Please don’t log into your bank with Servo just yet!
So .. just their own test shell compiled about engine as yet. (AFAIK)
There a few longish tech talks on youtube, the initial focus was on bringing documentation up to date in order to draw third party dev's in. Now there's more focus on more coverage of test suite.
It's in a decent sweet spot for certain types to get on board; new funding, new energy, room to change the guide rails and a milestone to work towards.
Well as I understand it the goal now (or arguably 'still') outside Mozilla is just the engine, not the browser that uses it (which would have been Firefox)?
So there still needs to be some browser project like the Ladybird mentioned, or a Brave, or whatever that decides to use Servo instead of WebKit, is my understanding.
(A bit of a tangent since not a browser, but I assume Tauri will be keen to use it.)
Won't happen anytime soon :
"
Will Ladybird work on Windows?
We don't have anyone actively working on Windows support, and there are considerable changes required to make it work well outside a Unix-like environment.
We would like to do Windows eventually, but it's not a priority at the moment.
"
The Linux ecosystem is by far the largest market for enthusiasts volunteering their time to develop a new browser. It makes sense this community would only care about building a browser for their own needs (Linux support only).
Additionally and unlike Mozilla, this volunteer community is also very unlikely to care about non-enthusiasts who may complain the browser doesn't support Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), Web Environment Integrity (WEI) or whatever anti-features ad-tech companies are trying to force onto mainstream users. This volunteer community is also unlikely to care too much about whether web sites containing 10MB of obfuscated JavaScript that was developed and tested solely against Chromium-based browsers works well. I think you'd find that the community would rather spend time working on projects such as yt-dlp to just re-implement front-ends for horribly broken websites, or would simply prefer to use non-broken alternative websites.
Linux is also the easiest kernel to develop against too for reasons that include _much_ better sandboxing features being available, better debugging tools and availability of source code to learn from and debug with. Contrast to Windows with undocumented or poorly documented kernel and other system library APIs, lack of source code (particularly examples of APIs being used in other software), and having to do more work to opt-in to security features that are enabled by default on a Linux system.
"smallest market" is relative, the Linux market for suckless tools for example is likely 10x bigger than the Windows one. For privacy focused alternative browsers I'd say its somewhere close to 50/50.
Which is not the point. If you want to have success you need to copy the Blender/Godot model. Year by year they make great versions for all platforms, and they do well. A new browser should support both and rally the people to work on it, again like the Blender Foundation has done.
Yes, it's called WSLg. Uses Wayland, so many apps are a bit messed up. I think there's a way to install X11. Last time I tried it over a year ago it was a bit rough.
I think they were listing the lineage of browsers they used, starting from the earliest one to current one. Not that they were using Firefox 30 years ago.
Draw a trend line through Windows releases and it doesn't look good. I can't see myself upgrading to 11 any time soon and I'm seriously considering just switching to Linux. It's all I've used on work laptops since 2013 and it's just fine.
I still despise Gtk 3 or whatever it is that is killing menus and sticking controls into the title bar etc. but it's fine. You don't need to use Gtk apps much these days anyway.
I'm afraid it'll take very, very much time and effort for Ladybird to be as fast as Firefox. Web pages are terrible resource hogs. An inefficient browser will not be popular.
> One of the long term goals is to match the performance of other production JavaScript engines like JavaScriptCore and V8 when they run without a JIT compiler.
Only for a few years until they come up with same shit but with a different name. Take a look at the presumably "dead" Palladium initiative and consider how much of it we're actually been subjected to now in our computing.
You don't need to rely on alpha vaporware. You can use a Firefox or chromium fork that patches out the changes and still have a quality battle tested browser.
It's hard to put faith in a project that's partially AI-generated and doesn't disclose it.
That picture of the laptop is the most blatant part. Is that just one contributor phoning it in for the landing page, or does that culture run deeper through the Ladybird project?
I've followed Kling's videos for years, both the ones working on serenity OS and the ones working on Ladybird, and followed the general arc of those projects and even contributed once a few year' back, and they actually seem to take the quality of their work very seriously and enjoy producing good high-quality code. I think it's just that none of them had experience with website design and the one guy who stepped up to do it happens to be one of those people that thinks AI generated stuff is fine.
I can't help but see these "let's create a Web browser from scratch" projects as massive wastes of time. You can't build a sane implementation of an insane standard.
Modern websites and the standards they rely on are overcomplicated. The problem lies with the standards, and the way they are used. The browser can't control that. I could never work on such a project without quickly losing motivation.
Also, that link says "The main community hub is our Discord server." That doesn't inspire confidence in anything.
Already a good way through CSS and WPT test suites: https://servo.org/about/
That's two seperate lines of not-Chrome not-Mozilla dev in the pipeline.