5 ms·
One year of sponsored Servo development
- p-e-w 16d agoWhat can one actually do with Servo today? It’s apparently still not ready to be used as a browser engine (and may never be), so what exactly is it for?
- foresterre 16d agoRegardless of actual use as an (embedded) browser, it is useful in the sense that it can be used to provide (another) source of validation about whether specs and WPT [1] tests are properly and clearly defined. That helps for long term browser compatibility. [1] https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=experimental&label=master&product=servo&aligned https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=experimental&label=master&pro...
- charcircuit 16d ago>long term browser compatibility Making a new browser engine hurts browser compatibility more than it helps it. It now becomes one more target that needs to be tested against, limitations need to be kept tracked of, etc. The best thing for long term browser compatibility is focusing resources into Blink. In regards to the standard we can use LLMs to cross reference the spec, with tests, and with the implementation to make sure all match.
- teekert 16d agoAh, you must be too young to have experienced early Internet Explorer, which attempted just this.
- charcircuit 15d agoInternet Explorer was not open source acting as engine everyone's browser could use and it got abandoned by Microsoft. It is not the same situation.
- teekert 15d agoOne could argue that effectively Blink is also not open source. At any rate users don't have power over it, as witnessed by the manifest v3 stuff jammed down our throats.
- pygy_ 15d agoChurn makes it impossible to keep up a fork, Google weaponizes its manpower, making the "open source" argument moot.
- charcircuit 15d agoThere are many active forks that are an existence proof that it's possible. It's also a ton of man power to maintain your own browser engine.
- le-mark 15d agoMonocultures are bad full stop. Blink is corporate controlled open source, which has been clearly less than.
- mohamedkoubaa 15d agoAt this point Microsoft should just open source it for science.
- Oxodao 16d agoyeah in a perfect world google dictates how the standard will evolve, we kill all competition so we're sure that you have only one target to build your software against, I'm sure a monopoly will greatly improves innovation and not be used to stiffen competition. /s
- charcircuit 15d agoUsing Blink doesn't mean you have to defer all decisions to Google. You just benefit from not having to duplicate work.
- samus 15d agoExcept one does since Google is the primary maintainer. Anyway, work on other browser engines is not duplicated or wasted.
- charcircuit 15d agoIt's easier maintaining a fork of Blink than an entirely different engine. Google being the primary maintainer doesn't mean that browsers can't make large forks. >work on other browser engines is not duplicated or wasted. How is having N engine developers implement some new addition to the EMCAScript or CSS standard for each of their engines not duplicated work?
- samus 14d ago> It's easier maintaining a fork of Blink than an entirely different engine. Google being the primary maintainer doesn't mean that browsers can't make large forks. Maintaining a fork is not fun as taking patches from the origin repo becomes more complicated the longer the fork exists and the bigger the divergence becomes. > How is having N engine developers implement some new addition to the EMCAScript or CSS standard for each of their engines not duplicated work? It would be duplicated only if they all maintained, say, a Blink fork.
- kryptiskt 15d ago
- latexr 16d ago> The best thing for long term browser compatibility is focusing resources into Blink. That’s what makes Google more dominant, and if you think that’s a good idea you should really put down your LLM and go read up on a bit of history. Do you want to live in a world where a single company controls your access to the web? Are you eager to navigate through ad pages with a little bit of web? To have even more of your data mined? Browser diversity may be a bit annoying for developers, but it is good for users, and developers are users too. When there’s a lack of diversity, everyone but the dominant player is squeezed.
- charcircuit 15d agoGoogle's dominance comes from market share not from owning upstream. If a different fork took 90% market share that fork would have the dominance and power.
- samus 15d agoAnd that market share is maintained by integration with Android and low-key sabotage of others browsers, especially Firefox. Similar to how Microsoft maintained its monopoly decades ago.
- charcircuit 15d agoWhether a new browser uses a brand new engine or not that doesn't stop Chrome being integrated with Android.
- samus 14d agoThe argument was not about stopping Chrome from becoming integrated into Android.
- latexr 15d ago> If a different fork took 90% That can only happen if we don’t all focus resources on Blink, which is the point. By definition, we can only have other engines if diversity is a thing. The problem isn’t specifically Google (though they are a problem), but any one individual company having all the power.
- embedding-shape 15d ago> The best thing for long term browser compatibility is focusing resources into Blink. Lol, for Blink perhaps, what about the rest of the ecosystem, the web and the users, like the ones who don't even use Blink? Very idealistic point-of-view with no basis in reality, sadly, because wouldn't it be nice if we could care about just one engine?
- nextaccountic 16d agohttps://v2.tauri.app/blog/tauri-verso-integration/ https://v2.tauri.app/blog/tauri-verso-integration/ https://github.com/versotile-org/tauri-runtime-verso https://github.com/versotile-org/tauri-runtime-verso Servo doesn't implement the whole web platform, but your own desktop app isn't the whole web. You can generally work around any limitations or missing features. And it might be lighter than CEF or whatever.
- gyulai 15d agoCouldn't agree more. Looking at [1], it seems to me like Servo has a much better adoption story than Ladybird. The latter seems to be just building a browser that's going to be crashy and not really work on the web. The former is addressing problem spaces where, even with the limitations of the half-finished state it's in, it can be usefully applied: WebView/Electron-replacement and headless browsers. Things not currently on this list that could/should be: HTML rendering for desktop E-Mail clients. Also, I wonder to what extent they're implementing paged media and capable of targetting PDF output or similar (like weasyprint). That could be another domain, where you don't need full web-scale abilities. And yet, somehow, Ladybird seems to be the darling of the masses (in certain circles at least). Doing vibe-ports to Rust, while going closed-contribution also, in my mind, sits in a marked contrast to the origin story that initially generated so much goodwill. [1] https://servo.org/made-with/ https://servo.org/made-with/
- everybodyknows 15d agoNaive question then: Where does Servo stand, relative to Electron?
- nerdypepper 15d agoservo is incredibly cool. super easy API to embed, and to build browsers around it.
- LogicWolfe 15d agoI use servo to render e-ink UIs and screenshot them to push to the displays. About 10% of the memory usage and 5% of the render time as doing the same thing with headless chrome. It doesn’t handle every possible feature, but it handles enough that it’s never been an issue when it’s my only target rendering environment. I love it.
- lastontheboat 15d agoThis sounds very cool! If you'd like to talk about your experience with the project on the Servo zulip (servo.zulipchat.com), we love hearing feedback from embedders.
- iamnothere 15d agoIt’s not really a finished product yet (in terms of being production-ready), but it would already be usable as an embedded kiosk for applications where you own the pages being accessed.
- phkahler 15d ago>> What can one actually do with Servo today? You can run CAD in it: https://solvespace.com/webver.pl https://solvespace.com/webver.pl
- pizza234 16d ago[dead]
- macic 16d agoThe Hurd of browser engines
- mrmincent 16d agoFeels like ladybird is going to Linux Servo
- flossly 16d agoI remember waiting on the Mozilla project to deliver something that could browse as well on linux as closed source browsers on windows/mac did. It... took... long... But there it was. And it still works.
- embedding-shape 15d agoWas this recent? Because Firefox were the browser that worked better than all the rest, for quite many years, maybe 2005-2010, and Firefox had no competition basically until Chrome arrived on the scene. Just the fact that Firefox got browser tabs before anyone else, and Firebug, just took it to another level compared to all the other browsers available at the time.
- lukan 15d agoFirefox was bad on linux for a long time. Even running the windows ff build via wine/proton got you better performance than the "native" build (I think that was around 10 years ago).
- deleted 16d ago[deleted]
- bpbp-mango 16d ago[flagged]
- jaytaph 16d agoIt's a decision they've made. Perfectly reasonable. If they did accept AI code, that's perfectly reasonable too. They just made their policy clear here..
- nicce 16d agoI would personally whitelist people with good enough reputation/contribution history. Might get the best from both worlds. Avoiding AI spam while saving time for the core contributors. If they just have capability to use it responsibly.
- epestr 15d agoThis seems like the direction Zed has taken. Which they even enforce actively: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues?q=label%3A%22no%20self-review%22 https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/issues?q=label%3A%22no....
- wizzwizz4 15d agoJudging by how many once-respectable expert developers I've seen start churning out high-velocity utter crud¹, I'm not sure that anyone has the capability to use it responsibility. (Except you, of course, dear reader.) ¹: Often correlating with a marked decline in the quality of their technical writing. I don't know which direction the arrow of causality goes, but I have observed LLM use inducing madness under reasonably-controlled circumstances – different phenomenon, similar principle. I suspect the use of AI codegen systems is causing the reduction in discernment ability, rather than a sudden drop in discernment ability causing increased use of AI codegen systems.
- nicce 15d agoIt is unfortunate. I guess we also can blame the social pressure. Most want features and don't value quality or durability unless something breaks and is unusable. Competence is often measured with shipping speed, rather than service had zero bugs over its lifetime.
- flossly 16d agoI really wish a patron would step up and sponsor this project. Not just by money, but also by plugging it in their browser-carrying products. Maybe Hauwei of Samgsung; they now sling a browser derived of another for-profit --usually competitor-- company's browser.
- fifilura 15d agoI don't really see why they would do that?
- samus 15d agoSanctions
- bryanlarsen 15d agoBeing dependent on a direct competitor is not a comfortable position to be in. It's ameliorated significantly by Chromium being open source, but not completely.
- tonyhart7 15d agoSamsung web browser uses chromium, I doubt they care
- embedding-shape 15d agoSo right now Servo is funded by the community, and this is no good because why? Instead you propose that this project should be funded by a for-profit company with it's own objectives in this world (that often starts with "more money"), again leading me to ask why? The setup right now seems to give enough people enough time to work on it to move forward, why on earth would you want to involve companies infamous for their shit software quality, like Samsung?
- lukan 15d agoProbably because broad adoption would help making it a real option to use in the near future? So sure, Samsung would bundle it with their usual crap, but if it helps making the engine more mature, great, but I also don't see why they would in the first place.
- fifilura 15d agoHot take... There is something about programming projects spending 10x (or 1000x) the effort to parallelize execution when everything is still restricted by von Neumann architecture.
- wannabe44 15d agoThis. I don't want your browser engine to use all my cores. I want the rest of my cores to be compiling C++.
- poly2it 15d agoThanks to the scheduler, you can do both!
- skavi 15d agothat's something you, the user, are free to enforce with priorities, pinning, etc.
- fifilura 15d agoIt is not really about reserving cores. Just that - even if you distribute work to a number of cores (that itself limited), you still need to sync the execution. So unless you have some bigger chunks of computation, the performance increase will be very small. And yes, there are bigger chunks of work when rendering a web page, but that is typically already outside the css engine and can be distributed without having to rewrite the core engine. But my comments are a bit generic here, so I am open to comments regarding this particular project.
- panstromek 15d agoServo also had some other novel architectural ideas IIRC, not directly related to paralelism, but it's been a while since I was looking into that, I don't remember much.
- theandrewbailey 15d agoI want all my software to use all my cores, because I'll have twice as many within 5 years.
- vyaa 15d agoCongrats on the successful year!
- NLnet 15d agoNLnet has been sponsoring large blocks of Servo development as well. Filter with 'servo' in the list here: https://nlnet.nl/project/ https://nlnet.nl/project/
- stingraycharles 15d agoAs someone who had their first internet connection through NLnet in the 90s (later UUnet I think?), I’m so pleasantly surprised the impact that the organization has for open source projects globally.
- junon 15d agoI didn't know about this but of NLnet history. I assumed you had been mistaken so I looked it up. That's really cool!
- NLnet 15d agoYes, it's absolutely true. We used to provide internet connectivity and fund open source projects with the profits. Now we fund open source projects as a service and from donations. https://nlnet.nl/foundation/history/ https://nlnet.nl/foundation/history/
- loufe 15d agoThe more I actually look at projects I care about the more and more I'm noticing just how extensive their support is. I wish more governments and philanthropists would do like them.
- computersuck 15d agoServo uses mozjs which is just rust bindings for SpiderMonkey which is still C++. All this effort to use rust and yet they would not rewrite the JS engine which is the biggest attack surface for memory vulns.
- skybrian 15d agoWhy would it help? Rust doesn’t do anything to make generated assembly code safer.
- chiffaa 15d agoSetting aside the fact that using Rust for a JIT won't help that much - a new JS engine is a huge undertaking, especially if the goal is to compete with V8. They could eventually switch to Boa[1] if they wanted more safety, but it's still ways off and doesn't seem necessary enough just yet Also, isn't the goal of Servo to effectively compete with CEF first and foremost? Because you don't need memory safety for that really
- chiffaa 15d agoI referenced Boa without linking, so: https://github.com/boa-dev/boa https://github.com/boa-dev/boa
- alex_duf 15d agoOne thing at a time, it looks like implementing a rendering engine from scratch is already enough work for 20 years. First make it work, then make it better.
- QwenGlazer9000 15d agoI'm glad we have an alternative to ladybird, since I haven't been a fan of the direction of the project for a bit.
- ubercore 15d agoWhat in particular? I've enjoyed watching some of the community update videos and dev videos, but haven't followed the project closely.
- fabrice_d 15d ago[flagged]
- aqfamnzc 15d agoCan you explain more about that?
- fabrice_d 15d ago[flagged]
- aqfamnzc 15d agoThanks!
- lawn 15d ago[flagged]
- RamRodification 15d ago[flagged]
- bigstrat2003 15d agoThere's nothing sad about that. He's entitled to his opinions, as are you.
- throwa356262 15d agoAny idea how much this has cost them? Some non-profits have their HQ in the valley and pay SF salaries when they could just as well have paid a fraction of that to a very competent developer elsewhere.
- minraws 15d agoEuropean safety nets, and government grants have helped open source projects a lot, and this is a big reason almost all of these projects end up being developed/maintained by folks from EU. Even if the sponsorships could hire 2-3x as much man power elsewhere in the world. Another big thing is govt aligned sponsorships are not for software but for generating jobs/work within their borders.
- throwa356262 15d agoYes, but SF salaries are still twice German salaries and probaby 4x Eastern Europe salaries.
- minraws 15d agoyeah but the us folks aren't working out of SF and generally these projects have mostly flat pay structures (unsure if that exactly fits but a few comments make it seem like it checks out)
- smj-edison 15d agoI think if someone is maintaining open source software, they're already not worrying about making that much money.
- nicoburns 15d agoThis is public https://github.com/servo/project/issues/181 https://github.com/servo/project/issues/181 and https://github.com/servo/project/issues/187 https://github.com/servo/project/issues/187. TL;DR: up to $4800/month (at a rate of $150/h depending on hours actually worked)
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- evolve2k 15d agoNon ai post as top post. We did it guys! But seriously, it’s nice to see other news on here. Important we keep covering broader tech things.
- bakar_islem 15d ago[flagged]