
Mozilla Servo alpha will be released in June - dumindunuwan
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.servo/dcrNW6389g4
======
pcwalton
To echo what Paul said, this will _not_ be a browser you will want to use as a
replacement for all your day-to-day browsing. If you try to, you won't end up
happy.

Web compatibility is a long road, and it's crucial for us to be able to know
what missing functionality is most important and the places where we need to
focus on performance the most. The purpose of the package is to help us find
and prioritize bugs and missing features. We want to know which sites are the
most broken (and, even more importantly, which missing features are breaking
those sites). From the Web developer side, we also want early feedback on use
cases that may be slow today, so that the browser engine can eventually become
a great experience for everyone.

~~~
yoodenvranx
> From the Web developer side, we also want early feedback on use cases that
> may be slow today

Have you ever tried Google+? In my experience this is one of the most
demanding pages out there and it is almost unusable in Firefox for me. The
only reasonable way for me to use it is to switch to Chrome. (Linux, cheap
Intel Celeron with 2.6 GHz)

~~~
kough
Even worse, Google Keep with ~3 years of notes. Actually unusable in a web
browser for me at this point - chrome, Safari, Firefox, doesn't matter. Trying
to figure out the best way to export all my notes. Sucks, because it's
fantastic on mobile, and the built in reminder features are really useful.
Anyone have a good mobile + webpage alternative?

~~~
btrask
Out of curiosity, how many notes? No suggestions, sorry.

~~~
kough
I would give you a count if I could. My guess is on the order of thousands,
but not tens of thousands. Seems like the browsers are trying to download
every single note I've ever created at once (from looking at the network
requests and seeing the huge amounts of data being transferred).

Also, just tried loading the site on a much faster internet connection and
everything worked, although text entry was slightly laggy on a new note. Still
couldn't figure out how to get a count of my notes though.

------
jerf
Congratulations to both the Servo and Rust team for making it this far. You
set out to slay not one, but two of the biggest dragons in all of software
engineering, _at the same time_ , and while you may not be done yet, you, uh,
err.... have the lance definitely sliding pretty far in and the dragons are
definitely noticing and quite upset?

Sorry. The metaphor kinda broke down there. Point is, congratulations.
Rust+Servo is one of the most absurdly ambitious projects I've seen in the
last twenty years, to make a new browser engine _and_ a new systems-level
language. The level of success achieved even to this point is astonishing. I
know the road is still long, but I wish you the best in finishing this
journey!

------
paulrouget
To be clear, this will be a very early release (nightly builds) of Servo with
a HTML UI (browser.html). You won't be able to replace your current browser
with Servo just yet :) … there's still a long way to go. The goal is to make
it easier for people to test Servo and file bugs.

~~~
ndesaulniers
Make it easy to file bugs from the UI then.

~~~
paulrouget
That's the plan :)

~~~
acdha
Do you have any advice for how quick we should be to report bugs? I just
noticed my old homepage[1] crashes webrender (not normal rendering) after
scrolling a bit and was wondering whether that kind of thing is worth
reporting or if the code is in such active work that it's not worth wasting
someone's time managing the issue.

1\. [http://chris.improbable.org](http://chris.improbable.org)

~~~
Manishearth
Please report it :)

If it's a known bug we'll just close it. If you want, see if you can find
dupes on the issue tracker before filing, but don't spend too much time doing
that.

~~~
acdha
Thanks – RUST_BACKTRACE was enough to turn up
[https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/9931](https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/9931).
I opened
[https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/10018](https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/10018)
as well.

------
gedrap
A year or so ago, I've read that servo project is fairly easy to contribute to
even if you have no prior rust knowledge, other than the core basics, and are
willing to learn it as you go. The reasoning was that there are tons of core
functionality missing, therefore there are plenty of low hanging fruits.

I was wondering, is it still true (or ever was true)?

~~~
Manishearth
(sorry, might have accidentally downvoted from mobile)

See [https://starters.servo.org/](https://starters.servo.org/)

This is still true. We're pretty good at creating easy issues, though there's
also a steady flow of newcomers so often they get snapped up quickly. A lot of
the low hanging fruit is gone, but with careful planning it's easy to create
more.

------
Sanddancer
Is there any chance we'll get a browser with support for discretionary access
controls in the render processes? Given that pretty much every OS supports
locking down rights processes have, it would be a big win, security-wise, if
the OS could catch anything the browser doesn't.

------
savanaly
Could someone in the know clarify for me what the difference is in aims of
this new Browser ("Servo") and Firefox? The Servo landing page said its aims
are

    
    
        Servo project aims to achieve better parallelism,
        security, modularity, and performance.
    

But aren't those the goals of every browser?

~~~
e1ven
Servo is a research project by Mozilla as a part of their Rust programming
language. It gives them a "real world" app to build in Rust, so they don't end
up doing ivory-tower designs that don't work well in real apps.

Despite the way some news articles might write about it, Mozilla does not
intend this to be a new browser for regular people - It's an extension of
their new language, and R&D.

Over time, Firefox may incorporate components written in Rust, potentially
including parts from Servo, but AFAIK there is no timeline for that.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Gecko is something of a pig. I find it hard to believe that Servo will be
developed and then thrown away as purely a research exercise. I suspect
Mozilla is hesitant to lay out a roadmap considering how young Rust is and how
long rendering engines take to write, but it seems to me that its likely Servo
will replace Gecko when its mature.

~~~
Manishearth
Note that not replacing Gecko with Servo doesn't mean that Servo will be
"thrown away", see
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295698)

------
stp-ip
Any plans to make the browser cache aware of cross domain resources? Basically
a hash based cache, where as long as the hash is valid it can be used from a
hash based caching pool. This could be integrated with SRI to reduce
unnecessary network load without compromising user privacy. Will not provide
complete privacy, but might reduce exposure to 3rd party CDNs.

If something like this is implemented, providing frequently used resources via
a plugin, privacy aware CDN or even a custom CDN similar to
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/decentraleyes/) would be possible.

------
bobajeff
I wonder if the other browser vendors are working on a similar parallel
browser engine? Perhaps using some custom version of Clang that applies Bjarne
Stroustrup's C++ Core Guidelines to errors/warnings.

~~~
kibwen
I don't remember the C++ Core Guidelines having anything to say about
parallelism, nor proposing any sort of lint or static analysis involving
concurrent code. Though I may be misremembering, it's a rather long document.

~~~
steveklabnik
Last thing they published still had a bit question mark around concurrency.

------
dkhenry
I am more interested to see how a major Rust project holds up when its attack
surface gets larger. So the question is when does Servo get added to the
Pwn2Own

~~~
bzbarsky
That's a political question, not a technical one. Things get added to Pwn2Own
when its sponsors (including, e.g. Google and Microsoft) push for them to be
added, as far as I can tell.

------
bhauer
Awesome. I've not been following it as closely as I should. Is there an ETA on
Windows builds? Or is it too early to say?

~~~
paulrouget
Support landed a month ago
([https://github.com/servo/servo/pull/9385](https://github.com/servo/servo/pull/9385)).
No nightly builds yet.

------
zobzu
interestingly its not using mercurial, bugzilla, etc. basically none of the
mozilla stuff

~~~
Manishearth
Mercurial isn't a mozilla thing. Firefox uses mercurial. A lot of other
Mozilla projects (Gaia, emscripten, shumway, Servo, Browser.html) use GitHub,
and others (Bugzilla) use Git directly (over gitolite or something).

We occasionally have discussions on whether or not to switch to Bugzilla.
Github has some limitations when it comes to organizing things; however it's
more newbie-friendly so there's a tradeoff.

------
BenoitP
What does he mean by meta bug?

~~~
robin_reala
A meta bug in Mozilla parlance is basically the same as epic. It’s a bug that
acts as a collection of bugs, that can be closed when all its dependencies are
closed but doesn’t have any direct work associated to itself.

------
shmerl
What about Firefox based on Servo?

~~~
cpeterso
Firefox (Gecko) is importing bits of Rust code from Servo, such as Servo's CSS
system: [https://bugzil.la/stylo](https://bugzil.la/stylo)

~~~
shmerl
Yeah, I mean full usage of Servo.

~~~
lambda
It's still much too early to say when and how this would work.

------
sonnyp
firefox.html not servo

~~~
capnrefsmmat
Server+Browser.html, so Servo running an HTML-based browser UI. (Instead of
XUL, as used by Firefox.)

