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Last week I tried my hand at putting vim functionality into servo, a la pentadactyl. It's not even close to being ready. Even rendering a simple page like hack

Last week I tried my hand at putting vim functionality into servo, a la pentadactyl. It's not even close to being ready. Even rendering a simple page like hackernews is broken. That's not to say I am not excited for this. I think servo will be huge and I think it will see widespread adoption. It's just that with all the news we hear about it, you might be lead to think that today it's competing with webkit. It's not. Soon, though.

rylee 12y ago
Thank you! I'm glad someone cares about vim functionality enough to work on it.
vanderZwan 12y ago
Every time I hear about Servo, it mostly can be boiled down to: A: We did a ton of work B: We're not even remotely close to something really useful yet I think that says more about how websites work, to be honest.
- jerf 12y ago
  The stack of web technologies is staggeringly enormous. It may not feel like it just scanning over a simple HTML page, but it is, and there's a lot of invisible-yet-critical stuff like proper same-origin policy enforcement. The miracle is not that it takes Servo a while to be created, it's that this stack works at all, and that they're even trying!
  - higherpurpose 12y ago
    Couldn't they just do something similar to Microsoft's Edge/IE11 approach? Servo for HTML5+/CSS3+/Javascript ES6+ and then keep Gecko as well inside Firefox for "legacy websites"?
    - adapt_throw 12y ago
      If the point is to make a more secure browser, allowing a webpage to opt-in to use the old, less secure engine instead is probably a non-starter. (In any case, I think the complexity is fundamental to many of the specs involved.)
    - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
      HTML5 is no smaller than its predecessors. It's considerably larger.
    - gsnedders 12y ago
      HTML5/CSS3/ES6 define how to process legacy content as well as current — the only actual branching for versions is quirks mode and that has relatively minor effects which aren't that much code to implement. Edge should, in principle, support everything, including legacy sites (at least as well as other browsers do today). Trident is only being kept around for sites that do extensive UA sniffing and rely on obscure behaviour — and pretty much only for the intranet.
    - Manishearth 12y ago
      Gecko is not exactly separable from Firefox (unlike Blokc/Webkit and I'm guessing Trident/Spartan). The firefox UI depends heavily on things like XUL and XPCOM and whatnot which are nonstandard features in Gecko and would be a pain to support in Servo. I guess you could run two browser engines -- one for the UI, one for the content, but I'm not sure how well that would work.
- plorkyeran 12y ago
  FireFox using some libraries written for Servo is a nice deviation from that. The sheer amount of work involved in getting Servo to a usable state should be less surprising when you consider that all of the browser engines in current use date back to the 90s in some form (1997 for Gecko and Trident, 1998 for KHTML/WebKit/Blink).
- sp332 12y ago
  Not only that, but Servo is experimenting with new techniques for just about everything as they go. Progress may seem slow if you measure how "done" it is, but it's much faster than other projects if you measure how much research is being produced.
  - yoodlepipping 12y ago
    Research? I don't think they've published a single paper have they?
    - ffk 12y ago
      Breakthroughs don't always result in research papers. They sometimes end up in products instead. :)
    - pcwalton 12y ago
      The parallel algorithms that Servo uses to implement advanced features of CSS are, as far as I know, novel (block formatting context size speculation, float impaction detection, absolute positioning traversals, parallel automatic table layout, parallel border-collapse).
      - vanderZwan 12y ago
        I vaguely recall them discovering a number of bugs in the spec along the way as well.
        pcwalton 12y ago
        Yes, we've discovered several spec bugs, as well as bugs in other browser engines.
    - Bjartr 12y ago
      Practical research, not academic research.
      - 12y ago
- reddotX 12y ago
  the B is wrong :> they are getting closer and closer to gecko rendering level. gecko vs servo (rendering a couple of sites) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZGhnqtXVdc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZGhnqtXVdc
pcwalton 12y ago
Hacker News is surprisingly un-simple, due to extreme reliance on <center> (the major remaining broken thing, with annoying interactions with CSS) and automatic table layout (very complex).
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  To add to this, Hacker News does not display well in either Chrome for Android or Firefox for Android[0], so it's not like it's only Servo (or even only Firefox) that has issues. [0] Notice the inconsistent sizes of comments (which actually does not always even correlate with nested depth): https://www.dropbox.com/s/b47lhe3px83wq9j/2015-05-01%2019.29.11.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/b47lhe3px83wq9j/2015-05-01%2019.29...
  - Manishearth 12y ago
    Oh, that was happening on IE mobile and I just assumed it was their way of showing the post score on a mobile phone. Didn't realize it was a bug :)
  - adapt_throw 12y ago
    Mobile browsers attempt to make content more prominent than navigation. This matters a lot on e.g. mobile news sites. Unfortunately the algorithm they use breaks horribly on comment threads, because it decides that long comments are content, while short comments are not important. (At least, this is my deduction from seeing it in action.) You'll see it on reddit, forum threads, and here on HN -- so this is not exactly a layout bug, but a problem with how Firefox/Chrome try to apply some simple semantics to web content.
  - jsnell 12y ago
    That's a feature ("font boosting"). It's a total mystery to me how something working so badly could ship, especially since the Android Webkit fork had a similar feature working perfectly. But apparently it's of "acceptable quality" in Chrome https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=84186#c24 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=84186#c24
kibwen 12y ago
The Servo team plans to ship an alpha-quality release later this year, and my entirely amateur opinion is that Servo will be ready to compete with Webkit by 2017. Place your bets...
daGrevis 12y ago
Is there any place where I could follow progress of Pentadactyl-like plugin for Servo?

rylee 12y ago

Thank you! I'm glad someone cares about vim functionality enough to work on it.

vanderZwan 12y ago

Every time I hear about Servo, it mostly can be boiled down to: A: We did a ton of work B: We're not even remotely close to something really useful yet I think that says more about how websites work, to be honest.

jerf 12y ago
The stack of web technologies is staggeringly enormous. It may not feel like it just scanning over a simple HTML page, but it is, and there's a lot of invisible-yet-critical stuff like proper same-origin policy enforcement. The miracle is not that it takes Servo a while to be created, it's that this stack works at all, and that they're even trying!
- higherpurpose 12y ago
  Couldn't they just do something similar to Microsoft's Edge/IE11 approach? Servo for HTML5+/CSS3+/Javascript ES6+ and then keep Gecko as well inside Firefox for "legacy websites"?
  - adapt_throw 12y ago
    If the point is to make a more secure browser, allowing a webpage to opt-in to use the old, less secure engine instead is probably a non-starter. (In any case, I think the complexity is fundamental to many of the specs involved.)
  - TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    HTML5 is no smaller than its predecessors. It's considerably larger.
  - gsnedders 12y ago
    HTML5/CSS3/ES6 define how to process legacy content as well as current — the only actual branching for versions is quirks mode and that has relatively minor effects which aren't that much code to implement. Edge should, in principle, support everything, including legacy sites (at least as well as other browsers do today). Trident is only being kept around for sites that do extensive UA sniffing and rely on obscure behaviour — and pretty much only for the intranet.
  - Manishearth 12y ago
    Gecko is not exactly separable from Firefox (unlike Blokc/Webkit and I'm guessing Trident/Spartan). The firefox UI depends heavily on things like XUL and XPCOM and whatnot which are nonstandard features in Gecko and would be a pain to support in Servo. I guess you could run two browser engines -- one for the UI, one for the content, but I'm not sure how well that would work.
plorkyeran 12y ago
FireFox using some libraries written for Servo is a nice deviation from that. The sheer amount of work involved in getting Servo to a usable state should be less surprising when you consider that all of the browser engines in current use date back to the 90s in some form (1997 for Gecko and Trident, 1998 for KHTML/WebKit/Blink).
sp332 12y ago
Not only that, but Servo is experimenting with new techniques for just about everything as they go. Progress may seem slow if you measure how "done" it is, but it's much faster than other projects if you measure how much research is being produced.
- yoodlepipping 12y ago
  Research? I don't think they've published a single paper have they?
  - ffk 12y ago
    Breakthroughs don't always result in research papers. They sometimes end up in products instead. :)
  - pcwalton 12y ago
    The parallel algorithms that Servo uses to implement advanced features of CSS are, as far as I know, novel (block formatting context size speculation, float impaction detection, absolute positioning traversals, parallel automatic table layout, parallel border-collapse).
    - vanderZwan 12y ago
      I vaguely recall them discovering a number of bugs in the spec along the way as well.
      - pcwalton 12y ago
        Yes, we've discovered several spec bugs, as well as bugs in other browser engines.
  - Bjartr 12y ago
    Practical research, not academic research.
    - 12y ago
reddotX 12y ago
the B is wrong :> they are getting closer and closer to gecko rendering level. gecko vs servo (rendering a couple of sites) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZGhnqtXVdc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZGhnqtXVdc

pcwalton 12y ago

Hacker News is surprisingly un-simple, due to extreme reliance on <center> (the major remaining broken thing, with annoying interactions with CSS) and automatic table layout (very complex).

chimeracoder 12y ago
To add to this, Hacker News does not display well in either Chrome for Android or Firefox for Android[0], so it's not like it's only Servo (or even only Firefox) that has issues. [0] Notice the inconsistent sizes of comments (which actually does not always even correlate with nested depth): https://www.dropbox.com/s/b47lhe3px83wq9j/2015-05-01%2019.29.11.png?dl=0 https://www.dropbox.com/s/b47lhe3px83wq9j/2015-05-01%2019.29...
- Manishearth 12y ago
  Oh, that was happening on IE mobile and I just assumed it was their way of showing the post score on a mobile phone. Didn't realize it was a bug :)
- adapt_throw 12y ago
  Mobile browsers attempt to make content more prominent than navigation. This matters a lot on e.g. mobile news sites. Unfortunately the algorithm they use breaks horribly on comment threads, because it decides that long comments are content, while short comments are not important. (At least, this is my deduction from seeing it in action.) You'll see it on reddit, forum threads, and here on HN -- so this is not exactly a layout bug, but a problem with how Firefox/Chrome try to apply some simple semantics to web content.
- jsnell 12y ago
  That's a feature ("font boosting"). It's a total mystery to me how something working so badly could ship, especially since the Android Webkit fork had a similar feature working perfectly. But apparently it's of "acceptable quality" in Chrome https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=84186#c24 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=84186#c24

kibwen 12y ago

The Servo team plans to ship an alpha-quality release later this year, and my entirely amateur opinion is that Servo will be ready to compete with Webkit by 2017. Place your bets...

daGrevis 12y ago

Is there any place where I could follow progress of Pentadactyl-like plugin for Servo?