[cwzwarich]

The original plan was for the Servo project was to develop a new browser engine separate from Gecko, similar to the original Mozilla transition. An alpha-quality browser with Servo as an engine was originally a 2015 goal, and the active goal tracking this was removed from the roadmap in 2016:

https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap/_compare/47f490b...

As someone who was involved with Servo during that time period, I was disappointed at the time that it was quite obviously not going to happen. However, looking at what has happened since then, the change of focus towards Firefox integration was definitely a good move.

[majewsky]

When I looked at browser.html, it was what you could call an "alpha-quality browser", unless we use different definitions of the term "alpha-quality".

[fabrice_d]

We all due respect, browser.html can do so little that it's hardly more than a prototype. Also, Servo itself as a web engine is still far from supporting enough of the web stack to be usable in a daily browser.

I guess putting effort in Stylo diverted some resources from Servo - I feel it didn't progress much the last year in terms of "sites I can browse for more than 5 minutes". At this point it's clear that Mozilla is unlikely to staff Servo to fill the gap (although cpearce and others are working on getting the gecko media stack in Servo), but I wonder what will happen once WebRender makes its way in Gecko; are there any other pieces of Servo that can be useful?

[pcwalton]

> are there any other pieces of Servo that can be useful

I definitely think Servo layout can be made useful. There have been no indications that parallel layout doesn't work in practice. Our performance tests have had good results, comparable to the results we saw in Stylo.

I would like to redo the way Servo layout scheduling works, possibly when async/await lands in Rust. I believe that will not only improve performance but also fix a whole bunch of random bugs relating to floats where our scheduler currently just does the wrong thing. (That doesn't mean we have to throw out all of that code or anything like that; it just means I'd like to redo how that works.)

Once you have layout, style, and graphics out of the way, what remains—really, at that point, the difference between Gecko and Servo, aside from embeddability—will mostly be DOM APIs and relatively isolated components such as image decoders. It's an open question how to use Servo DOM API implementations in Gecko. In any case, though, Servo's DOM story may change with the arrival of Alan Jeffrey's Josephine or something like it, and it probably makes sense to revisit this question once we decide how all of that will shake out.

And, personally, I don't know if you consider Pathfinder part of Servo or not, but I'm certainly aiming to get that in.

One thing's for sure: we won't be running out of things to do in Research any time soon. :)