[Waterluvian]

I’m not sure I understand the context.

They began a replacement engine 7 years later to address shortcomings, and 3 years after that still aren’t sure if it’s actually better and worth switching over to?

Now that I write this, I kind of get it. But I’ve only experienced this for weeks worth of work, not for years.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

I heard that Firefox incorporated some parts of Servo years ago as part of the Quantum project. However my knowledge is limited to those buzzwords and I don’t have any real sense of how big a portion of the work that went into Servo got used.

[dblohm7]

The major Servo components that made it into Gecko were the style subsystem (Stylo) and WebRender.

[linuxandrew]

Mozilla abandoned work on Servo in 2020 (source: https://tildes.net/~tech/ra8/i_am_a_mozilla_employee_amaa) shortly after Layout 2020 came about. Servo was in limbo for some time before recently being handed over to the Linux Foundation, hence the time delay.

[mindwok]

I feel like that would be helpful context at the top of this article, because before knowing this I was pretty confused why a project was publicly questioning a decision it made 3 years ago, whereas with that context it seems this was more a discovery exercise by the new maintainers.

[capableweb]

The article is published in a blog for people working with/on servo and for people who are interested in servo already. It is not a "This is what servo is", "Announcing servo" or anything like that, it's a niche article on a niche blog for a niche project. It's perfectly fine to not lead with context that is obvious from the rest of the website.

[MBCook]

This is a very useful comment.

I knew Servo was part of Mozilla, but was confused by the article. It said 2013 was in use, but listed multiple major issues with it that I would think would prevent FF from being acceptable by any normal person.

Knowing it was a project and not a part of the current FF engine (as I had assumed) is the context I was missing.

Thank you. I don’t follow FF development closely enough to know this stuff, I just know enough to recognize a few project names.

[kelnos]

Also note that Servo is no longer a part of Mozilla. Servo's development now has nothing to do with Firefox's needs or roadmap. They're completely independent and are chasing their own goals.

[MBCook]

I did see that, but forgot to mention it above. You’re right that’s important info too.

[Waterluvian]

Ah that makes complete sense. They’re dusting it off to see if it’s worth continuing development of.

[HopenHeyHi]

Layout 2020 is an experimental attempt at parallel layout - an intersection between the complexities of "how the hell do I even do that in Rust" and "how the hell do I even do that at all".

Servo if memory serves was also experimenting with 3d layouts in VR as the wave of the future at one point. Make your own conclusions.

The really actually useful thing that came out of that effort was the CSS engine which is already incorporated into Firefox.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum/Stylo