12 ms·

Servo passes Acid2

264 points by bpierre 13y ago

cordite 13y ago
> That smiley face looks like the face of someone that just passed an acid test. -- ‏@alekslitynski I remember the mess I saw on my PSP when I tried it out when Acid 2 was important.
- jey 13y ago
  For the confused: @alekslitynski is making a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Tests.
camus2 13y ago
Good,now maybe you could fix that broken IndexedDB spec and come up with something more usefull... and implement basic stuff like Summary/Details or you know some HTML5 form controls... And some file system api, seems to me Mozilla dont care about offline webapps,since the WebSQL debacle...
- rubiquity 13y ago
  Offline and Web have always been very funny to me. Why should it be the Web's responsibility to make offline better, it is the Web after all -- the epitome of online connectivity. If anything, it should be the mobile companies responsibility to have better offline support. Maybe they could start by not choosing to arbitrarily wipe Web browser data as the first step of reclaiming memory for the operating system (I'm looking at you, Apple)?
  - Turing_Machine 13y ago
    "Why should it be the Web's responsibility to make offline better" Because you care about your users being able to use the site? Because modern users aren't tethered to the wall any more? "Maybe they could start by not choosing to arbitrarily wipe Web browser data as the first step of reclaiming memory for the operating system" Okay, now I'm curious. Assume the system is totally out of storage. Something has to go. Should it be: 1) Apple's answer (i.e., deleting cached web pages and data) 2) Your answer (which would be?)
  - mcosta 13y ago
    I care about webapps being able to survive temporal offline situations and local caching. And it is one of my bigger headaches.
  - gldalmaso 13y ago
    Offline webapps is an easy way to distribute apps. No installations steps, easy updates, probably even easier than an app store. Also add very easy deploy and hosting of your app.
- taspeotis 13y ago
  offline webapps Paging Dr. Oxymoron
  - DiabloD3 13y ago
    I think he means like Chrome OS or Firefox OS type apps, where its just locally hosted html+js in some cases.
  - Turing_Machine 13y ago
    http://diveintohtml5.info/offline.html http://diveintohtml5.info/offline.html
    - taspeotis 13y ago
      I'm going to have to apologise and eat humble pie because, unbeknownst to me (and found through your link), the HTML standard actually has a section called "Offline Web applications" [1]. [1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/offline.html http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
- icebraining 13y ago
  seems to me Mozilla dont care about offline webapps Did you get that impression from the fact that they're building a whole OS based on offline webapps?
  - camus2 13y ago
    when did that os support websql? tell me oh wait,it does not,because of this crappy indexedDB Moz pushed.
    - Skinney 13y ago
      As far as I know, websql is deprecated. No work has been done on the standard since 2010. Firefox, Chrome and IE supports IndexedDB. There exists a shim that uses websql or indexeddb, depending on what's available.
      - camus2 13y ago
        Did you even try that shim? it's broken,and i'm not interested in using a slow nosql db where i'd have to do manual join or write javascript for queries to persist my complex datas in my offline apps
        Skinney 13y ago
        Which one? There are several. Then don't target Firefox OS. It's not like Android or iOS is going to drop support for webSQL anytime soon. Me personally, I've written an orm around localstorage, work's everywhere :)
    - icebraining 13y ago
      Not supporting your pet feature != not supporting offline webapps. WebSQL is not even a standard. Besides, if you want to use SQLite in the browser, you don't need WebSQL: https://github.com/kripken/sql.js https://github.com/kripken/sql.js
      - 13y ago
sanxiyn 13y ago
Acid2 pass itself maybe uninteresting, but Servo also does layout in parallel (right now, not in the future). No other engines do. http://pcwalton.github.io/blog/2014/02/25/revamped-parallel-layout-in-servo/ http://pcwalton.github.io/blog/2014/02/25/revamped-parallel-...
- haberman 13y ago
  Wow, Servo is way longer along than I thought! From that post: > No doubt about it, CSS 2.1 is tricky—floats perhaps more than anything else. I really hope that Servo helps to identify parts of the HTML/CSS specs (if any) that unnecessarily prevent parallelism. By that I mean features (like "float" perhaps) that make it harder to parallelize, and where an alternative design could support the same use cases in a better way. Those are the gems that teach us deep lessons about the problem space, and how future similar technologies out to be designed.
  - mbrubeck 13y ago
    > I really hope that Servo helps to identify parts of the HTML/CSS specs (if any) that unnecessarily prevent parallelism. This is beginning to happen; for example Servo work on running <iframe sandboxed> documents in parallel [1] led to the discovery that the HTML spec allowed different-origin iframes to mutate into same-origin, through the "document.domain" setter [2], which made process isolation infeasible (since it would require some way to merge separate processes with separate heaps back into a single process). That discussion led to a change in the spec [3]. [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.servo/LQ46AtKp_t0/plqFfjLSER8J https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.servo/LQ46... [2] http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2013-August/040433.html http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2013-Aug... [3] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=23040 https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=23040
  - dingdingdang 13y ago
    CSS without float.. would not work very well! Unless we all go back to table based design (or ahead to flexbox I guess, I don't know enough, practically speaking, about that standard yet to reason proper about it though!)
bpierre 13y ago
Servo [1] is an experimental web engine developed by Mozilla, written in the Rust language [2], which is also developed by Mozilla. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/servo https://github.com/mozilla/servo [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_%28programming_language%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_%28programming_language%2...
DiabloD3 13y ago
Can't wait until I can get a browser that uses this, especially on Android.
joelmichael 13y ago
Oddly enough I just checked and Safari is not passing the Acid2 right now. Happens on my iPhone too. http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top
- mbrubeck 13y ago
  Acid2 was designed before high-density screens were common; it has known bugs when one CSS px is not exactly one device pixel: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580920 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580920
- annnnd 13y ago
  To quote: "Servo passes Acid2 in my branch". It is probably not in default branch yet.
  - danielsamuels 13y ago
    To quote: "Safari is not passing".
- Corrado 13y ago
  Actually, on my Mavericks box, Safari 7.0.2 seems to pass Acid2 just fine; the nose even changes color on hover. However, Chrome 35.0.1912.2 pretty obviously fails with the top of the head being messed up and a red line over the forhead. The nose changes color, so that's good. :)
taeric 13y ago
But is it any faster at doing so than any of the competition? Specifically, are there any real benefits to the "parallel" aspect of this?
- pcwalton 13y ago
  I haven't measured Acid2 layout performance, because it's not particularly interesting; Acid2's CSS is nowhere near the CSS that someone would actually write in the real world. On real pages, from our small amount of testing, we've seen promising results.
  - taeric 13y ago
    I'll have to give it another try. Last build I ran couldn't load that much. Of course, firefox is already bloody fast on any site I can think of. Not sure what sorts of improvements I should be looking for.
    - pcwalton 13y ago
      Oh, Servo certainly isn't a production-ready browser engine yet, if that's what you're looking for; the incomplete DOM code and network code prevent many sites from working.
      - taeric 13y ago
        More than just being production ready. I'm wondering what lessons have been learned that will actually help current browsers. Seems that servo is in a massive game of catch up, with no guarantees that things will be faster/better/whatever.
        anonbanker 13y ago
        I remember the same things being said about Mozilla/Gecko back in '99. That seemed to turn out pretty well for everyone.
panzi 13y ago
Looks better than current Firefox on my system. http://i.imgur.com/6CN4Heh.png http://i.imgur.com/6CN4Heh.png
- cpeterso 13y ago
  Ouch! Acid2 is broken on my Firefox too (but in a slightly different way). :(
  - simlevesque 13y ago
    No problems on FF 31. http://i.imgur.com/5l2042M.png http://i.imgur.com/5l2042M.png
- zobzu 13y ago
  looks exactly the same on firefox for me
wittekm 13y ago
Are there any sites with runnable Servo binaries? Or is it seriously just the engine with absolutely zero browser chrome?
- pcwalton 13y ago
  We have no browser chrome, for two reasons: (1) Browser UX research isn't part of the research agenda for Servo at this time. (That isn't to say we aren't interested in browser UX research at Mozilla, just that that isn't being done under the Servo project.) (2) It helps to ensure that we are embeddable. We want Servo to be an embeddable Web rendering engine for people to use in their own projects.
  - ksec 13y ago
    embeddable. Wow. This was what Gecko was hoping to achieve and failed to do so. Lets hope the second time around everything will be much much better.
    - adam-a 13y ago
      Whilst it may not be as easy as you'd like Firefox definitely is embeddable. My company use it in our desktop photo application.
    - kibwen 13y ago
      There's also a chance that they'll adopt the Webkit embedding API, which would make Servo a drop-in replacement for any software that currently uses Webkit. Though it hasn't been decided for certain whether to pursue this route.
porker 13y ago
Am I the only one who thought Acid2 was something to do with a new database data integrity test?
- kalnuezis 13y ago
  me too
herokusaki 13y ago
Posts like this always make me want to play with a layout engine trying to implement various features. Is there a toy layout engine made specifically for (self-) education? I couldn't find one. If there isn't, what is otherwise the easiest one to get started with?
- userbinator 13y ago
  How about writing your own? If you want an existing one, in a simpler browser, try Dillo or NetSurf.
- jgraham 13y ago
  Or contribute to Servo! Despite the huge milestone represented by Acid 2, it's still pretty early days and there is plenty of work to go around. The code's on GitHub [1], Josh Matthews did a nice talk about Fosdem that should give you a start on the architecture and how to contribute (video [2], slides [3]), and there is an irc channel (#servo on irc.mozilla.org) where you can ask questions. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/servo/ https://github.com/mozilla/servo/ [2] http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/fosdem//2014/UD2218A/Saturday/Servo_building_a_parallel_web_browser.webm http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/fosdem//2014/UD2218A/Saturday/Serv... [3] http://www.joshmatthews.net/fosdemservo/ http://www.joshmatthews.net/fosdemservo/
  - pcwalton 13y ago
    Servo is also pretty easy to navigate, IMO. I'm biased, of course :) But we do care a lot about code cleanliness.
- sanxiyn 13y ago
  WeasyPrint is a layout engine written in Python. It is not written for education nor it is a toy, but I found it easier to understand compared to other engines. One of Servo authors worked on WeasyPrint. WeasyPrint passes Acid2. http://weasyprint.org/ http://weasyprint.org/
AshleysBrain 13y ago
Servo's progress is impressive. How far is it off being ready to integrate in to a real browser? Is this likely in the foreseeable future?
- hyperpape 13y ago
  Mozilla keeps saying it is experimental and not intended to replace Firefox, but it sure seems like they're putting a lot of effort into it and Rust... That said, I don't think it could be ready for years if ever.
cardiffspaceman 13y ago
The HTML 5 spec can be implemented from scratch, but my guess is it takes a dozen times more people than implementing a C++ compiler. My basis for this comment is the now-four-years-dormant project I worked on to implement just parsing HTML5 into a DOM tree, which wasn't even inspired by wanting to write my own browser. I was motivated more by having an interest in hacking text layout code, and the need for some sort of syntax for my test cases. Since the project had no commercial goal, it went down a tangent. I'm impressed that a non-profit has funded two of these projects.

264 points by bpierre 13y ago

> That smiley face looks like the face of someone that just passed an acid test. -- ‏@alekslitynski I remember the mess I saw on my PSP when I tried it out when Acid 2 was important.

jey 13y ago
For the confused: @alekslitynski is making a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Tests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Tests.

camus2 13y ago

Good,now maybe you could fix that broken IndexedDB spec and come up with something more usefull... and implement basic stuff like Summary/Details or you know some HTML5 form controls... And some file system api, seems to me Mozilla dont care about offline webapps,since the WebSQL debacle...

rubiquity 13y ago
Offline and Web have always been very funny to me. Why should it be the Web's responsibility to make offline better, it is the Web after all -- the epitome of online connectivity. If anything, it should be the mobile companies responsibility to have better offline support. Maybe they could start by not choosing to arbitrarily wipe Web browser data as the first step of reclaiming memory for the operating system (I'm looking at you, Apple)?
- Turing_Machine 13y ago
  "Why should it be the Web's responsibility to make offline better" Because you care about your users being able to use the site? Because modern users aren't tethered to the wall any more? "Maybe they could start by not choosing to arbitrarily wipe Web browser data as the first step of reclaiming memory for the operating system" Okay, now I'm curious. Assume the system is totally out of storage. Something has to go. Should it be: 1) Apple's answer (i.e., deleting cached web pages and data) 2) Your answer (which would be?)
- mcosta 13y ago
  I care about webapps being able to survive temporal offline situations and local caching. And it is one of my bigger headaches.
- gldalmaso 13y ago
  Offline webapps is an easy way to distribute apps. No installations steps, easy updates, probably even easier than an app store. Also add very easy deploy and hosting of your app.
taspeotis 13y ago
offline webapps Paging Dr. Oxymoron
- DiabloD3 13y ago
  I think he means like Chrome OS or Firefox OS type apps, where its just locally hosted html+js in some cases.
- Turing_Machine 13y ago
  http://diveintohtml5.info/offline.html http://diveintohtml5.info/offline.html
  - taspeotis 13y ago
    I'm going to have to apologise and eat humble pie because, unbeknownst to me (and found through your link), the HTML standard actually has a section called "Offline Web applications" [1]. [1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/offline.html http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
icebraining 13y ago
seems to me Mozilla dont care about offline webapps Did you get that impression from the fact that they're building a whole OS based on offline webapps?
- camus2 13y ago
  when did that os support websql? tell me oh wait,it does not,because of this crappy indexedDB Moz pushed.
  - Skinney 13y ago
    As far as I know, websql is deprecated. No work has been done on the standard since 2010. Firefox, Chrome and IE supports IndexedDB. There exists a shim that uses websql or indexeddb, depending on what's available.
    - camus2 13y ago
      Did you even try that shim? it's broken,and i'm not interested in using a slow nosql db where i'd have to do manual join or write javascript for queries to persist my complex datas in my offline apps
      - Skinney 13y ago
        Which one? There are several. Then don't target Firefox OS. It's not like Android or iOS is going to drop support for webSQL anytime soon. Me personally, I've written an orm around localstorage, work's everywhere :)
  - icebraining 13y ago
    Not supporting your pet feature != not supporting offline webapps. WebSQL is not even a standard. Besides, if you want to use SQLite in the browser, you don't need WebSQL: https://github.com/kripken/sql.js https://github.com/kripken/sql.js
    - 13y ago

sanxiyn 13y ago

Acid2 pass itself maybe uninteresting, but Servo also does layout in parallel (right now, not in the future). No other engines do. http://pcwalton.github.io/blog/2014/02/25/revamped-parallel-layout-in-servo/ http://pcwalton.github.io/blog/2014/02/25/revamped-parallel-...

haberman 13y ago
Wow, Servo is way longer along than I thought! From that post: > No doubt about it, CSS 2.1 is tricky—floats perhaps more than anything else. I really hope that Servo helps to identify parts of the HTML/CSS specs (if any) that unnecessarily prevent parallelism. By that I mean features (like "float" perhaps) that make it harder to parallelize, and where an alternative design could support the same use cases in a better way. Those are the gems that teach us deep lessons about the problem space, and how future similar technologies out to be designed.
- mbrubeck 13y ago
  > I really hope that Servo helps to identify parts of the HTML/CSS specs (if any) that unnecessarily prevent parallelism. This is beginning to happen; for example Servo work on running <iframe sandboxed> documents in parallel [1] led to the discovery that the HTML spec allowed different-origin iframes to mutate into same-origin, through the "document.domain" setter [2], which made process isolation infeasible (since it would require some way to merge separate processes with separate heaps back into a single process). That discussion led to a change in the spec [3]. [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.servo/LQ46AtKp_t0/plqFfjLSER8J https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mozilla.dev.servo/LQ46... [2] http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2013-August/040433.html http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2013-Aug... [3] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=23040 https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=23040
- dingdingdang 13y ago
  CSS without float.. would not work very well! Unless we all go back to table based design (or ahead to flexbox I guess, I don't know enough, practically speaking, about that standard yet to reason proper about it though!)

bpierre 13y ago

Servo [1] is an experimental web engine developed by Mozilla, written in the Rust language [2], which is also developed by Mozilla. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/servo https://github.com/mozilla/servo [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_%28programming_language%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_%28programming_language%2...

DiabloD3 13y ago

Can't wait until I can get a browser that uses this, especially on Android.

joelmichael 13y ago

Oddly enough I just checked and Safari is not passing the Acid2 right now. Happens on my iPhone too. http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top http://www.webstandards.org/files/acid2/test.html#top

mbrubeck 13y ago
Acid2 was designed before high-density screens were common; it has known bugs when one CSS px is not exactly one device pixel: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580920 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=580920
annnnd 13y ago
To quote: "Servo passes Acid2 in my branch". It is probably not in default branch yet.
- danielsamuels 13y ago
  To quote: "Safari is not passing".
Corrado 13y ago
Actually, on my Mavericks box, Safari 7.0.2 seems to pass Acid2 just fine; the nose even changes color on hover. However, Chrome 35.0.1912.2 pretty obviously fails with the top of the head being messed up and a red line over the forhead. The nose changes color, so that's good. :)

taeric 13y ago

But is it any faster at doing so than any of the competition? Specifically, are there any real benefits to the "parallel" aspect of this?

pcwalton 13y ago
I haven't measured Acid2 layout performance, because it's not particularly interesting; Acid2's CSS is nowhere near the CSS that someone would actually write in the real world. On real pages, from our small amount of testing, we've seen promising results.
- taeric 13y ago
  I'll have to give it another try. Last build I ran couldn't load that much. Of course, firefox is already bloody fast on any site I can think of. Not sure what sorts of improvements I should be looking for.
  - pcwalton 13y ago
    Oh, Servo certainly isn't a production-ready browser engine yet, if that's what you're looking for; the incomplete DOM code and network code prevent many sites from working.
    - taeric 13y ago
      More than just being production ready. I'm wondering what lessons have been learned that will actually help current browsers. Seems that servo is in a massive game of catch up, with no guarantees that things will be faster/better/whatever.
      - anonbanker 13y ago
        I remember the same things being said about Mozilla/Gecko back in '99. That seemed to turn out pretty well for everyone.

panzi 13y ago

Looks better than current Firefox on my system. http://i.imgur.com/6CN4Heh.png http://i.imgur.com/6CN4Heh.png

cpeterso 13y ago
Ouch! Acid2 is broken on my Firefox too (but in a slightly different way). :(
- simlevesque 13y ago
  No problems on FF 31. http://i.imgur.com/5l2042M.png http://i.imgur.com/5l2042M.png
zobzu 13y ago
looks exactly the same on firefox for me

wittekm 13y ago

Are there any sites with runnable Servo binaries? Or is it seriously just the engine with absolutely zero browser chrome?

pcwalton 13y ago
We have no browser chrome, for two reasons: (1) Browser UX research isn't part of the research agenda for Servo at this time. (That isn't to say we aren't interested in browser UX research at Mozilla, just that that isn't being done under the Servo project.) (2) It helps to ensure that we are embeddable. We want Servo to be an embeddable Web rendering engine for people to use in their own projects.
- ksec 13y ago
  embeddable. Wow. This was what Gecko was hoping to achieve and failed to do so. Lets hope the second time around everything will be much much better.
  - adam-a 13y ago
    Whilst it may not be as easy as you'd like Firefox definitely is embeddable. My company use it in our desktop photo application.
  - kibwen 13y ago
    There's also a chance that they'll adopt the Webkit embedding API, which would make Servo a drop-in replacement for any software that currently uses Webkit. Though it hasn't been decided for certain whether to pursue this route.

porker 13y ago

Am I the only one who thought Acid2 was something to do with a new database data integrity test?

kalnuezis 13y ago
me too

herokusaki 13y ago

Posts like this always make me want to play with a layout engine trying to implement various features. Is there a toy layout engine made specifically for (self-) education? I couldn't find one. If there isn't, what is otherwise the easiest one to get started with?

userbinator 13y ago
How about writing your own? If you want an existing one, in a simpler browser, try Dillo or NetSurf.
jgraham 13y ago
Or contribute to Servo! Despite the huge milestone represented by Acid 2, it's still pretty early days and there is plenty of work to go around. The code's on GitHub [1], Josh Matthews did a nice talk about Fosdem that should give you a start on the architecture and how to contribute (video [2], slides [3]), and there is an irc channel (#servo on irc.mozilla.org) where you can ask questions. [1] https://github.com/mozilla/servo/ https://github.com/mozilla/servo/ [2] http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/fosdem//2014/UD2218A/Saturday/Servo_building_a_parallel_web_browser.webm http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/fosdem//2014/UD2218A/Saturday/Serv... [3] http://www.joshmatthews.net/fosdemservo/ http://www.joshmatthews.net/fosdemservo/
- pcwalton 13y ago
  Servo is also pretty easy to navigate, IMO. I'm biased, of course :) But we do care a lot about code cleanliness.
sanxiyn 13y ago
WeasyPrint is a layout engine written in Python. It is not written for education nor it is a toy, but I found it easier to understand compared to other engines. One of Servo authors worked on WeasyPrint. WeasyPrint passes Acid2. http://weasyprint.org/ http://weasyprint.org/

AshleysBrain 13y ago

Servo's progress is impressive. How far is it off being ready to integrate in to a real browser? Is this likely in the foreseeable future?

hyperpape 13y ago
Mozilla keeps saying it is experimental and not intended to replace Firefox, but it sure seems like they're putting a lot of effort into it and Rust... That said, I don't think it could be ready for years if ever.

cardiffspaceman 13y ago

The HTML 5 spec can be implemented from scratch, but my guess is it takes a dozen times more people than implementing a C++ compiler. My basis for this comment is the now-four-years-dormant project I worked on to implement just parsing HTML5 into a DOM tree, which wasn't even inspired by wanting to write my own browser. I was motivated more by having an interest in hacking text layout code, and the need for some sort of syntax for my test cases. Since the project had no commercial goal, it went down a tangent. I'm impressed that a non-profit has funded two of these projects.