8 ms·

Servo announces grant from the NLnet Foundation

fermigier 3y ago
The money for this grant actually comes, in part, from the European Commission (via the NGI programme).
nicoburns 3y ago
It's cool to see the work on Servo since Igalia picked it up. There was a lot of tech debt to work through due to years of minimal maintenance, but they seem to have been making real progress. My personal hope is they push hard on the modularity angle. Seems to me that: 1) there's probably a niche to be filled by an OSS browser engine focussed on embedability and 2) That it could be a huge boon for the long-term health of the web platform if there are build-your-own-browser "lego building block" libraries that people can mix and match to create new engines.
- arlcode 3y ago
  Wild speculation: With iphones being forced to open their web engine there might be some apps interested in embedding their own engines across mobile devices.
- capableweb 3y ago
  > 1) there's probably a niche to be filled by an OSS browser engine focussed on embedability Absolutely. Electron or something Electron-like with Servo embedded could be a nice outcome. Tauri already fills that niche a bit, but uses whatever the OS provides, rather than embedding anything. Would be nice with something in-between that.
  - the_duke 3y ago
    Tauri is actually adding experimental Servo support.
    - capableweb 3y ago
      Oh wow, I wasn't aware of this! So proper embedded cross-platform engine into the final binary? That'd be awesome.
      - igrunert 3y ago
        Yep, embedding the Servo engine into the final binary. This work is sponsored by another (separate) NLnet grant: https://nlnet.nl/project/Tauri-Servo/ https://nlnet.nl/project/Tauri-Servo/
- paulrouget 3y ago
  > My personal hope is they push hard on the modularity angle It is strongly designed that way (the component model and the embed layer).
- wongarsu 3y ago
  An embedded engine is also a much faster path to viable use cases. For example Sciter [1] has some degree of success despite implementing only a sane subset of the DOM API. It doesn't work well for general internet surfing, but when used as an UI library you just avoid the parts that don't work. 1: https://sciter.com/ https://sciter.com/
dale_glass 3y ago
I'm very excited about Servo. Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it. Not only the idea of an engine with great security and performance is an excellent one, but I also love the idea of a web engine as a component. This for some reason seems to have disappeared in modern times. IE used to have an ActiveX control back in the Windows 9x days. You could embed a web engine anywhere you wanted. KHTML also worked like that. And in modern times... nothing. Neither Firefox nor Chrome seem to have interest in that kind of usage. Qt WebEngine thankfully exists, but in my understanding has a bit of an antagonistic relationship with Chrome, because Chrome doesn't care for that kind of use. Plus Chrome is a Google thing, and Google things in my experience are their own world, making them annoying to build and integrate. So I'm very much looking forward to having a viable alternative to integrate into our code. Both solving security concerns and hopefully making the integration less painful.
- znpy 3y ago
  > Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it The fact that mozilla wasn’t interested in that really tells a lot about their priorities
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Or they (Firefox folks) learned what happens when you (Netscape) try a major greenfield rewrite (Netscape v5) so ambitious that it becomes the example of why one should never rewrite. And instead just back ported the lessons learned to make Firefox/Gecko better years earlier than a rewrite could.
    - jeltz 3y ago
      That they got a ton of valuable code and lessons which improved Firefox a lot? Seems like the investment into Servo paid off really well.
    - dahauns 3y ago
      That's why Servo exists in the first place. That's exactly the reason why always has been intended as a research engine, with an explicit focus on high modularity, and easy portability of single components, several of which were then incorporated into Firefox. Especially the latter wasn't some kind of salvage, trying to squeeze value out of some theoretical project. It was an explicit goal from the beginning.
Sander_Marechal 3y ago
That is great news for Servo! NLNet Foundation has been funding a lot of great projects lately. I see their name pop up a lot.
- chubot 3y ago
  Yes, my project https://www.oilshell.org/ https://www.oilshell.org/ has been funded by NLnet since 2022, and it's helped a lot. I needed some help to push through a few problems, and that happened :) It is very forward thinking since we happen to be mostly in North America, but the funding comes from the EU.
rob74 3y ago
What's this "Legacy Layout" they're using as a comparison? The previous iteration of Servo? Looks like some of the code is still used by both, as the curves sometimes (but not always) go up and down at the same time...
- igrunert 3y ago
  Legacy Layout refers to the original system, Layout 2013. There was a second system started, Layout 2020, to address challenges with implementing parts of the CSS spec which didn't cleanly map to Layout 2013's architecture. There's a good report in the Servo wiki from this year (authored by a group of Igalians) summarizing the differences between the two and why the decision was made to move forward with Layout 2020. https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Servo-Layout-Engines-Report https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Servo-Layout-Engines-Rep...
sergiotapia 3y ago
See also Ladybird for another from-scratch browser being built by a more ragtag indie group. https://ladybird.dev/ https://ladybird.dev/ The chaddest of the chad projects honestly.
- neurostimulant 3y ago
  Is ladybird actually usable outside of serenity os?
  - tristan957 3y ago
    There are many ports. GTK, Qt, and Cocoa are the 3 that I am aware of.
- jedisct1 3y ago
  I have more hope in Ladybird than Servo, TBH. Considering how young it is, Ladybird is already very impressive. Even just to take screenshots, Servo's renderer is very basic, slow and buggy.
  - jancsika 3y ago
    Hm... is Ladybird more feature complete than Servo at this point?
    - exxos 3y ago
      [dead]
  - actuallyalys 3y ago
    I have more optimism for Ladybird as well. For me, That’s not a knock on Servo and mostly because it was started as a research project, which suggests you’re focusing more on experimentation than producing a product.
  - _wf2l 3y ago
    I don't see Ladybird ever being seriously useful. Already serious browser projects like Brave, Arc, and Orion struggle to keep me off of Firefox. Servo is honestly doing the correct thing by focusing on embed-ability into other projects, something that has been basically dominated by Chrome alone
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
AbuAssar 3y ago
Servo is a web rendering engine written in Rust, with WebGL and WebGPU support, and adaptable to desktop, mobile, and embedded applications. It is embeddable, independent, memory-safe, modularand parallel web rendering engine.
ilaksh 3y ago
Somehow I thought that Servo was already incorporated into Firefox. Is there a way to render some HTML in Rust into an image, without loading a whole browser? It doesn't have to support a lot of HTML or CSS.
- nicoburns 3y ago
  The closest thing currently is probably https://github.com/trimental/inlyne https://github.com/trimental/inlyne which differs in two ways: it only support markdown not arbitrary HTML, and it renders to screen rather to an image. But it's a good start. IMO the main blocker for web rendering in Rust right now is better text layout, and in particular support for embedding non-text content within text ala `display: inline-block`. If/when that is implemented I think we'll be able to do a decent job of rendering basic web pages.
- jszymborski 3y ago
  The CSS style system (stylo) started out in Servo and is now in Firefox but as I understand it they've diverged quite a bit. https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2017/07/25/stylo-is-ready-for-community-testing-on-nightly/ https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2017/07/25/stylo-is-ready-f...
- fulafel 3y ago
  WebRender and Stylo come from Servo and have been integrated as Quantum Render and Quantum CSS. An maybe some other things as well?
- abhinavk 3y ago
  Not the entire engine but WebRender (GPU-based compositor) and Stylo (CSS engine) are in Firefox for a few years now.
Gina65 3y ago
[flagged]

The money for this grant actually comes, in part, from the European Commission (via the NGI programme).

It's cool to see the work on Servo since Igalia picked it up. There was a lot of tech debt to work through due to years of minimal maintenance, but they seem to have been making real progress. My personal hope is they push hard on the modularity angle. Seems to me that: 1) there's probably a niche to be filled by an OSS browser engine focussed on embedability and 2) That it could be a huge boon for the long-term health of the web platform if there are build-your-own-browser "lego building block" libraries that people can mix and match to create new engines.

arlcode 3y ago
Wild speculation: With iphones being forced to open their web engine there might be some apps interested in embedding their own engines across mobile devices.
capableweb 3y ago
> 1) there's probably a niche to be filled by an OSS browser engine focussed on embedability Absolutely. Electron or something Electron-like with Servo embedded could be a nice outcome. Tauri already fills that niche a bit, but uses whatever the OS provides, rather than embedding anything. Would be nice with something in-between that.
- the_duke 3y ago
  Tauri is actually adding experimental Servo support.
  - capableweb 3y ago
    Oh wow, I wasn't aware of this! So proper embedded cross-platform engine into the final binary? That'd be awesome.
    - igrunert 3y ago
      Yep, embedding the Servo engine into the final binary. This work is sponsored by another (separate) NLnet grant: https://nlnet.nl/project/Tauri-Servo/ https://nlnet.nl/project/Tauri-Servo/
paulrouget 3y ago
> My personal hope is they push hard on the modularity angle It is strongly designed that way (the component model and the embed layer).
wongarsu 3y ago
An embedded engine is also a much faster path to viable use cases. For example Sciter [1] has some degree of success despite implementing only a sane subset of the DOM API. It doesn't work well for general internet surfing, but when used as an UI library you just avoid the parts that don't work. 1: https://sciter.com/ https://sciter.com/

dale_glass 3y ago

I'm very excited about Servo. Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it. Not only the idea of an engine with great security and performance is an excellent one, but I also love the idea of a web engine as a component. This for some reason seems to have disappeared in modern times. IE used to have an ActiveX control back in the Windows 9x days. You could embed a web engine anywhere you wanted. KHTML also worked like that. And in modern times... nothing. Neither Firefox nor Chrome seem to have interest in that kind of usage. Qt WebEngine thankfully exists, but in my understanding has a bit of an antagonistic relationship with Chrome, because Chrome doesn't care for that kind of use. Plus Chrome is a Google thing, and Google things in my experience are their own world, making them annoying to build and integrate. So I'm very much looking forward to having a viable alternative to integrate into our code. Both solving security concerns and hopefully making the integration less painful.

znpy 3y ago
> Can't believe Mozilla wasn't interested in it The fact that mozilla wasn’t interested in that really tells a lot about their priorities
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Or they (Firefox folks) learned what happens when you (Netscape) try a major greenfield rewrite (Netscape v5) so ambitious that it becomes the example of why one should never rewrite. And instead just back ported the lessons learned to make Firefox/Gecko better years earlier than a rewrite could.
  - jeltz 3y ago
    That they got a ton of valuable code and lessons which improved Firefox a lot? Seems like the investment into Servo paid off really well.
  - dahauns 3y ago
    That's why Servo exists in the first place. That's exactly the reason why always has been intended as a research engine, with an explicit focus on high modularity, and easy portability of single components, several of which were then incorporated into Firefox. Especially the latter wasn't some kind of salvage, trying to squeeze value out of some theoretical project. It was an explicit goal from the beginning.

Sander_Marechal 3y ago

That is great news for Servo! NLNet Foundation has been funding a lot of great projects lately. I see their name pop up a lot.

chubot 3y ago
Yes, my project https://www.oilshell.org/ https://www.oilshell.org/ has been funded by NLnet since 2022, and it's helped a lot. I needed some help to push through a few problems, and that happened :) It is very forward thinking since we happen to be mostly in North America, but the funding comes from the EU.

rob74 3y ago

What's this "Legacy Layout" they're using as a comparison? The previous iteration of Servo? Looks like some of the code is still used by both, as the curves sometimes (but not always) go up and down at the same time...

igrunert 3y ago
Legacy Layout refers to the original system, Layout 2013. There was a second system started, Layout 2020, to address challenges with implementing parts of the CSS spec which didn't cleanly map to Layout 2013's architecture. There's a good report in the Servo wiki from this year (authored by a group of Igalians) summarizing the differences between the two and why the decision was made to move forward with Layout 2020. https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Servo-Layout-Engines-Report https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Servo-Layout-Engines-Rep...

sergiotapia 3y ago

See also Ladybird for another from-scratch browser being built by a more ragtag indie group. https://ladybird.dev/ https://ladybird.dev/ The chaddest of the chad projects honestly.

neurostimulant 3y ago
Is ladybird actually usable outside of serenity os?
- tristan957 3y ago
  There are many ports. GTK, Qt, and Cocoa are the 3 that I am aware of.
jedisct1 3y ago
I have more hope in Ladybird than Servo, TBH. Considering how young it is, Ladybird is already very impressive. Even just to take screenshots, Servo's renderer is very basic, slow and buggy.
- jancsika 3y ago
  Hm... is Ladybird more feature complete than Servo at this point?
  - exxos 3y ago
    [dead]
- actuallyalys 3y ago
  I have more optimism for Ladybird as well. For me, That’s not a knock on Servo and mostly because it was started as a research project, which suggests you’re focusing more on experimentation than producing a product.
- _wf2l 3y ago
  I don't see Ladybird ever being seriously useful. Already serious browser projects like Brave, Arc, and Orion struggle to keep me off of Firefox. Servo is honestly doing the correct thing by focusing on embed-ability into other projects, something that has been basically dominated by Chrome alone

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

AbuAssar 3y ago

Servo is a web rendering engine written in Rust, with WebGL and WebGPU support, and adaptable to desktop, mobile, and embedded applications. It is embeddable, independent, memory-safe, modularand parallel web rendering engine.

ilaksh 3y ago

Somehow I thought that Servo was already incorporated into Firefox. Is there a way to render some HTML in Rust into an image, without loading a whole browser? It doesn't have to support a lot of HTML or CSS.

nicoburns 3y ago
The closest thing currently is probably https://github.com/trimental/inlyne https://github.com/trimental/inlyne which differs in two ways: it only support markdown not arbitrary HTML, and it renders to screen rather to an image. But it's a good start. IMO the main blocker for web rendering in Rust right now is better text layout, and in particular support for embedding non-text content within text ala `display: inline-block`. If/when that is implemented I think we'll be able to do a decent job of rendering basic web pages.
jszymborski 3y ago
The CSS style system (stylo) started out in Servo and is now in Firefox but as I understand it they've diverged quite a bit. https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2017/07/25/stylo-is-ready-for-community-testing-on-nightly/ https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2017/07/25/stylo-is-ready-f...
fulafel 3y ago
WebRender and Stylo come from Servo and have been integrated as Quantum Render and Quantum CSS. An maybe some other things as well?
abhinavk 3y ago
Not the entire engine but WebRender (GPU-based compositor) and Stylo (CSS engine) are in Firefox for a few years now.

Gina65 3y ago

[flagged]