Mozilla & Samsung Develop "Servo" Browser Engine

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla & Samsung Develop "Servo" Browser Engine

A research project between Mozilla and Samsung engineers has led to the development of Servo, a new web-browser engine designed around modern hardware and today's web-browsing needs...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTM0MjI

[brosis]

In Rust we trust

Should? ve fixed slow libpango rendering issues, that make videoplayback and scroll speed on any *nix very slow, but no.

They work with Samsungs, who proven themself to be egoistic we-don?t-care-about-floss types.
Probably want FirefoxOS to use that engine on Samsung hardware, but they will not do it - as Google Android is more adopted and Ubuntu phone is more full-linux and open.

Mozilla became proprietary-windows-1st-priority-loving developer-don?t-caring lying all-about-marketing egoists recently.

[plonoma]

Strange direction they are taking.
There was the electrolysis project a while back where the idea was to have one process per tab.
They cancelled that, too bad they did but now the layout engine Servo seems to be a new take on multiprocessing, multi-threading. (Go Thread pool approach)

They really should take a look at responsiveness issues.

Not sure if the new language is going to do very well. Especially when porting stuff to more than x86-64.

[ciplogic]

Strange direction they are taking.
There was the electrolysis project a while back where the idea was to have one process per tab.
They cancelled that, too bad they did but now the layout engine Servo seems to be a new take on multiprocessing, multi-threading. (Go Thread pool approach)

They really should take a look at responsiveness issues.

Not sure if the new language is going to do very well. Especially when porting stuff to more than x86-64.

If you are afraid that Mozilla doesn't care about responsiveness, there is an ongoing effort for this: Project Snappy.
Here are the developer's blog updates: http://taras.glek.net/ Try using Aurora (the alpha) and you will find that they got better.

About Rust, I agree that this should be the way to go for a big codebase. C++ is nasty to work with, I have more respect for Java (or C#) but in this era there is a deep need to have safe constructs in the language by default. Rust does just this: gives immutability by default and many things that are great to have. I know that it means 5 years to see it alive but who cares, every research project pushes the boundaries and will give if is successful better software for every of us.

Electrolysis is worse from my perspective than Rust: is much better to enforce the code at the language level than: if it breaks, we will fix it via sandboxing.

[liam]

Strange direction they are taking.
There was the electrolysis project a while back where the idea was to have one process per tab.
They cancelled that, too bad they did but now the layout engine Servo seems to be a new take on multiprocessing, multi-threading. (Go Thread pool approach)

They really should take a look at responsiveness issues.

Not sure if the new language is going to do very well. Especially when porting stuff to more than x86-64.

e10s hasn't been cancelled, it's been folded into onging efforts with performance and stablity (snappy and supersnappy).
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Performance/Snappy
http://blog.mozilla.org/tglek/category/snappy/
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=718121

So, supersnappy looks like a bunch of threadpools that exist within the chrome, or independent content/js(so one pool, or constellation as they call it, per tab).
It looks like there's only one blocker left on this, so, shouldn't be long now

[bwat47]

In Rust we trust

Should? ve fixed slow libpango rendering issues, that make videoplayback and scroll speed on any *nix very slow, but no.

They work with Samsungs, who proven themself to be egoistic we-don?t-care-about-floss types.
Probably want FirefoxOS to use that engine on Samsung hardware, but they will not do it - as Google Android is more adopted and Ubuntu phone is more full-linux and open.

Mozilla became proprietary-windows-1st-priority-loving developer-don?t-caring lying all-about-marketing egoists recently.

The smooth scrolling in the newly released firefox 20 is a big improvemnt over 19, and is wonderfully smooth for me in linux, smoother than any other browser I've used. I've also had no problems with video playback.

[Nobu]

Not sure if the new language is going to do very well. Especially when porting stuff to more than x86-64.

It uses LLVM, so it should be supported at least on ARM relatively easily (in addition to x86(-64)). As far as other arch's, I guess time will tell. Will probably be a while. :-/

[Ericg]

This announcement said a few things to me....

1) Mozilla doesnt have the attitude of "We wrote gecko we're gonna use gecko!" like MS does with Trident. They're open to exploring other options and ideas, just like Opera was.

2) They don't believe that a single engine for browsers is good-- otherwise they would've picked WebKit

3) They're looking to test and push boundaries, hence Rust and not some other language.

4) I love Mozilla even more than i used to I'm glad to see that they are still experimenting and trying new things. If nothing else, if Servo falls through, they can always go back to Gecko, the code doesnt disappear just because its not being used, and the web browser world got a bit of research and development for future endeavors.

I wish Mozilla all the best, and I'm looking forward to testing this in the future.

[Ibidem]

In Rust we trust

Should? ve fixed slow libpango rendering issues, that make videoplayback and scroll speed on any *nix very slow, but no.

They work with Samsungs, who proven themself to be egoistic we-don?t-care-about-floss types.
Probably want FirefoxOS to use that engine on Samsung hardware, but they will not do it - as Google Android is more adopted and Ubuntu phone is more full-linux and open.

Mozilla became proprietary-windows-1st-priority-loving developer-don?t-caring lying all-about-marketing egoists recently.

It's a port to Android on ARM that they're announcing.
And it's designed to use GLUT for rendering, if I understand the notes right.

[liam]

This announcement said a few things to me....

1) Mozilla doesnt have the attitude of "We wrote gecko we're gonna use gecko!" like MS does with Trident. They're open to exploring other options and ideas, just like Opera was.

2) They don't believe that a single engine for browsers is good-- otherwise they would've picked WebKit

3) They're looking to test and push boundaries, hence Rust and not some other language.

4) I love Mozilla even more than i used to I'm glad to see that they are still experimenting and trying new things. If nothing else, if Servo falls through, they can always go back to Gecko, the code doesnt disappear just because its not being used, and the web browser world got a bit of research and development for future endeavors.

I wish Mozilla all the best, and I'm looking forward to testing this in the future.

I would agree with 1), but they would be stupid to drop gecko as it might be the most compatible html renderer out there (don't forget all those years of ie6, where they worked hard to develop compatibility for "optimized" sites...that should all still exist, and is something webkit hasn't had to deal with as much).
For 2) I think they've actually said exactly that. If there is only one engine, there would be little point to the w3c. It would be the de facto standard.
I've really felt of rebirth of moz luv lately. FFOS, asm.js, pancake (though ios ONLY! ), webmaker, and so much more. They are really committed to an open, first class web.