Mozilla's Servo Engine Is Crazy Fast Compared To Gecko

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Mozilla's Servo Engine Is Crazy Fast Compared To Gecko

Yesterday an update was shared concerning the latest state of Google's Blink Engine fork of WebKit. While not receiving much mainstream attention, Mozilla's Servo Engine is starting to come together as a much more performant and advanced layout engine compared to Gecko. Next year we might see some Servo action within Firefox OS and on Android...

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

[souenzzo]

What's the difference between servo and gecko?/Why not commit this to gecko?

And how about this samsung logo?

[89c51]

And how about this samsung logo?

Samsung engineers work on Servo.

[cb88]

What's the difference between servo and gecko?/Why not commit this to gecko?

And how about this samsung logo?

Servo is written in a different language, namely Rust which is implemented on top of LLVM. Secondly Gekco is *MASSIVE* it is a good time for a complete rewrite which is basically what Servo is... also servo doesn't use the Gecko API as far as I know it uses the webkit APIs so its basically a drop in replacement for webkit. Of course I imagine there are gocchas. Keep in mind Webkit isn't terrible hard to write a custom browser with... whereas Geko is pretty hard and API breaks plague browsers other than Firefox causing long delays in upgrades (Camelon, and to a lesser extent Seamonkey, Palemoon etc...)

[cb88]

5min limit!

Let me qualify my previous statement... it isn't using the webkit API directly.

It is using the Chromium Embedded Framework.... which is a stable embedding wrapper for webkit.

[przemoli]

That's good news.

Unfortunately, 4 cores on Android is not that common. On the web when there is high pressure for speed but not for throughput even less?

Activating sleeping core is time & energy consuming process. So either cores are always online or it wont work that well.

Webpage loading is single time task. Then for long period there is noting to do. (Moving cursor do not count!)

On the other hand that single core score is really promising
Also can we have some JS heavy tests too?

[ua=42]

One main difference is that Servo is multi-thread while geko (and firefox in general) is single threaded (which is why if a page locks up, the entire browser locks up ).

[cb88]

That's good news.

Unfortunately, 4 cores on Android is not that common. On the web when there is high pressure for speed but not for throughput even less?

Activating sleeping core is time & energy consuming process. So either cores are always online or it wont work that well.

Webpage loading is single time task. Then for long period there is noting to do. (Moving cursor do not count!)

On the other hand that single core score is really promising
Also can we have some JS heavy tests too?

Bought a brand new ZTE Open C on Ebay.. $50 has 2 cores so it would benefit Its hard to find a phone without at least 2 cores flagship phones often have 8 cores. Runs Android 4.4.2 better than my 2011 Xperia Mini Pro ran Gingerbread.

And as you noticed its faster even on a single core... probably because the way it divides and conquors rendering is more cache efficient than how current browser engines do it. Also keep in mind web pages with dynamic content are alot more common now... and will make use of multiple cores for sure through web workers and now through servo leveraging multiple cores for the entire stack instead of just a little bit in the JS engine which is the limit of current browsers.

[Pajn]

Also can we have some JS heavy tests too?

Servo isn't a JS VM so that would be pretty uniteresting.
The supported way is to pair it with SpiderMonkey but as it uses webkit APIs I guess it would be possible to pait it with V8 as well with some work.

[cb88]

One main difference is that Servo is multi-thread while geko (and firefox in general) is single threaded (which is why if a page locks up, the entire browser locks up ).

You'd be happy to now that the alpha version of firefox has code to fix that ... its called Electrolysis.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox/Multiprocess_Firefox

The bug tracker:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=516752