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Mozilla Announces Layoffs, Renews Focus on Firefox
(www.omgubuntu.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2024
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I'd never heard of Servo before this, but judging from the website it's nowhere near a GUI offering. The work they're doing on the engine looks solid (to me as not-a-developer) but it's a telltale sign that there are no UI screenshots on their landing page. So, not an alternative to Firefox yet.
Because, as pointed in the page, Servo is being developed as a(n embeddable) Rendering Engine, not as a full blown end user Browser.
Its alternatives are not Chrome, Safari or Firefox, but Webkit, Blink and Gecko
There's an example GUI called Servoshell, but it is more of a testing ground and example on how to embed the engine in an app than a serious alternative to anything currently in the market.
Already this kind of work is difficult and daunting. Adding to it a full GUI would make it completely impossible for the current size and financial backing Servo has.
Big words aside it just means that Servo wants to be only one of the parts that compose a real browser: the one that takes HTML, Javascript, WASM and translates them into the things you see on your monitor. All the user facing functionality are left to the devs of the app that embed it.
Thanks for the big word elaboration! 👍
While it's not an alternative right now, I think Servo's focus on being embeddable might help it in the long run. A big issue with Gecko is that it was difficult, if not impossible to embed. It'd be nice to see something like Vivaldi that runs on Servo.
Oh, that's fair. I'm not complaining about the work being put into a new browser engine, and there is definitely space for improvement over the ones we have.
Vivaldi, though? I'd vastly prefer an open source browser, and maybe one with less baggage than Vivaldi has — but I'll look forward to any GUI implementation of Servo, when and if, etc.
I was more talking about Vivaldi feature-wise, FWIW. There's features I'd like from Vivaldi that don't have a close equivalent to Firefox, not even from its forks (tab tiling's my go-to example), and maybe in the distant future, there'd be a browser like it running on Servo.
@Flaky @halm be nice if you could just essentially plug-in engines and swap them out etc
in theory they are all supposed to support the same standards
Hmm. Now there's an idea for developers. Some kind of modular compatibility standard.
@Flaky @halm Vivaldi design is _strongly_ reminiscent of Mozilla SeaMonkey (antecedent Netscape Navigator) with a dose of old Opera.
Obviously not. Building a modern browser engine from scratch is an immense undertaking, so it's definitely possible that it will never be usable as a replacement for every day webbrowsing. But for now I won't give up hope :)