1y ago

Two months in Servo: better inline layout, stable Rust, and more! - Servo, the embeddable, independent, memory-safe, modular, parallel web rendering engine

Improved control over typography, very early support for sticky positioning and tables, plus updates to our minibrowser and build tooling.

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It's great to see Servo finally getting some development again. I was so hopeful in the early days when Mozilla was using it as a playground and backporting parts to Firefox... Then that totally stopped.
- I've used some of their components in a little helper program that was scraping some stats from a service without an API, so Servo code will end up in plenty of projects besides Firefox (and Tauri). Good news for all of us.
I was pretty excited for a Servo when it was first announced. Then Mozilla shifted priorities and development slowed down to a crawl. Glad to see some more activity on it now.
I presume the tentative future goal would be to rebase Firefox on top of this. Hopefully Servo does eventually reach that level of maturity.
- IIRC, some code from Servo was merged into Firefox during project Quantum
- It's more likely we'll see a new browser with Servo rather than Firefox replacing Gecko with it - especially after Mozilla's recent wayward behavior starting with cutting Rust and Servo lose. But even more likely is Servo becoming a backend for Tauri. Anything beyond that will depend on the developers' persistence.
I wonder if servo could be turned into a safer electron alternative.
- It's already planned: https://servo.org/blog/2024/01/19/embedding-update/
- Others have linked it, so just the summary here. Tauri is an alternative to Electron. But unlike electron, Tauri doesn't bundle the web engine (blink) and uses the platform's webview instead. Tauri and Servo teams are working together on integrating the latter as the engine.
- Ah, like XULRunner 2.0.
  Speaking of which, it's crazy how Mozilla keeps almost developing technologies that Google later copies and profits from, but keeps giving up at the last minute.

9 comments