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Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot
- k8svet 3y agoI'd like to know how much Tauri is driving interest in Servo. I was ecstatic to see that Servo is using Tauri as a "test client" of sorts.
- laerus 3y agoThe plan is to see how viable Servo is as an alternative to WebView. If it works well I expect Tauri to provide an option to use Servo when building the app.
- Joeboy 3y agoWhich leads me to wonder, what would be the reason for doing that rather than just using the system WebView?
- ephemeral-life 3y agoYou won't have to worry about different engines and their edge cases. But at that point we are back to electron, but in rust.
- black_puppydog 3y ago... and with an easy way to control what gets baked into your engine. maybe you don't actually need that Xbox controller driver in your app. :) Cargo's feature management should make this quite simple.
- Raicuparta 3y agoI'm currently suffering the pains of developing a Tauri app that relies on the system WebView (which is the default for Tauri). It's unreliable (especially on Windows where people love to mess around and run "debloat" scripts), and causes slight differences on each platform. Tauri lets you bundle the WebView, but this causes the installer to grow like 150 MB. I presume this alternative would be a lot smaller.
- cageface 3y agoAfter messing around with various cross platform desktop toolkits, including a big Electron app and some smaller Tauri apps, I've settled on Flutter. It's not perfect but the results I'm getting are so far much better than anything I was able to achieve using repurposed web tech.
- Raicuparta 3y agoHow is desktop performance and startup times for you with Flutter? I tested some flutter apps like Flutter Folio and they seemed to perform poorly.
- cageface 3y agoAt least on the Mac my desktop Flutter app starts up quickly and performs quite well. It’s much smoother in fact than a prototype I built in SwiftUI.
- Raicuparta 3y agoInteresting, thanks for the answer. I wonder if it's just way worse on Windows for some reason.
- Sytten 3y agoAfaik bundling webview is only available with appimage. We also have a big tauri app and it is a PITA to develop. I actually opened an issue to support bundling a chromium ala electron.
- davgoldin 3y agoI thought not much: https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/issues/579 https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/issues/579
- goku12 3y agoThat issue is four years old. Here is a discussion from last month: https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/discussions/8524#discussioncomment-7993948 https://github.com/tauri-apps/tauri/discussions/8524#discuss... . The two teams are apparently working together.
- sa-code 3y agoWasn't servo's purpose to essentially be a testing ground for features that would eventually be pushed to Firefox?
- fyrn_ 3y agoNot really no, it was more to explore a greenfield web engine design, and also to use rust to do that. Not for user facing features as all, for one thing servo barely has a UI
- GuB-42 3y agoThat's what happened, but if I remember correctly, it was supposed to be an entirely new engine. I had a lot of hope for it, as the demo looked really promising at the time. It really was what Mozilla needed to get back on track, because to be honest, Firefox was pretty sucky when compared to Chrome at that time. I also liked the idea of inventing a whole programming language for that purpose (Rust), it reminded me of C/UNIX. In the end, Firefox got better, and we have Rust, a great language on its own, but I think it could have been even better. And I was particularly disappointed when Mozilla laid off the Servo team, I feel they let go of the most important thing they had.
- rollcat 3y ago> And I was particularly disappointed when Mozilla laid off the Servo team, I feel they let go of the most important thing they had. Gotta pay out those CEO bonuses somehow. In a sick plot twist Mozilla gets shocked back to its senses, re-hires the team, restarts the effort to replace Gecko with Servo, and Firefox finally lives up to its potential. (I wish.)
- thinkingemote 3y agoI would like to see Positron rebooted. Positron is to Firefox what electron is to chromium. https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/ https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/
- stefanos82 3y agoHow about quickjs or tauri?
- jojobas 3y agoYeah, it's an awesome idea to waste few hundred megabytes of RAM to run your app. This browser-in-a-box cancer needs to die a painful death.
- diath 3y agoUntil there's a viable solution for desktop native GUI, this trend will continue.
- germandiago 3y agoWas not Servo a super nice thing it would allow better multithreading through Rust's power as compared to old, ancient C++ that everyone and her neighbour says it is so bad? What happened exactly to Servo? Why it was discontinued?
- claudex 3y agoMozilla found it will be easier to change gecko part per part once the initial tests with Servo was done and successful.
- stuaxo 3y agoParts of Servo were integrated fully, but they stopped doing this and let everyone go. Now it's going again, I think this could happen again in future.
- sgift 3y agoServo was always intended as a way to proof certain technologies without the restrictions of a full browser engine like Gecko, so they could integrate them into Firefox/Gecko later if they panned out. They did and things got integrated into Firefox with https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum. Then Mozilla had a sustainability crisis and - imho unwisely - decided that one of the things that they could do without in the future was the Servo team. Without funding Servo effectively was put into sleep mode since people need to eat. Then it got donated to the Linux foundation and got new funding and progress has started again.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago> Then Mozilla had a sustainability crisis and One way to word it... CEO had a 400% pay increase since 2018 All while Firefox browser market share dropped from 11.87% to 7.58% during the same period. World would be a better place without the Mozilla Foundation
- yoavm 3y agoBecause without the Mozilla Foundation the Firefox market share would raise?
- terabytest 3y agoThis page keeps crashing for me on iOS Safari. Is anyone else experiencing this?
- h0l0cube 3y agoYep. It keeps refreshing on me on Firefox iOS. Super annoying
- pmontra 3y agoThey have a video of Servo running on a Raspberry 400 faster than Chromium. However there are no downloads or build instructions specifically for the Raspberry in the repository on GitHub or in the issues. Maybe it's just build for Linux. Googling servo and raspberry together gives a lot of hardware projects with motors, even when including mozilla in the query. Did anybody here made it run on a Pi?
- CuriousCosmic 3y agoI haven't messed with it yet but from looking into it, this should absolutely work. https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Building-on-ARM-desktop-Linux https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Building-on-ARM-desktop-...
- pmontra 3y agoI totally missed that page. Thanks!
- devaiops9001 3y agoA 100% Rust based browser engine is sorely needed.
- postalrat 3y agoThat sounds pretty difficult unless it's also the operating system.
- niutech 3y agoDo you mean Redox OS? https://www.redox-os.org https://www.redox-os.org
- devaiops9001 3y agoAn operating system that isn't written in Rust can contend with browser remote code execution vulnerabilities. Having the browser implemented in Rust to mitigate most remote code execution vulnerabilities stops the problem at the root.
- haunter 3y agoI want Safari on Windows back
- niutech 3y agoHave a look at my Split Browser WebKit (still alpha): https://niutech.github.io/splitbrowser/ https://niutech.github.io/splitbrowser/
- jhoechtl 3y agoServo is a waste of time. If we want a fast rendering engine, Mozilla already has it. If we want a secure rendering engine we could leverage code checks. It's all there. The meme of Rust equals safety (or C equals I safety) has to go away.
- CuriousCosmic 3y agoHonestly I think servo is a worthwhile endeavor if solely because it has the potential to introduce some needed variety into the browser engine space. Especially if they can dial it in with tauri as a viable electron/blink alternative.
- boxed 3y agoFirefox owes quite a bit of its speed to Servo... so that's a weird take.
- sanxiyn 3y agoServo was about parallelism. Mozilla tried multiple times to parallelize CSS style calculation in Gecko which is written in C++, and failed all of them. When they tried again in Servo with Rust, they succeeded first time. They integrated Rust-written parallel CSS style calculation to Gecko. As a result, to this day, Firefox is the only web browser which can parallelize CSS style calculation, and beats every other browser in CSS style calculation performance. The meme that Rust is easier to parallelize is true.
- menaerus 3y agoI don't think this has anything to do with the language itself. If anything, you could claim the same for C++ since "easier to parallelize in Rust" is derived from the fact that Rust models pretty much everything as a shared-ptr so many gotchas you would normally have in multithreaded (but not concurrent) code disappear. Since you have the shared-ptrs in C++, you can achieve pretty much the same and also quite easily. So I think that the programming language as an underlying reason is most likely a wrong premise to start with. IMO there's a huge difference between "here's several MLOC with all of its 20-years legacy/baggage, and now make N% of that non-trivial work to run faster" and "here's a greenfield project with 0 LOC, no legacy and no baggage, no code to learn, and now please write the algorithm from the ground up". I think this is much more likely to be closer to the truth.
- beretguy 3y agoI just want native tab group support.
- EasyMark 3y agoDon't know if it helps anyone but darkreader in "light" mode absolutely destroys the linked page for some reason, works fine in DR dark mode tho
- charcircuit 3y agoIt's not Mozilla's anymore
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- andrewmcwatters 3y agoI hope that being at Igalia forces the team to have laser focus in being a real embeddable solution for developers. The last I checked maybe a year ago or more, it isn’t. I commented over the years how Servo isn’t a real alternative because they don’t actually provide any API surface comparable to using CEF or full Chromium or WebKit, and as a result it’s a nonstarter. I think someone working on it had mentioned they were looking into creating a CEF-like API for embedding, but if the project says it’s an embed-able engine before anything else and it can’t even be used for that purpose, I have no idea what that team is focusing on other than rendering itself. I’d be more interested in even just a partially compliant engine whose primary focus was actually embedding. It might be OK if you want to build a Firefox? It’s not if you want to use it as an actual embedded renderer.
- niutech 3y agoThere was an embedding example: https://github.com/paulrouget/servo-embedding-example https://github.com/paulrouget/servo-embedding-example