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Servo v0.0.1
- adzm 1y agoFrom the blog at https://servo.org/blog/2025/10/20/servo-0.0.1-release/ https://servo.org/blog/2025/10/20/servo-0.0.1-release/ > Today, the Servo team has released new versions of the servoshell binaries for all our supported platforms, tagged v0.0.1. These binaries are essentially the same nightly builds that were already available from the download page with additional manual testing, now tagging them explicitly as releases for future reference. > We plan to publish such a tagged release every month. For now, we are adopting a simple release process where we will use a recent nightly build and perform additional manual testing to identify issues and regressions before tagging and publishing the binaries. > There are currently no plans to publish these releases on crates.io or platform-specific app stores. The goal is just to publish tagged releases on GitHub.
- bastawhiz 1y agoIs it as simple as "now is as good a time as any to start tagging releases"? There's no special motivating factor that drove this to happen now?
- sebsebmc 1y agoThat's roughly correct. The other side of this is figuring out a release process and thinking about versioning.
- swiftcoder 1y agoI think it's also that they finally got Mac/Arm releases sorted, so now they have the full platform support matrix for nightlies?
- jlaporte 1y agoI think the motivation is Ladybird [1] coming on the scene with lots of awareness and sponsorship [1] https://ladybird.org/#about https://ladybird.org/#about
- zwnow 1y agoIs there a remind me bot once a relevant version number releases? Like 1.0 for example
- bdcravens 1y agoThat might be a while. It's taken 5 years from being transferred to the Linux Foundation to get to 0.0.1.
- someplaceguy 1y agoAll the more reason for asking the question?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoAdding context on a tangent "The Missing Protocol: Let Me Know" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44881287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44881287 Such a thing could be implemented with RSS on a long scale or ntfy.sh on a short scale, but afaik most projects don't.
- nicoburns 1y agoThe release announcement doesn't contain much information, but Servo does publish regular "This month in Servo" updates on their blog which contain lots of details: - Blog: https://servo.org/blog/ https://servo.org/blog/ - Most recent TMIS post https://servo.org/blog/2025/09/25/this-month-in-servo/ https://servo.org/blog/2025/09/25/this-month-in-servo/ Check them out if you're interested in what's going on with Servo.
- Y_Y 1y agoWhen Google Reader died, so did a large part of me, and the web. That said, I'm recently back on RSS and this is another good feed: https://servo.org/blog/feed.xml https://servo.org/blog/feed.xml
- srott 1y agoI wish I had a RSS reader to feed this to...
- skyfaller 1y agoOne of my favorite RSS readers is https://vore.website https://vore.website - river of news, no unread indicators, simple. It's a website, as the domain suggests, so no need to install anything.
- zymhan 1y ago> as the domain suggests It suggests a couple of things...
- Millennium 1y agoYeah, after the appropriate layers of VPN/Incognito/Tor/muted phone/etc I braved the link, and it turns out it's actually real, but that is still not a hostname I want connected to me in anyone's access logs more than once.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoIs Servo ready if I want to play around with it in a embedded-browser capacity? Say I wanted to have some basic HTML+CSS UI, can I create a Rust binary that embeds Servo+those resources and it kind of works?
- ryukoposting 1y agoI tried it as a little preview window for writing my blog, which is (in my opinion) very basic HTML and CSS. Whole page rendered wrong, though I admit I didn't bother to find out why. Give it a shot, but keep your expectations low.
- lastontheboat 1y agoLink? I'm a Servo maintainer and I appreciate test cases like that.
- Imustaskforhelp 1y agoI tried my simple html css website and it kinda worked actually. Even the dark mode/light mode worked but it was also minimalist pure html css website
- sebsebmc 1y agoIf you have a basic site that doesn't work you can open an issue on the repo. If you have some relatively simple site, its useful for the team to know what features that people are using are broken.
- lastontheboat 1y agoI found your blog and this behaviour is extremely mysterious! Thanks for pointing this out, I've got a new puzzle to dig into now. Edit: https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/40047 https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/40047
- ryukoposting 1y agoShoot, am I forgetting to send Content-Type on stylesheets? Wow, uh, oops. I guess I'll leave it that way for now, in hopes that a production example is useful?
- natemcintosh 1y agoTried it out on Linux. Worked better than I expected. Sites that are text heavy render well, and quickly. Sites with more "customization" sometimes struggled with rendering; stuff all over the place. Memory usage seemed a bit higher than Firefox with the same tabs, but not out of this world higher. All in all, an impressive release.
- brokencode 1y agoIt’s still a ways off, but I’m excited for the possibility of something like Tauri using Servo natively instead of needing host browsers. A pure Rust desktop app stack with only a single browser to target sounds fantastic.
- qzw 1y agoBut then we have the same complaint against Electron, namely large deployment sizes and no shared memory, no?
- Octoth0rpe 1y agothis part is important: > A pure Rust desktop app stack I think the parent is imagining a desktop with servo available as a standard lib, in which case you're left with the same complaints as Tauri, not electron; that the system version of Servo might be out of date.
- brokencode 1y agoYeah, multiple Tauri apps could theoretically share a Servo library. Though I’d also be interested to see how slim it could be with static linking. Presumably a lot of code could be compiled out with dead code analysis? Or compile flags could remove old compatibility cruft and unneeded features?
- niutech 1y agoFor rust desktop apps, why target a web engine, when we have much more lightweight native GUI frameworks? We don't need yet another bloated Electron.
- Aissen 1y agoA few hours ago, just a few comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45642051 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45642051
- altairprime 1y agoIf you email the mods they’ll merge the duplicate discussions. Footer contact link.
- clot27 1y agoI am sooo ready to ditch chrome and firefox duopoly
- lambdaone 1y agoWe are lucky it's even a duopoly. All it would take is the demise of Firefox, and the entire web would be defined entirely by the implementation of Chrome/Chromium. Servo is very welcome; a third leg to the stool makes real diversity possible again.
- whizzter 1y agoLadybird seems to be progressing at an impressive pace also, time will tell however if their choice of C++ will be a big problem or if modern ways of doing things are safe enough.
- throwaway48476 1y agoThey chose c++ because the web spec implies object oriented design.
- IshKebab 1y agoNo they didn't. It's C++ because the primary author was most familiar with C++ and only allowed C++ in SerenityOS. https://ladybird.org/#:~:text=The%20choice%20of%20language%20was,of%20modern%20C%2B%2B%20to%20maintain. https://ladybird.org/#:~:text=The%20choice%20of%20language%2...
- throwaway48476 1y agoThat was the answer I remember Andreas give in a update video to answer the "why not rust" question.
- IshKebab 1y ago
- beardsciences 1y agoWhether it's something like this, or ladybird's engine, I'm happy there is work being made in this space.
- DerSaidin 1y ago+1 Personally I'm more optimistic about Servo - because originating at Mozilla, I imagine more web browser experience and expertise went into its architecture, and also because Rust.
- ricardobeat 1y agoI don't know.. Servo has been in development for a decade and still has quite underwhelming performance and UX. The binary is 100MB+ on Mac, scrolling is janky, a google image search takes 10+ seconds to render and goes through very buggy states. Meanwhile Ladybird renders a legacy UI, but feels really fast and stable.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoSeeing Servo and full-fat Electron [1] both at 100 MB made me wonder if that's the minimum for an "Everything bagel" browser engine that does WebRTC, video playback, etc., etc. How big is Ladybird? [1] I believe you can make Electron smaller by cutting parts of Chromium out, but the default is around 100 MB
- darkwater 1y agoI'm so going to try this, and I hope it will end up as when I tried and used Phoenix, and then Firebird.
- wduquette 1y agoI'd like to see this succeed, but I'm skeptical that a small team can keep up with the major players in this area. Many years ago Dan Kennedy (of the SQLite team) wrote a lovely HTML widget for TCL/TK. It rendered CSS 1.0 quite nicely, and was a pleasure to use, modulo a few font-related bugs; but was soon rendered obsolete and out of date. Not blaming Dan, here; it simply wasn't a one-person job. Meanwhile, I'd rewritten an app to make use of it. Got burned once, don't want to get burned again.
- nicoburns 1y agoI feel like part of the solution here is to build the browser as reusable modular components. For some parts of browsers that's been common for years: JS engines (V8, SpiderMonkey, etc) are typically reusable, as are rendering backends (WebRender, Skia, etc), and lower-level components like Freetype/Harfbuzz/icu. Servo's CSS engine Stylo is also modular, and is shared by Firefox which is part of how they've managed to not completely fall behind in web standards support despite the project being all but abandoned for several years. I'm building another browser engine Blitz [0] which also uses Stylo, and we're building our layout/text engine in such a way that it can be reused so future browser engines (at least ones written in Rust) shouldn't need to build either Style or Layout if they don't want to. A few more infrastructure pieces like this and browser engine development starts to look more approachable. [0]: https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz
- norman784 1y agoThanks for you hard work, I already saw taffy being used by other prominent projects like Cosmic desktop environment, bevy, etc
- bryanlarsen 1y agoIt's several small teams. Servo is modular, and parts of it are useful outside of Servo. Other projects are using and maintaining and enhancing those modules. For example, IIRC dioxus uses many of the modules. Edit: see sister comment by the actual Dioxus guy, which is more accurate than mine!
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- robin_reala 1y agoAh nice, they’re finally generating native ARM Mac binaries.
- esafak 1y agoThey just issued their first release, 0.0.1, after 50,000 commits. I've never seen that before.
- samus 1y agoIt would be a pleasure to check out the open source web engine you have been a major contributor to :)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kelnos 1y agoVersion numbers don't really mean much, especially for a project that was initially supposed to just be a proving ground for new Firefox technologies, some of which are indeed used in Firefox today. Only more recently has the plan emerged to release a full browser engine based on servo.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- timvisee 1y agoI'm seriously impressed on how far this has come. Tried a few websites in the experimental mode, it renders quite well.
- amiljkovic 1y agoDoes it support kiosk mode or is it configurable to run “locked down” to a single page and full-screen?
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoIf servoshell doesn't, Tauri will, the Tauri project seemed open to collaborating with Servo as an alternative to OS-provided WebViews
- CharlesW 1y agoThis is an incomplete browser engine, suitable mostly for technical contributors. If you're looking for a solution for kiosks, there are good for-purpose products/projects. Examples include: OpenKiosk, Porteus Kiosk, SiteKiosk.
- brson 1y agoCongrats to the servo team. It's been a long road and it's amazing they kept it alive.
- nonethewiser 1y agoOK my understanding is that servo is a browser. Then I read this on their repo: >Servo aims to empower developers with a lightweight, high-performance alternative for embedding web technologies in applications. Um... what? Are they just saying it's a browser in a verbose way or what? It just seems like you could replace literally all those words with "browser" and the clarity would skyrocket. Although perhaps it's not actually just a browser and I dont understand.
- duped 1y ago> Servo is a prototype web browser engine
- nonethewiser 1y agoYes, those words are also in the repo.
- nicoburns 1y agoTo many people involved in browser development there is a distinction between the "browser" (Chrome and Firefox, but also Opera, Brave, Arc that don't develop their own engine) and the "web engine" (Blink, WebKit, Gecko). Servo is currently more of the latter than the former as it's UI is a pretty minimal one that is mostly useful for testing and doesn't much of the niceties that users expect of a modern browser (bookmarks, history, password manager, etc). I do agree that it's confusing for most people though.
- nonethewiser 1y agoOK, that is a fair distinction I guess. A browser engine would be more clear then, I think. That is what it says in the readme.
- Philpax 1y agoServo is to a browser what Chromium Embedded Framework is to Chromium. It is the vast majority of what is necessary for a browser, but it is not a browser in itself: it renders websites, but all of the user-facing browser functionality around that is a separate concern.
- butz 1y agoI wonder if it is deliberate choice to not include scrollbar? Is it due to limitations of UI widgets, or nowadays scrollbars are part of website, as some websites are very happy to set scrollbar size to "too narrow for comfortable use" or even remove it altogether. To end on positive note: is there a way for an average developer to try and fix this issue, thus doing my own share of contributing? Where should one start?
- fabrice_d 1y agoRelated: https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/21817 https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/21817 You should likely join https://servo.zulipchat.com https://servo.zulipchat.com and ask questions to know where to start.
- xnorswap 1y agoI am confused, I remember downloading and trying an early Servo release out a very long time (decade?) ago. I've not been following the space, is this a different project with the same name?
- nicoburns 1y agoIf the other project was a web browser then it's the same project. It got abandoned ~5 years ago, but has since been picked up again.
- edoceo 1y agoSame, reborn
- adaml_623 1y agoI hope they give it a new name with the rebirth. I know it means something to some people but there are a lot of different things with that name
- hu3 1y agoI think there's a Verso project which uses it. Named servo in reverse.
- alex_duf 1y agoI hope they don't, Servo is a technology If someone wants to put marketing veneer on top of a new project that uses servo, great! But servo is servo: a rendering engine
- emmelaich 1y agoAgree, 'servo' suggests serving whereas this is oriented to being a web client?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoMozilla/5.0 (Android; Mobile; rv:128.0) Servo/0.0.1 Firefox/128.0
- zeroq 1y agoELI5 why we need more engines? I shipped my first commercial website in 2001. I have PTSD from times when you had to basically do at least twice the work to ensure that your page worked - not just looked, but worked - on multiple browsers over multiple systems. I recall a postmortem from a project of a major telecom website which took its pride in being accessible "everywhere". They had a matrix of systems and browsers, like 10x10, and they described how painful it was to check all the boxes. I remember a tiny JS library I wrote at Wikia in 2006 for deep linking. It started with ~10 lines implementing documentation. But by the time I had all major browsers covered it grew to 500 lines. I also have very fond memories of Flash. Apart from resolution - when I had my project working on my machine I had 100% certainty that it would work exactly the same on every client. Including mobile, kiosks, and desktop deployments. Times were different, BigCos lived in siloes, ES4 went to shit and we needed another 15 years to reinvent the wheel with TS, but today everyone seems to be on the same team and browsers are shockingly compatible.
- kouteiheika 1y ago> ELI5 why we need more engines? We don't. But we could use a memory safe one, so that a random website can't steal your credit card info. Unfortunately Servo is the only one that's actively developed and is written in a memory safe language; the rest are all C++.
- beeflet 1y agobecause otherwise google will control the web standards via chrome implementation. Whatever pains you deal with cross-browser compatibility, it's nothing like the pain of web development when IE was dominant. Like the IE era, we are heading towards an environment where whatever google says, goes.
- jchw 1y agoI've been testing web software that I work on with Servo and Ladybird. I'm pretty impressed! Servo has some areas where it performs very well, though support for things like CSS Grid are still experimental and off by default (but working pretty well), and it's missing a few important APIs still. (I haven't checked in a while but last I looked it was missing AbortController. That's pretty unfortunate and probably breaks a lot of random stuff across the web. I think Ladybird in Nixpkgs still doesn't have fully working hardware acceleration, so I'm probably not seeing the full smoothness Ladybird can offer in an optimal setup. Still! It runs pretty well, and it supports a vast majority of the web platform. Right now for my own development, the only major two omissions I've noticed are Origin Private File System, which is pretty new, and OffscreenCanvas, which actually is "implemented" but only as a stub. Throwing Web Workers and heavy WebAssembly workloads at Ladybird seems like no problem at all, and it renders a very reasonable subset of modern CSS almost perfectly. (Tangent: Ladybird Web Workers are actually separate processes, which is kind of funny. If one runs out of control, you can literally SIGKILL it. The browser copes with this seemingly fine!) Unfortunately, a lot of the web uses libraries and frameworks that are happy to eagerly adopt web standards and technologies that are not supported by browsers from a year or two ago. While I realize a lot of these standards were created specifically to solve problems that real developers have, I've been unimpressed watching this play out. Often new technologies increase complexity to solve relatively minor already-manageable issues with the web platform, and I feel like it is counterproductive to fatten up the web platform just for that. I mean really. There eventually has to be a point where we all agree that there is simply too much CSS technology and there is little justification to add more, but yet it just continues to grow uncontrollably. (I'm not saying it's all bad, though. Personally, I think the text-wrap additions were actually pretty nice things that really do need to be part of the layout engine.)
- niutech 1y agoLadybird is a memory hog compared to Servo: https://fosstodon.org/@niutech/114139305720083599 https://fosstodon.org/@niutech/114139305720083599
- nullbyte808 1y agoWow ive never seen such a low version number
- nullbyte808 1y agoIt actually renders way more than it did a couple months ago. Very good progress!
- Mr_Minderbinder 1y agoA Cloudflare turnstile caused Servo to crash during my testing, just like with Pale Moon earlier this year. They are becoming the new gatekeepers of the Web.