some experience around that (https://github.com/fabricedesre/servonk/ https://github.com/fabricedesre/servonk/) and it's been easy to embed: you just need to provide a GL surface and hook up your input events into their event loop. Clearly there were not zero integration points, and a some other examples exist (like https://github.com/paulrouget/servoshell https://github.com/paulrouget/servoshell).
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tannhaeuser 4y ago