Servo Browser Engine Enables New Default UI, Improves Crash Error Page, Replaces OpenSSL

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Servo Browser Engine Enables New Default UI, Improves Crash Error Page, Replaces OpenSSL

The Servo web rendering engine that is written in Rust and started originally by Mozilla while now being developed as a Linux Foundation Europe project has issued a status update around recent changes to this memory-safe and modular web browser engine...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Servo-September-2023

[shmerl]

I want to see Vulkan rendering used in Firefox / Servo instead of OpenGL.

[edxposed]

They replaced the slightly less stinky poop with an even smellier one

[SteamPunker]

Wait, what? Mozilla abandoned Servo?

It's good that it's seeing continued development, but I was really looking forward to seeing the core of Firefox being refitted with a state-of-the-art engine.

Why did they decide this? How did I miss that?

[RahulSundaram]

Wait, what? Mozilla abandoned Servo?

It's good that it's seeing continued development, but I was really looking forward to seeing the core of Firefox being refitted with a state-of-the-art engine.

Why did they decide this? How did I miss that?

Mozilla had some layoffs in 2020 and it affected the Servo team along with Rust developers. The Rust foundation ended up being created to avoid any dependency on a single organization and Servo team moved on the Linux Foundation. All of this has been covered in Phoronix before.

[dlq84]

Wait, what? Mozilla abandoned Servo?

It's good that it's seeing continued development, but I was really looking forward to seeing the core of Firefox being refitted with a state-of-the-art engine.

Why did they decide this? How did I miss that?

Firefox is still using Servo, here it is vendorized in the source tree: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/servo. They didn't abandoned it, they just move the development to another foundation.

[creative]

While I know there is some dislike of Rust in these parts I have seen a massive ton of CVE patches lately. All the way high up with firefox to further down as far as vim, curl, openssl etc.

For vim of course it would have to do with something like JSON.

Ehhyea I think I'm paying more attention to changelogs than usual, that's why I'm seeing the stuff.

[Quackdoc]

I really think servo has a good chance to replace webkit, It's extremely easy to hack on and modular at the same time, It took me about 10 or so minutes to get JXL working in servo thanks to servo using image-rs (jpeg-xl isn't supported in it yet, jxl-oxide, the rust jxl decoder is missing a couple features for inclusion). https://media.discordapp.net/attachm...2080/image.png

as another example the "media" crate for servo is quite modular, only one backend currently exists (gstreamer) but it's set up in a way to be conducive to adding other backends https://github.com/servo/media

It's speed isn't quite there anymore (obviously) and the rendering is messed up, (even simple pages like boorus don't render right with new backend) but well, thats what a year of inactivity does.

for anyone looking to use this in a rust project, you can see the example "ports" here https://github.com/servo/servo/tree/master/ports

[betam4x]

I want to see Vulkan rendering used in Firefox / Servo instead of OpenGL.

I don’t know that it would make much of a difference. Vulkan is harder to deal with, and you can’t really take any advantage of the lower level API. Maybe someone else has a different viewpoint, however.

[shmerl]

I don’t know that it would make much of a difference. Vulkan is harder to deal with, and you can’t really take any advantage of the lower level API. Maybe someone else has a different viewpoint, however.

Not sure what you mean. The whole point is to use full parallelization advantage, which you can't use with OpenGL. Fits very well the goals of Servo.