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Servo Revival: 2023-2024
- int0x29 2y agoThey haven't abandoned it but that title makes it sound like they have.
- benatkin 2y agoI think that's intended. This indicates that there's a possibility it's default dead. > Servo is a huge project. To keep it alive and making progress, we need continuous funding on a bigger scale than crowdfunding can generally accomplish. If you’re interested in contributing to the project or sponsoring the development of specific functionality, please contact us at join@servo.org or igalia.com/contact. > Let’s hope we can walk this path together and keep working on Servo for many years ahead. https://paulgraham.com/aord.html https://paulgraham.com/aord.html
- rswail 2y agoExcept that paulg's essay was about startups, not about an OSS project. Servo has no "customers" as such. It has potential future project users and there may be a support/development economic return for those users to fund further work. It's very similar to Rust the language. Rust itself is not a startup or a company product. The economics are completely different.
- Brian_K_White 2y agos/default/defacto
- cbarrick 2y agos/defacto/de facto/
- benatkin 2y agos/$/\//
- Brian_K_White 2y agoadmitted
- tux3 2y agoor, s@$@/@, I don't know whether that's more or less cryptic :)
- mappu 2y agoNo, "default dead" is VC-speak for a business that relies on runway to operate rather than being profitable.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoIs Servo a business? I thought it was an open source software library?
- orf 2y agoIt’s obviously not a business.
- leoc 2y agoI assume that they're hoping that the EU or an EU member-state steps up; or failing that, maybe a (probably-US) nonprofit or billionaire donor, perhaps a Laurene Powell Jobs or MacKenzie Scott type. To be clear, something like this very probably should happen. I'm heading to social media to shout into the void about this: dear reader, you should probably do this too, and use any other means you might have to steer the attention of decision-makers towards this. That said, in the longer term the solution to the WWW"'s Too Big To Fork problem surely has to involve getting much more of the "specification" expressed precisely in declarative specification languages, so as to greatly reduce the handwork involved in generating a half-decent implementation.
- alex_duf 2y agoI don't think a single big donation is a good idea. We're so used to seeing extreme wealth we don't event question it. Once a big donation is given, you get to wonder what sort of influence that person (willingly or not) has had on the project. A much better model is a large amount of small donations, the incentive becomes to serve the maximum amount of these people.
- leoc 2y agoI too would prefer that the funding come from a relatively hands-off source, like some EU pot, if possible. But I think that nearly any (reasonably likely) funding source would be preferable to letting Servo development fail.
- LeFantome 2y agoWhat we need are multiple implementations, all giving feedback on the spec: https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird https://github.com/LadybirdBrowser/ladybird
- striking 2y agoA lot of private funding at these consultancies actually comes from pet features. Some company says "hmm, we sure do rely on XYZ feature a lot, would be nice if it were faster", they throw some money at a consultancy like Igalia, and then it becomes faster for everyone. No need for a big pot all at once, though I'm sure that'd be really nice.
- nar001 2y agoHopefully they don't! I wanna see where this goes, we need more browser engines
- Vinnl 2y agoThe article was first posted in 2024, which made it feel less so at the time :) Should probably have a "(2024)" appended to the title.
- mdaniel 2y agoInteresting, they also claim that they are the 2nd biggest contributors to Chromium after Google: https://bsky.app/profile/igalia.com/post/3lasylsguzs2f https://bsky.app/profile/igalia.com/post/3lasylsguzs2f
- barkingcat 2y agoIgalia is a huge force in open source They are self directed contractors. They are also responsible for huge portions of chromium and fundimental/base opensource libraries. If you can think of an open source library, it's highly likely Igalia had funded some development or bug fixes.
- jitl 2y agoIgalia is the real deal. Many companies that want bugs fixed or features added to web browsers hire Igalia to make those changes. They also maintain WebKit on Linux (gtk and wpe) https://planet.igalia.com/webkit/ https://planet.igalia.com/webkit/
- mmastrac 2y agoYeah. I got to see Andy Wingo's work on a V8 feature and it was an impressive piece of work.
- topspin 2y agoThat's interesting. One wonders what their future looks like after Google divests Chrome. Good to see that the knowledge base isn't entirely confined within Google.
- barkingcat 2y agoIgalia is self directed and one of the few organizations I can see taking on technical leadership of the entire chromium project if/when Google divests Chrome. The technical talent at Igalia runs deep.
- qingcharles 2y agoChrome will still be the #1 browser, and corps will still want features added, so they'll be good for a while I think.
- shmerl 2y agoAny plans to move WebRender to using Vulkan instead of OpenGL? The latter is really not well suited for proper parallelism. I hope Servo will eventually replace Chromium in QtWebEngine and other similar cases.
- benatkin 2y agoThere's an active attempt to make a DOM rendering engine in Rust using these APIs. https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz
- shmerl 2y agoThat looks like its own thing, so not going to benefit Servo and Firefox if I understand correctly? Since they are using WebRender.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nicoburns 2y agoCorrect. There are some shared components (notably Stylo, the style system), but Webrender is not one of them. Webrender is still maintained primarily by Mozilla as part of Firefox. If they have any plans to move to Vulkan/Metal/DX10/wgpu then I haven't heard of them. It might be possible for Servo to go down the same route as Blitz and have pluggable rendering backends. If so then the wgpu-based renderering library we are using (Vello [0] - which is an exciting project in it's own right) could be an option. Servo is actively looking at potentially using this library to implement Canvas2D. [0]: https://github.com/linebender/vello https://github.com/linebender/vello
- norman784 2y agoWouldn't be better for them to use wgpu instead?
- shmerl 2y ago
- WD-42 2y agoOf all projects for Mozilla, the supposed champions of the web, to abandon, it still blows my mind that they chose Servo to be the one to lay off the entire team for.
- torginus 2y agoThis. Especially since it's pretty much supposed to be Rust's flagship project.
- IshKebab 2y agoTo be fair, it wasn't really by the time they abandoned it.
- torginus 2y agoStill, I think Rust was designed for the style and scale of application that a Web Browser is. Foundational, but not kernel level, highly complex, with a wide feature set, performance is important (but not the most important) and high reliability/maintainability and quality is expected. Building these kinds of apps was commonplace in the 90s/early 2000s: photo editing apps, word processors, IDEs, 3D modeling software etc. Maybe RDBMS count as well. In practice Rust is mostly used by web people to gain clout - rewriting microservices, which are usually <10k, but very rarely above 100k LOC, and were originally written in a very slow language, such as Python or Ruby. Had these projects started out in an uncool, but performant language, like Java, there'd have been very little reasonable justification for these Rust rewrites.
- jokethrowaway 2y agoThe main advantage is having a reliable type system and a codebase you can reason about and refactor fearlessly. On the performance side, raw processing power is not that important as you are waiting for io all the time: the main difference is not having GC and GC spikes (if you are working at significant scale) and lower memory usage all around.
- 2y ago
- aorth 2y agoOh this is nice to hear. It's always pleasant to read updates about Servo. I didn't know they started accepting donations on Open Collective and GitHub sponsors last year https://servo.org/blog/2024/03/12/sponsoring-servo/ https://servo.org/blog/2024/03/12/sponsoring-servo/. I'm happy to contribute something.
- jszymborski 2y agoFYI: I think their website indicates they pay the fewest fees on GitHub, so you may want to set up your donations there if anyone is still deciding between the two. Sponsoring them was a no brainer for me :)
- diggan 2y ago> I think their website indicates they pay the fewest fees on GitHub The difference (https://servo.org/sponsorship/#donation-fees https://servo.org/sponsorship/#donation-fees) between the donation going via GitHub/Microsoft and Open Collective (independent) is so small (96% VS ~91%) that I'd rather not centralize funding FOSS with someone who has kind of a shitty track record with it, like Microsoft. Made more sense in the beginning of GitHub Sponsors when Microsoft was matching donations 2x, or whatever it was. But now? I don't feel like it makes much sense anymore. Open Collective is a fully public organization, who lives and breathes FOSS.
- jszymborski 2y agoNote that the fee for Open Collective depends on the amount you are donating, what card you use, and where you are from. Servo would only see 85.6% of my 5 USD/mo donation as I'm from Canada. If I used PayPal, that number would go down to 81.2%. I do agree that I'd prefer Open Collective, fees being equal/comparable.
- cies 2y agoAll this discussion (hate) on the effort to "rewrite in Rust"... At the same time these projects are soooo promissing (to me -- it may be purely subjective). By these projects I mean: Servo and Verso Redox OS System76's COSMIC Desktop's EPOCH RipGrep Deno Zig tree-sitter And lots of web dev libs and frameworks: Actix, Leptos, Dioxus... Currently a web dev stack can run on Redox OS and use significantly less resources than Alpine! (and this stack has not even had the years of tuning Alpine had)
- alraj 2y agoWhy is Zig here?
- cies 2y agoShit, should have been Zed. The editor.
- actionfromafar 2y agoIt would have been funny to suggest rewriting Zig in Rust. :)
- edoceo 2y agoRewrite Rust in Zig.
- nasretdinov 2y agoHonestly either should be more than possible to do, although not sure how beneficial. It would certainly be very funny if Zig compiler would be implemented in Rust and, simultaneously, Rust compiler would be written in Zig
- throwawaymaths 2y agozig compiler does lots of things for speed that would push it well into unsafe rust, or unchecked rust (like using u32 index tags in arrays instead of pointers)
- ags1905 2y agoIs there a browser where we can test this?