[WastingMyTime89]

It’s shame Mozilla gimped Servo by shackling it to Gecko for political reasons and giving it utterly stupid priorities like VR. Some of the ideas put forward were great. It was really inspiring to see that such a cool R&D project was possible in a space as uncompetitive as web browsers.

[mariusor]

I wish the first priority for the project would be to make it easy to integrate into other applications, instead of building a full fledged browser. To break the monopoly of WebKit/Blink browsers we need a competing rendering engine that is being developed outside the Google/Alphabet umbrella.

[fabrice_d]

Servo has always been easy to embed. Basically the host needs to provide a GL surface and input events, and gets some callbacks from Servo.

Maybe I should revive the Gonk port[0]...

[0] https://github.com/fabricedesre/servonk/

[forgotpwd16]

>first priority for the project would be to make it easy to integrate into other applications, instead of building a full fledged browser

That's the case. From homepage:

> Servo’s mission is to provide an independent, modular, embeddable web engine, which allows developers to deliver content and applications using web standards.

[mariusor]

I thought that's the old blurb. In the article they specifically mention they want to work on CSS2:

> The focus for 2023 is to improve the situation of the layout system in Servo, with the initial goal of getting basic CSS2 layout working.

But seeing another comment in the thread, it looks like that was the last thing the developers that will be sponsored were working on anyway, so it makes sense to pick up where they have left off.

[stuaxo]

Exactly - there are cases there where it wouldn't matter too much that it isn't complete yet.

[tomstockmail]

One of Igalia's, the team funding this new Servo development, projects is Servo-based Wolvic[1] which is a continuation of the Firefox VR project:

>A few months ago, we announced we would be taking over stewardship of what was then the Firefox Reality project, spinning off a new browser based on Reality’s foundations that would follow its own evolutionary path: Wolvic.

[1] https://www.igalia.com/2022/07/08/Wolvic-1.0.html

[TingPing]

Wolvic uses Gecko.

[detaro]

How was Servo "shackled to Gecko"?

[WastingMyTime89]

It was far obvious it would be used to provide things piecemeal to Gecko when it was started. The decision to port WebRender came more or less at the same time when it was decided that Servo, which had a great velocity at that point, would focus on VR and AR usage.

It wasn't too hard to read between the lines for what was happening especially considering how political Mozilla is from the inside. The decision to stop the project some time later wasn't much of a surprise from then on.

[steveklabnik]

I don't mean to wade into the question if the strategy with Servo was good or bad or anything like that, but

> It was far obvious it would be used to provide things piecemeal to Gecko when it was started.

While many people believed that Servo would be a total re-write of the browser, a new clean slate project, everyone involved was very clear from the very beginning that it was not.

See slide 3 of the presentation that introduced Rust and Servo inside of Mozilla: http://venge.net/graydon/talks/intro-talk-2.pdf

> We are not “rewriting the browser”. That's impossible. Put down the gun.

[orra]

> It was far [from] obvious it would be used to provide things piecemeal to Gecko when it was started.

I don't know why you're so surprised. Creating a browser rendering engine with full feature parity is an absolutely gigantic project. Of course successful modules were merged into Gecko.

> Servo, which had a great velocity at that point, would focus on VR and AR usage.

Mozilla doesn't have the same financial clout as Google. Of course Mozilla wanted a way to monetise Servo. R&D is great but they can't spend on R&D indefinitely.

[WastingMyTime89]

> Creating a browser rendering engine with full feature parity is an absolutely gigantic project.

So? Gecko was a mess and they had something actually exciting on their hand which was mostly untainted by their branding. They could have bet on it rather than chose to die a slow death while their money trickles to their highly pay executive team.

> Of course Mozilla wanted a way to monetise Servo. R&D is great but they can't spend on R&D indefinitely.

If that’s what they were looking for, that’s retrospectively an extremely poor decision. There was no money in VR. The issue with Mozilla management is that they have been so consistently terrible you never know if they are genuinely malicious or just completely inept.

I generally feel little sympathy for Mozilla. They killed all their interesting projects, squandered money in dubious half-assed investments and managed to make themselves hard to deal with as a community member through a combination of weird rigidity and repeated communication mismanagement.

I would be very happy to see Servo find a new lease on life however. That’s what great R&D looks like.

[camgunz]

> I generally feel little sympathy for Mozilla.

I see this take a lot in Mozilla-ish threads, and at this point it just reads to me a lot like backseat driving. I think real critiques of Mozilla take the form of companies like Vivaldi, Opera, The Browser Company, Brave, Mighty, Synth, Sidekick, etc. I'm not doing a "put up or shut up" thing; I always think people have the right to critique and discuss. I'm just saying there's a difference between substantive and non-substantive critiques, and most of the anti-Mozilla stuff I see now seems like the former.

> Gecko was a mess and they had something actually exciting on their hand which was mostly untainted by their branding.

Honestly I'm not that excited by Servo. It's geek-cool that they're able to leverage Rust and build a browser engine that maybe doesn't have memory error vulns and can better take advantage of multiple CPU cores, but I'm yawning just typing that out. By the time they're done we'll have the metaverse.

[WastingMyTime89]

> like backseat driving

It’s not backseat driving to criticise the driver who just crashed their vehicle into the wall.

> most of the anti-Mozilla stuff I see now seems like the former.

Sadly I did have to interact with Mozilla in the past decade. I wish I didn’t honestly. It goes a long way to explain why they have no momentum anymore as far as I’m concerned.

[TuringTest]

Possibly. But thanks to Wolvic, there's a chance that the metaverse will be built on top of Servo ;-)

[Calavar]

> So? Gecko was a mess and they had something actually exciting on their hand which was mostly untainted by their branding. They could have bet on it rather than chose to die a slow death while their money trickles to their highly pay executive team.

Mozilla/Firefox rose from the ashes of Netscape, which failed precisely because they tried to do a complete rewrite of their browser engine. With that in mind, it's not too surprising that they would want to backport features to Gecko.

[WastingMyTime89]

Netscape was killed by AOL culture in the same way Firefox died of Mozilla culture. Who could have guessed? The same management team led to the same end result.

[cies]

Servo was a PoC browser that did not need to become an actually usable browser by itself, but it served as a test bed for writing browser parts in Rust so they could be used to replace bits of Firefox (Gecko).

Now it seems they are pushing for Servo as a browser and goal by itself.

[vfclists]

If its any consolation Mozilla will never threaten the browser engine that is used by the company that provides the lion's share of its income, just saying.

[WastingMyTime89]

Technically Mozilla incomes come from being a foil to Google for an hypothetical antitrust probe. At this point both Gecko and Firefox are utterly irrelevant.