from Hacker News

Mozilla's abandoned web engine 'Servo' project is getting a reboot

by worez on 2/6/24, 2:14 AM with 135 comments

  • by thinkingemote on 2/6/24, 9:58 AM

    I would like to see Positron rebooted. Positron is to Firefox what electron is to chromium.

    https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/

  • by pmontra on 2/6/24, 11:22 AM

    They have a video of Servo running on a Raspberry 400 faster than Chromium. However there are no downloads or build instructions specifically for the Raspberry in the repository on GitHub or in the issues. Maybe it's just build for Linux.

    Googling servo and raspberry together gives a lot of hardware projects with motors, even when including mozilla in the query.

    Did anybody here made it run on a Pi?

  • by k8svet on 2/6/24, 4:38 AM

    I'd like to know how much Tauri is driving interest in Servo. I was ecstatic to see that Servo is using Tauri as a "test client" of sorts.

  • by sa-code on 2/6/24, 7:11 AM

    Wasn't servo's purpose to essentially be a testing ground for features that would eventually be pushed to Firefox?

  • by germandiago on 2/6/24, 10:25 AM

    Was not Servo a super nice thing it would allow better multithreading through Rust's power as compared to old, ancient C++ that everyone and her neighbour says it is so bad?

    What happened exactly to Servo? Why it was discontinued?

  • by andrewmcwatters on 2/6/24, 3:52 PM

    I hope that being at Igalia forces the team to have laser focus in being a real embeddable solution for developers. The last I checked maybe a year ago or more, it isn’t.

    I commented over the years how Servo isn’t a real alternative because they don’t actually provide any API surface comparable to using CEF or full Chromium or WebKit, and as a result it’s a nonstarter.

    I think someone working on it had mentioned they were looking into creating a CEF-like API for embedding, but if the project says it’s an embed-able engine before anything else and it can’t even be used for that purpose, I have no idea what that team is focusing on other than rendering itself. I’d be more interested in even just a partially compliant engine whose primary focus was actually embedding.

    It might be OK if you want to build a Firefox? It’s not if you want to use it as an actual embedded renderer.

  • by terabytest on 2/6/24, 10:26 AM

    This page keeps crashing for me on iOS Safari. Is anyone else experiencing this?

  • by devaiops9001 on 2/6/24, 11:29 AM

    A 100% Rust based browser engine is sorely needed.

  • by charcircuit on 2/6/24, 2:05 PM

    It's not Mozilla's anymore

  • by beretguy on 2/6/24, 12:39 PM

    I just want native tab group support.

  • by haunter on 2/6/24, 11:40 AM

    I want Safari on Windows back

  • by EasyMark on 2/6/24, 1:59 PM

    Don't know if it helps anyone but darkreader in "light" mode absolutely destroys the linked page for some reason, works fine in DR dark mode tho

  • by jhoechtl on 2/6/24, 11:41 AM

    Servo is a waste of time. If we want a fast rendering engine, Mozilla already has it.

    If we want a secure rendering engine we could leverage code checks.

    It's all there. The meme of Rust equals safety (or C equals I safety) has to go away.