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by Manishearth 3020 days ago
> I think the amount of users you can win back from Chrome with a Servo browser is much larger than any VR audience you can hope to gain in the near future.

A Servo browser product is not possible in the near future. That is very much a far future thing. Web compatibility is hard.

Servo has a lot more potential in platforms where you don't need to support the _entire_ set of browser features -- like as an electron replacement, or a platform for something like webVR, or Android embedding (which will probably come out of the VR work as well).
2 comments
leeoniya 3020 days ago
> A Servo browser product is not possible in the near future. That is very much a far future thing.

and an impossibly far future if the Servo team is now refocused on VR, no? how likely is it that these hard problems will be solved by fewer engineer-hours?

perhaps there's some external backer willing to bankroll VR and Servo is just an easy expense to curtail.

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Manishearth 3020 days ago
You still need webcompat for VR stuff.

Focusing on VR means that we may not be working on some kinds of webcompat things (the standard example is "IE6 table layout quirks") but there's plenty of webcompat work that needs to be done otherwise.

Yes, not everyone will be working on webcompat, but this has never been the case anyway.

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leeoniya 3020 days ago
> (the standard example is "IE6 table layout quirks")

if a new browser in 2019 could not properly render an archived 1996 Geocities webpage at time of launch, i don't think many users would care or even notice. there are almost certainly legacy bugs in Firefox that have been open for over a decade with little activity and yet it's in production.

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Manishearth 3020 days ago
It's not just old sites that depend on these quirks.

Seriously, web compat is very tricky.

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sitkack 3020 days ago
So it is about team velocity vs standards compliance? I know the Servo team isn't large enough to make a whole new browser from scratch.
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Manishearth 3020 days ago
I'm not sure what you mean by team velocity.

We're still working on standards compliance, but we may focus more on the bits that are actually useful within VR.

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sitkack 3019 days ago
> team velocity

Having folks spending months implementing the corner cases of standard might not researching and finding creative ways to use Rust to implement large systems.

Standards compliance probably follows some exponential curve wrt energy and results.

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