Servo Browser Engine Continues On Its Path To Be Embed-Friendly

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Servo Browser Engine Continues On Its Path To Be Embed-Friendly

Following good progress in October and this former-Mozilla browser engine project receiving funding recently for "table" support, Servo developers continued implementing more functionality over the course of November...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Servo-November-2023

[chromer]

How challenging and complex is it to combine Servo and Firefox components to craft a new browser? Are there any current endeavors or projects dedicated to this?

[Quackdoc]

How challenging and complex is it to combine Servo and Firefox components to craft a new browser? Are there any current endeavors or projects dedicated to this?

servo is already built on firefox components, the thing you would want to do right now is simply help contribute in getting servo rendering accurately, once it can render most stuff (media playback doesn't work atm), you can make a simple UI for it like gnome web does for webkit

[ssokolow]

servo is already built on firefox components, the thing you would want to do right now is simply help contribute in getting servo rendering accurately, once it can render most stuff (media playback doesn't work atm), you can make a simple UI for it like gnome web does for webkit

...or, more correctly, Servo and Firefox are built on each other. Servo is and always has been built on Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine, while "Firefox Quantum" was the marketing name for "We replaced a bunch of Firefox components, such as the CSS engine, with ones from Servo".

It's just a matter of "Firefox prioritizes keeping visible change from adding Servo components limited to performance improvements" vs. "Servo is an R&D project and prioritizes having a relationship with Firefox similar to rustc's relationship with LLVM". (i.e. Rewriting SpiderMonkey at this stage would be a massive amount of work for limited gain.)

[Quackdoc]

...or, more correctly, Servo and Firefox are built on each other. Servo is and always has been built on Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine, while "Firefox Quantum" was the marketing name for "We replaced a bunch of Firefox components, such as the CSS engine, with ones from Servo".

It's just a matter of "Firefox prioritizes keeping visible change from adding Servo components limited to performance improvements" vs. "Servo is an R&D project and prioritizes having a relationship with Firefox similar to rustc's relationship with LLVM". (i.e. Rewriting SpiderMonkey at this stage would be a massive amount of work for limited gain.)

Servo was abandoned by Mozilla a long time ago, there are still shared components, but the servo rendering engine is still very much it's own distinct thing. and is currently being primarily developed by igalia sponsored devs. and this happened long ago.

[ssokolow]

Servo was abandoned by Mozilla a long time ago, there are still shared components, but the servo rendering engine is still very much it's own distinct thing. and is currently being primarily developed by igalia sponsored devs. and this happened long ago.

I never said that wasn't the case... just that the code borrowing goes both ways because Servo borrowed from Firefox to get started quickly and Firefox borrowed from Servo to improve performance.

[Quackdoc]

I never said that wasn't the case... just that the code borrowing goes both ways because Servo borrowed from Firefox to get started quickly and Firefox borrowed from Servo to improve performance.

ah I see, I misunderstood

[timofonic]

I never said that wasn't the case... just that the code borrowing goes both ways because Servo borrowed from Firefox to get started quickly and Firefox borrowed from Servo to improve performance.

Do you have a comparison? What about both spurce code repositories? Is the code sharing real or you supposed it?

[Quackdoc]

Do you have a comparison? What about both spurce code repositories? Is the code sharing real or you supposed it?

define "code sharing" I doubt mozilla is pulling any code from the servo engine into firefox now, however it for sure goes the other way https://github.com/servo/servo/pull/30770/files . And as for the past, servo absolutely was the testing ground for the stuff

[Kver]

How challenging and complex is it to combine Servo and Firefox components to craft a new browser? Are there any current endeavors or projects dedicated to this?

Basically impossible to go "full servo" at this point. Mozilla decided to integrate the renderer with the chrome in order to expedite development, which is why Gecko embeds were killed eons ago. Removing gecko to drop in servo would be akin to rewriting most of Firefox itself.