Servo Revival: 2023-2024
103 comments
·January 7, 2025aorth
jszymborski
FYI: I think their website indicates they pay the fewest fees on GitHub, so you may want to set up your donations there if anyone is still deciding between the two.
Sponsoring them was a no brainer for me :)
diggan
> I think their website indicates they pay the fewest fees on GitHub
The difference (https://servo.org/sponsorship/#donation-fees) between the donation going via GitHub/Microsoft and Open Collective (independent) is so small (96% VS ~91%) that I'd rather not centralize funding FOSS with someone who has kind of a shitty track record with it, like Microsoft.
Made more sense in the beginning of GitHub Sponsors when Microsoft was matching donations 2x, or whatever it was. But now? I don't feel like it makes much sense anymore.
Open Collective is a fully public organization, who lives and breathes FOSS.
jszymborski
Note that the fee for Open Collective depends on the amount you are donating, what card you use, and where you are from.
Servo would only see 85.6% of my 5 USD/mo donation as I'm from Canada. If I used PayPal, that number would go down to 81.2%.
I do agree that I'd prefer Open Collective, fees being equal/comparable.
mdaniel
Interesting, they also claim that they are the 2nd biggest contributors to Chromium after Google: https://bsky.app/profile/igalia.com/post/3lasylsguzs2f
jitl
Igalia is the real deal. Many companies that want bugs fixed or features added to web browsers hire Igalia to make those changes. They also maintain WebKit on Linux (gtk and wpe) https://planet.igalia.com/webkit/
LeFantome
They also employ the main dev for Chimera Linux:
elcritch
First I heard of it but Chimera sounds very interesting from an IoT / Embedded Linux perspective.
I've been looking for a while for Linux distro that's easy to build from scratch and customizable.
lawik
Yeah, been seeing their site a lot when setting up cog and weston for an embedded kiosk thing. Also met a bunch of them at the OpennSource Summit in Vienna.
Every now and then you run into these small-ish expert consultancies that actually are the force behind a lot of open source.
They seem awesome.
topspin
That's interesting. One wonders what their future looks like after Google divests Chrome. Good to see that the knowledge base isn't entirely confined within Google.
barkingcat
Igalia is self directed and one of the few organizations I can see taking on technical leadership of the entire chromium project if/when Google divests Chrome.
The technical talent at Igalia runs deep.
qingcharles
Chrome will still be the #1 browser, and corps will still want features added, so they'll be good for a while I think.
mmastrac
Yeah. I got to see Andy Wingo's work on a V8 feature and it was an impressive piece of work.
barkingcat
Igalia is a huge force in open source
They are self directed contractors.
They are also responsible for huge portions of chromium and fundimental/base opensource libraries.
If you can think of an open source library, it's highly likely Igalia had funded some development or bug fixes.
int0x29
They haven't abandoned it but that title makes it sound like they have.
benatkin
I think that's intended. This indicates that there's a possibility it's default dead.
> Servo is a huge project. To keep it alive and making progress, we need continuous funding on a bigger scale than crowdfunding can generally accomplish. If you’re interested in contributing to the project or sponsoring the development of specific functionality, please contact us at join@servo.org or igalia.com/contact.
> Let’s hope we can walk this path together and keep working on Servo for many years ahead.
rswail
Except that paulg's essay was about startups, not about an OSS project.
Servo has no "customers" as such. It has potential future project users and there may be a support/development economic return for those users to fund further work.
It's very similar to Rust the language. Rust itself is not a startup or a company product.
The economics are completely different.
leoc
I assume that they're hoping that the EU or an EU member-state steps up; or failing that, maybe a (probably-US) nonprofit or billionaire donor, perhaps a Laurene Powell Jobs or MacKenzie Scott type. To be clear, something like this very probably should happen. I'm heading to social media to shout into the void about this: dear reader, you should probably do this too, and use any other means you might have to steer the attention of decision-makers towards this.
That said, in the longer term the solution to the WWW"'s Too Big To Fork problem surely has to involve getting much more of the "specification" expressed precisely in declarative specification languages, so as to greatly reduce the handwork involved in generating a half-decent implementation.
striking
A lot of private funding at these consultancies actually comes from pet features. Some company says "hmm, we sure do rely on XYZ feature a lot, would be nice if it were faster", they throw some money at a consultancy like Igalia, and then it becomes faster for everyone. No need for a big pot all at once, though I'm sure that'd be really nice.
LeFantome
What we need are multiple implementations, all giving feedback on the spec:
alex_duf
I don't think a single big donation is a good idea. We're so used to seeing extreme wealth we don't event question it.
Once a big donation is given, you get to wonder what sort of influence that person (willingly or not) has had on the project. A much better model is a large amount of small donations, the incentive becomes to serve the maximum amount of these people.
Brian_K_White
s/default/defacto
mappu
No, "default dead" is VC-speak for a business that relies on runway to operate rather than being profitable.
benatkin
s/$/\//
cbarrick
s/defacto/de facto/
Vinnl
The article was first posted in 2024, which made it feel less so at the time :)
Should probably have a "(2024)" appended to the title.
nar001
Hopefully they don't! I wanna see where this goes, we need more browser engines
shmerl
Any plans to move WebRender to using Vulkan instead of OpenGL? The latter is really not well suited for proper parallelism.
I hope Servo will eventually replace Chromium in QtWebEngine and other similar cases.
benatkin
There's an active attempt to make a DOM rendering engine in Rust using these APIs. https://github.com/DioxusLabs/blitz
shmerl
That looks like its own thing, so not going to benefit Servo and Firefox if I understand correctly? Since they are using WebRender.
nicoburns
Correct. There are some shared components (notably Stylo, the style system), but Webrender is not one of them. Webrender is still maintained primarily by Mozilla as part of Firefox. If they have any plans to move to Vulkan/Metal/DX10/wgpu then I haven't heard of them.
It might be possible for Servo to go down the same route as Blitz and have pluggable rendering backends. If so then the wgpu-based renderering library we are using (Vello [0] - which is an exciting project in it's own right) could be an option. Servo is actively looking at potentially using this library to implement Canvas2D.
null
norman784
Wouldn't be better for them to use wgpu instead?
pjmlp
Given that wgpu is based on WebGPU, it is kind of limited by a graphics API designed for the Web sandbox and managed languages.
shmerl
Not sure, I don't see an issue with using Vulkan directly, but I think WebRender developers did plan to use wgpu at some point.
cies
All this discussion (hate) on the effort to "rewrite in Rust"...
At the same time these projects are soooo promissing (to me -- it may be purely subjective).
By these projects I mean:
Servo and Verso
Redox OS
System76's COSMIC Desktop's EPOCH
RipGrep
Deno
Zig
tree-sitter
And lots of web dev libs and frameworks: Actix, Leptos, Dioxus...
Currently a web dev stack can run on Redox OS and use significantly less resources than Alpine! (and this stack has not even had the years of tuning Alpine had)
kragen
Polars, a Rust replacement for Pandas.
Rewriting things in Rust is a reasonable thing to do. I think the hate is for people who criticize existing software for being written in C on the grounds that hypothetically someone could rewrite them in Rust.
"I rewrote SQLite in Rust" would be praiseworthy (assuming it's true). "Why don't you rewrite SQLite in Rust?" is trolling.
ivolimmen
I took a look at COSMIC and it really looks nice. I am not interest in it because it is written in Rust but it simply looks nice and the window management also looks promising. I hope to run it on my main machine soon.
LeFantome
I have been running COSMIC on my laptop and really enjoying it. It is only going to get better from Here.
alraj
Why is Zig here?
cies
Shit, should have been Zed. The editor.
actionfromafar
It would have been funny to suggest rewriting Zig in Rust. :)
WD-42
Of all projects for Mozilla, the supposed champions of the web, to abandon, it still blows my mind that they chose Servo to be the one to lay off the entire team for.
dralley
HN: "Mozilla has too many side projects that don't make the browser better"
Also HN: "Mozilla should spend more than a decade and tens of millions of dollars on a brand new browser engine that has no hope of replacing Gecko before it reaches 100% compatibility with a spec thousands (tens of thousands?) of lines long, not to mention the kind of "quirks" you see with websites in the wild, while they already lag behind Google with the browser engine they already have."
People like cool R&D projects, and that's understandable - I like Servo too. But the fact that it was really cool doesn't compensate for the fact that it was not going to be production-ready any time soon and in that light it's understandable why it was cancelled. While some parts of Servo ended up being so successful that they were merged into Firefox, a lot of what remained only in Servo (and not in Firefox) was nowhere close.
The layout component was by far the least mature of any part of Servo at the time (unlike Stylo and WebRender, I mean) and in fact it was going through the early stages of a brand-new rewrite of that component at the time the project was cancelled, partly because the experimental architecture ended up not being very suitable.
demurgos
> that has no hope of replacing Gecko before it reaches 100% compatibility with a spec thousands (tens of thousands?) of lines long
When Servo was still managed by Mozilla, they were able to merge some components incrementally into the Firefox. Most famously, Stylo and WebRender were first developed in Servo. They could have kept Servo for experimentation and merge parts incrementally.
It may also have enabled better embedding supporting which is a weak point of Firefox compared to Chrome; which is a long-term solution to remain relevant.
dralley
I covered that. Sure, Stylo and WebRender were successful enough that they made it into Firefox, but the Layout component was very much not. Servo was in the middle of a clean-slate rewrite of the layout component because the initial architecture chosen in 2013 wasn't very good.
The CSS engine and rendering engine are a lot easier to swap out than the remaining parts.
Again, I get why people like Servo, but "in 10 years, maybe we'll be able to take on Electron" isn't that great of a value proposition for a huge R&D project by a company already struggling to remain relevant with their core projects.
WD-42
True, I guess investing in the future viability of your core product doesn’t fit with how modern corporations are run.
They should just keep launching bookmarking and vpn services that might make money RIGHT NOW.
dralley
Does anybody argue that Google is negligent for not doing a complete rewrite of Blink, rather than doing the same incremental software development as everyone else? Did they suffer from their choice to use WebKit in the very beginning rather than do their own thing?
IshKebab
I agree. Pretty much the main distinguishing feature of Firefox is that it doesn't use WebKit/Blink. Crazy of them to discontinue working on their own engine's future, especially when it was already yielding results.
I'm trying Firefox on Android at the moment and it's noticeably less snappy than Chrome. I wonder if Servo would have changed that.
soganess
I am always in bizarro world when I read comments like this. I swear I perceive firefox for android to feel snappier and smoother than chrome.
To be clear, I am not trying to claim you are wrong! It is the common wisdom that chrome is faster on android. But I swear, scrolling and page loading just feels faster on firefox. My only guess is the adblocker, but I think firefox is faster than brave, so who knows.
I wonder if other have a similar experience and can shed some light on the situation?
IshKebab
I just double checked by closing all tabs, killing the browser and then loading Hacker News. It's about 0.5s on Chrome and 1s on Firefox (roughly). That's a big difference.
Firefox is probably faster for ad-heavy sites, but it definitely isn't for sites without obtrusive ads.
Zardoz84
Using uBlock Origin makes wonders. Chrome could be faster, but isn't fast enough to render all the ads shit stuff that are on many webs.
throwaway48476
Firefox on android is a million times faster than chrome because it has an ad blocker.
IshKebab
Not all sites have egregious ads. Chrome is faster for those.
usrnm
Why? They already have their own browser engine, what would they gain by creating another one? It's a browser company, not a Rust promotion company, from this point of view the decision was completely logical.
bpye
Many components from Servo (like WebRender) ended up being useful in Firefox. That alone seems like a pretty reasonable motivation to continue?
usrnm
No, it doesn't? It shows that Gecko can be updated and modernised without the need for a complete rewrite.
dralley
It's a lot easier to swap out the renderer or the CSS engine for a new one than it is the whole core of the browser engine.
Mozilla decided that replacing Gecko as-is was not reasonably likely to actually happen, and that further efforts towards Servo would be better made by continuing to evolve Gecko.
torginus
This. Especially since it's pretty much supposed to be Rust's flagship project.
IshKebab
To be fair, it wasn't really by the time they abandoned it.
torginus
Still, I think Rust was designed for the style and scale of application that a Web Browser is. Foundational, but not kernel level, highly complex, with a wide feature set, performance is important (but not the most important) and high reliability/maintainability and quality is expected.
Building these kinds of apps was commonplace in the 90s/early 2000s: photo editing apps, word processors, IDEs, 3D modeling software etc. Maybe RDBMS count as well.
In practice Rust is mostly used by web people to gain clout - rewriting microservices, which are usually <10k, but very rarely above 100k LOC, and were originally written in a very slow language, such as Python or Ruby.
Had these projects started out in an uncool, but performant language, like Java, there'd have been very little reasonable justification for these Rust rewrites.
Certhas
Honestly though: Why? Large chunks of the most important servo work is in Firefox now. Nobody else maintains even one web engine. What is the importance for the open web of Moz developing two?
null
cabirum
Mozilla could run out of money in the middle of engine rewrite, see also: Netscape[1]. I think they just decided to play safe.
[1]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
LeFantome
Yes, since Firefox IS Netscape, they have some experience with this.
peterfirefly
[flagged]
Oh this is nice to hear. It's always pleasant to read updates about Servo. I didn't know they started accepting donations on Open Collective and GitHub sponsors last year https://servo.org/blog/2024/03/12/sponsoring-servo/. I'm happy to contribute something.