Servo Browser Engine Making Embedded App Progress With Tauri

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Servo Browser Engine Making Embedded App Progress With Tauri

The Servo open-source browser engine originally started by Mozilla has seen renewed development in recent time by Linux Foundation Europe and via developers at firms like Igalia. Last year they drafted plans for focusing on making Servo embed-friendly so that this Rust-written code could be easily leveraged by desktop apps and frameworks. Today more light was shed on this embed initiative and their focus on integrating with Tauri...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Servo-Engine-Plus-Tauri

[paulocoghi]

This is good news. With more performant front-end frameworks and more lightweight alternatives to Electron, we can see a bright future for universal web/desktop apps.

[Mathias]

I recently wrote a small app in electron and I really like doing Desktop UI with HTML. But obviously the distributable was ~100MB. I then rewrote it in Tauri and it was really small. (a few MB) But Tauri comes with the downside, that it uses Windows Webview2 on Windows and some (IIRC) GTK/Mozilla webview on Linux. So you have to get used to the differences between them. Also IDK if the webview on an old Ubuntu-LTS is updated or not, so I think you can't really assume to have the latest version.

If Servo can provide a small, unified Webview for Tauri, that would be a nice alternative. However, Servo is severely lacking in supported features. So one might get a cross platform webview, that is bigger then using the system webview and likely has even less features. So I don't really see a lot of use cases for Servo with Tauri. Maybe embedded systems, where Servo will be the only webview installed?

[juxuanu]

I wonder if shipping Tauri apps with Servo in the same distributable is going to be bigger than shipping an Electron distributable (both standalone, with no dependency on system webview/electron)

[Mustafif Khan]

Love the Tauri project and seeing servo becoming an engine option is very exciting!

[Mathias]

I mean, thats the big question. Technologically embedding Servo is an interesting project. But if the size is about the same as electron, the use-case will reduce greatly.

[patrick1946]

This is good news. With more performant front-end frameworks and more lightweight alternatives to Electron, we can see a bright future for universal web/desktop apps.

Hopefully the simply develop a better UI framework which can cutoff the overhead. Something like slint or Qt for MCU.

[Mathias]

Hopefully the simply develop a better UI framework which can cutoff the overhead. Something like slint or Qt for MCU.

There is no way this will run on an MCU. (Sure MCUs come with hundreds of MHz today and you can attach heaps of RAM etc...didn't someone boot Linux on an Arduino?) This is for Systems with an operating system.

[User29]

Please help me to understand Servo. Is this engine a kind of lib that can be used in your own project so you don't have to reinvent the wheel (a browser engine) if you need some web browsing functionality? So would it be possible to write a new 'lynx/elinks' based on Servo? Or any program that has all the features of Firefox without the GUI?

I'm asking this, because last summer I was looking for a solution to 'dump' a whole fully rendered webpage from the memory into a html file from Firefox (or any modern browser) but there wasn't such an option. The best would be to dump it to PDF which was useless in my case. ('File > Save as...' ended up without the needed parts of the original HTML page, but because it was on my monitor, it was obviously somewhere in the RAM so I expected the browser that it has a way to dump it, like passing some command line parameters with the URL or something, but no).

[patrick1946]

There is no way this will run on an MCU. (Sure MCUs come with hundreds of MHz today and you can attach heaps of RAM etc...didn't someone boot Linux on an Arduino?) This is for Systems with an operating system.

Yes but the concept to compile down the UI so it simply only need to be linked instead of dynamically create it at runtime can work too with a OS. You still need to allocate graphic resources but that can be optimized too.