6 ms·

This year in Servo: over 1000 pull requests and beyond

265 points by Vinnl 3y ago

capableweb 3y ago
> finishing our integration with Tauri (thanks to NLNet) This is really exciting! Hopefully can lead to tiny packages (compared to Electron) but still a consistent rendering story across platforms.
- ReactiveJelly 3y ago
  If it has enough features to match Electron, I think it's likely to end up the same size (100 MB on disk)
  - capableweb 3y ago
    No, because Electron embeds Chromium/Chrome, Tauri uses whatever the platform already has.
    - fabrice_d 3y ago
      Correct, but for the Tauri/Servo combination, you need Servo which is unlikely to be already available. Stripped release builds of servo are currently 106M which is quite large. Hopefully some size reduction will be achieved.
    - postalrat 3y ago
      Why not a PWA? Does your app need more permissions to mess with people's system that a PWA would allow?
- niutech 3y ago
  For lightweight alternatives to Electron.js (apart from Tauri), have a look at: - Sciter (https://sciter.com https://sciter.com) - Yue (https://libyue.com https://libyue.com) - Wails (https://wails.io https://wails.io) - Muon (https://github.com/ImVexed/muon https://github.com/ImVexed/muon) and Ultralight (https://ultralig.ht https://ultralig.ht) - Gluon (https://gluonjs.org https://gluonjs.org) - NeutralinoJS (https://neutralino.js.org https://neutralino.js.org) - Proton Native (https://proton-native.js.org https://proton-native.js.org) - NodeGUI (https://nodegui.org https://nodegui.org) - DeskGap (https://deskgap.com https://deskgap.com) - Graffiti (http://tomsik.cz/graffiti/ http://tomsik.cz/graffiti/)
stephen_g 3y ago
Is there any plan at Mozilla to eventually use Servo for Firefox or did them basically stopping working on it end any hope of that? Is the Servo team’s plan to build a new browser around it? It definitely could get interesting soon, I’ve been keenly watching the development of the Ladybird browser (which is also a from-scratch engine) so if there were potentially two viable new browser engines over the next few years that could really shake things up!
- nicoburns 3y ago
  Mozilla have already integrated a few key servo components into Firefox. Notably webrender, the rendering backend, and stylo, the style system. But they’ve effectively dropped all servo development at this point, and are not working on it further.
  - tmikaeld 3y ago
    Huh? Why would they drop development of key components to their main product? What is Mozilla without Firefox? Update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lkIX5ryZZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lkIX5ryZZ4 Basically, Mozilla gave Servo employees the foot and the project was taken over by the linux foundation. Servo dev has been restarted (mostly) during 2023 and the changed Firefox made to their servo implemementation is now being added to servo in batches (ongoing). So Servo team is aiming to become a full featured (standalone) web platform (browser).
    - robin_reala 3y ago
      They integrated what they felt was worthwhile, and continue to develop and support those pieces internally to Firefox.
    - zaphar 3y ago
      Servo is not Firefox. It was always a testbed research platform. Stopping development of Servo does not mean stopping development of Firefox.
    - deleted 3y ago
dbrgn 3y ago
Quote from the post: > In a decade that many people feared would become the nadir of browser engine diversity, we hope we can help change that with Servo. I sure hope so! It might be a good thing that Servo is now independent from Mozilla. We can't rely on Mozilla anymore, and should move on. Maybe someday Servo can become the new Firefox (as in "modern and freedom-respecting browser")? From testing the current version of Servo, it still has a long long way to go though, until it becomes a usable browser.
- deskamess 3y ago
  > Servo is now independent from Mozilla When I initially read the headline what I remember thinking before reading the article was 'I hope it has some use outside of Firefox'.
  - lnxg33k1 3y ago
    I build scrapers with rust, and use servo
    - Exec2 3y ago
      is there a chance to see it? any links for someone interested?
    - Reefersleep 3y ago
      I would have thought it overkill to memory manage scrapers by hand. Do you need such succinct memory usage?
      - wongarsu 3y ago
        Safe memory management without GC is the feature that gets Rust the most headlines, but it's not the only raison d'etre. It also has a great type system, that combined with the focus of the standard library and the library ecosystem makes it a lot easier to avoid bugs and makes refactoring a lot safer and easier. It's also very fast, and scrapers are surprisingly often CPU bound
ravenstine 3y ago
Can anyone tell me whether Servo is "ready enough" to use for small noncommercial projects? For example, I really like writing personal projects in Typescript using Deno, but there really isn't a very good UI library for Deno outside of running an HTTP server. Other attempts at UI libraries, last I checked, were experimental or half-assed. Would be cool to somehow integrate directly with Servo from Deno so that I don't have to resort to Electron.
- capableweb 3y ago
  > Can anyone tell me whether Servo is "ready enough" to use for small noncommercial projects? I don't think it is, yet. But why not play around with it and see if it's enough for your use case? Hard to know exactly without knowing what you need to be able to do. Personally, Tauri currently hits the sweetspot of being way lighter than Electron, but still provide (mostly) the same benefits.
- mst 3y ago
  There's always https://neutralino.js.org/ https://neutralino.js.org/ which uses native WebView components to keep itself rather smaller than Electron.
- polyglotfacto2 3y ago
  Could you tell me more about what you mean with "integrate directly with Servo from Deno" You're welcome to the chat to discuss in more details if you want: https://servo.zulipchat.com/ https://servo.zulipchat.com/
KolmogorovComp 3y ago
The budget to make a browser today (including a browser engine) is estimated to be around 400 million yearly (FF cost, estimates for Safari in the same range). They may be bloated, but even by being 10x more efficient it’s still 40 million a year of equivalent engineering work. How is servo intending to pull that work without the leverage of a big corp?
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  I might be wrong but I don't think servo is intending to be feature or standard complete ever. Most of the cost of firefox or safari likely comes from new features. Also it is a web rendering engine, not a full fleshed browser.
- capableweb 3y ago
  How much of that cost is the browser vs the cost of the browser engine? Servo currently describes itself as a "web rendering engine", so I don't think they are aiming to become a full-featured browser, and I'm not sure if there is an important distinction between "browser engine" vs "web rendering engine". It makes it sound like they only want to focus on the rendering part itself.
- mminer237 3y ago
  Ladybird has mostly been made by one guy in a few years and has somehow become a usable browser. Where did you get that estimation?
  - joshmarinacci 3y ago
    useable and complete are very different things.
  - wharvle 3y ago
    There's something wackadoo going on in software where in one environment it'll take 200 workers six years to have something that's still not good, and in another it'll take 1-5 workers a couple years to do at least as well. It's not even a corporate vs. small shop thing. Look at the team sizes on "giant" programs from big companies in the 90s and consider how enormous an undertaking they'd be considered by most software orgs today. Like, I get all the Mythical Man-Month, Brooks' Law stuff and that that observation predates the period I'm talking about, but there's definitely been some kind of shift that has other factors causing this (with Brooks' Law compounding the problem). Not sure what it is, I just know that it sure looks like we're far less efficient at building software than we used to be (where "we" is the industry overall). It's like every single organization larger than a dozen people got way worse at building software, pretty suddenly, some time between about 2005 and 2010.
simonw 3y ago
The Playwright browser automation framework already has backends for Chromium, WebKit and Firefox. I wonder what it would take to build a Servo backend? Could be a really fun way to experiment with its capabilities.
- polyglotfacto2 3y ago
  Yes it sounds interesting and I wonder what it would take as well, you're welcome to join the chat to discuss in more details: https://servo.zulipchat.com/ https://servo.zulipchat.com/

265 points by Vinnl 3y ago

> finishing our integration with Tauri (thanks to NLNet) This is really exciting! Hopefully can lead to tiny packages (compared to Electron) but still a consistent rendering story across platforms.

ReactiveJelly 3y ago
If it has enough features to match Electron, I think it's likely to end up the same size (100 MB on disk)
- capableweb 3y ago
  No, because Electron embeds Chromium/Chrome, Tauri uses whatever the platform already has.
  - fabrice_d 3y ago
    Correct, but for the Tauri/Servo combination, you need Servo which is unlikely to be already available. Stripped release builds of servo are currently 106M which is quite large. Hopefully some size reduction will be achieved.
  - postalrat 3y ago
    Why not a PWA? Does your app need more permissions to mess with people's system that a PWA would allow?
niutech 3y ago
For lightweight alternatives to Electron.js (apart from Tauri), have a look at: - Sciter (https://sciter.com https://sciter.com) - Yue (https://libyue.com https://libyue.com) - Wails (https://wails.io https://wails.io) - Muon (https://github.com/ImVexed/muon https://github.com/ImVexed/muon) and Ultralight (https://ultralig.ht https://ultralig.ht) - Gluon (https://gluonjs.org https://gluonjs.org) - NeutralinoJS (https://neutralino.js.org https://neutralino.js.org) - Proton Native (https://proton-native.js.org https://proton-native.js.org) - NodeGUI (https://nodegui.org https://nodegui.org) - DeskGap (https://deskgap.com https://deskgap.com) - Graffiti (http://tomsik.cz/graffiti/ http://tomsik.cz/graffiti/)

stephen_g 3y ago

Is there any plan at Mozilla to eventually use Servo for Firefox or did them basically stopping working on it end any hope of that? Is the Servo team’s plan to build a new browser around it? It definitely could get interesting soon, I’ve been keenly watching the development of the Ladybird browser (which is also a from-scratch engine) so if there were potentially two viable new browser engines over the next few years that could really shake things up!

nicoburns 3y ago
Mozilla have already integrated a few key servo components into Firefox. Notably webrender, the rendering backend, and stylo, the style system. But they’ve effectively dropped all servo development at this point, and are not working on it further.
- tmikaeld 3y ago
  Huh? Why would they drop development of key components to their main product? What is Mozilla without Firefox? Update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lkIX5ryZZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lkIX5ryZZ4 Basically, Mozilla gave Servo employees the foot and the project was taken over by the linux foundation. Servo dev has been restarted (mostly) during 2023 and the changed Firefox made to their servo implemementation is now being added to servo in batches (ongoing). So Servo team is aiming to become a full featured (standalone) web platform (browser).
  - robin_reala 3y ago
    They integrated what they felt was worthwhile, and continue to develop and support those pieces internally to Firefox.
  - zaphar 3y ago
    Servo is not Firefox. It was always a testbed research platform. Stopping development of Servo does not mean stopping development of Firefox.
  - deleted 3y ago

dbrgn 3y ago

Quote from the post: > In a decade that many people feared would become the nadir of browser engine diversity, we hope we can help change that with Servo. I sure hope so! It might be a good thing that Servo is now independent from Mozilla. We can't rely on Mozilla anymore, and should move on. Maybe someday Servo can become the new Firefox (as in "modern and freedom-respecting browser")? From testing the current version of Servo, it still has a long long way to go though, until it becomes a usable browser.

deskamess 3y ago
> Servo is now independent from Mozilla When I initially read the headline what I remember thinking before reading the article was 'I hope it has some use outside of Firefox'.
- lnxg33k1 3y ago
  I build scrapers with rust, and use servo
  - Exec2 3y ago
    is there a chance to see it? any links for someone interested?
  - Reefersleep 3y ago
    I would have thought it overkill to memory manage scrapers by hand. Do you need such succinct memory usage?
    - wongarsu 3y ago
      Safe memory management without GC is the feature that gets Rust the most headlines, but it's not the only raison d'etre. It also has a great type system, that combined with the focus of the standard library and the library ecosystem makes it a lot easier to avoid bugs and makes refactoring a lot safer and easier. It's also very fast, and scrapers are surprisingly often CPU bound

ravenstine 3y ago

Can anyone tell me whether Servo is "ready enough" to use for small noncommercial projects? For example, I really like writing personal projects in Typescript using Deno, but there really isn't a very good UI library for Deno outside of running an HTTP server. Other attempts at UI libraries, last I checked, were experimental or half-assed. Would be cool to somehow integrate directly with Servo from Deno so that I don't have to resort to Electron.

capableweb 3y ago
> Can anyone tell me whether Servo is "ready enough" to use for small noncommercial projects? I don't think it is, yet. But why not play around with it and see if it's enough for your use case? Hard to know exactly without knowing what you need to be able to do. Personally, Tauri currently hits the sweetspot of being way lighter than Electron, but still provide (mostly) the same benefits.
mst 3y ago
There's always https://neutralino.js.org/ https://neutralino.js.org/ which uses native WebView components to keep itself rather smaller than Electron.
polyglotfacto2 3y ago
Could you tell me more about what you mean with "integrate directly with Servo from Deno" You're welcome to the chat to discuss in more details if you want: https://servo.zulipchat.com/ https://servo.zulipchat.com/

KolmogorovComp 3y ago

The budget to make a browser today (including a browser engine) is estimated to be around 400 million yearly (FF cost, estimates for Safari in the same range). They may be bloated, but even by being 10x more efficient it’s still 40 million a year of equivalent engineering work. How is servo intending to pull that work without the leverage of a big corp?

YetAnotherNick 3y ago
I might be wrong but I don't think servo is intending to be feature or standard complete ever. Most of the cost of firefox or safari likely comes from new features. Also it is a web rendering engine, not a full fleshed browser.
capableweb 3y ago
How much of that cost is the browser vs the cost of the browser engine? Servo currently describes itself as a "web rendering engine", so I don't think they are aiming to become a full-featured browser, and I'm not sure if there is an important distinction between "browser engine" vs "web rendering engine". It makes it sound like they only want to focus on the rendering part itself.
mminer237 3y ago
Ladybird has mostly been made by one guy in a few years and has somehow become a usable browser. Where did you get that estimation?
- joshmarinacci 3y ago
  useable and complete are very different things.
- wharvle 3y ago
  There's something wackadoo going on in software where in one environment it'll take 200 workers six years to have something that's still not good, and in another it'll take 1-5 workers a couple years to do at least as well. It's not even a corporate vs. small shop thing. Look at the team sizes on "giant" programs from big companies in the 90s and consider how enormous an undertaking they'd be considered by most software orgs today. Like, I get all the Mythical Man-Month, Brooks' Law stuff and that that observation predates the period I'm talking about, but there's definitely been some kind of shift that has other factors causing this (with Brooks' Law compounding the problem). Not sure what it is, I just know that it sure looks like we're far less efficient at building software than we used to be (where "we" is the industry overall). It's like every single organization larger than a dozen people got way worse at building software, pretty suddenly, some time between about 2005 and 2010.

simonw 3y ago

The Playwright browser automation framework already has backends for Chromium, WebKit and Firefox. I wonder what it would take to build a Servo backend? Could be a really fun way to experiment with its capabilities.

polyglotfacto2 3y ago
Yes it sounds interesting and I wonder what it would take as well, you're welcome to join the chat to discuss in more details: https://servo.zulipchat.com/ https://servo.zulipchat.com/