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Mozilla's New Servo Browser Will Hit Alpha In June 2016 (softpedia.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has announced it is releasing the first alpha versions of its Servo browser this upcoming June. The project uses browser.html for the browser's UI and Rust for the browser's core. There's a similarity between how Microsoft launched Spartan (Edge) and how Mozilla is launching Servo now. While many might think Mozilla is sneakily working on a Firefox replacement, Mozilla has also invested quite a lot in Firefox these days, like WebExtensions and e10s, and it may be more plausible that Servo might slowly be integrated in Firefox to replace Gecko, rather than replace Firefox altogether, like Microsoft did with Edge to IE.
I tried Servo recently. Holy shit, was I ever disappointed.
There's so much hype about Servo on Hacker News and Reddit, so I thought that maybe it was going to be usable, even considering it's a relatively young project. I was totally wrong!
It has essentially no usable UI of any sort, at least when I built it from source recently. You run it from the command line and tell it what URL to fetch and render. Maybe this is excusable since it's just a rendering engine, and not an entire browser, but it's still disappointing. Maybe there is a UI for it, but I didn't find it included with whatever I'd built from source.
It would kinda render some sites. Many did not work well at all. Those that kinda worked made me feel like I was back in 1997.
It would also crash on a lot of sites for me. I was going to file a bug report, but it looked like somebody else had filed one much earlier but it had not yet been fixed. I also noticed that Servo had a lot of open bugs in general. This lack of action made me very uncomfortable.
Servo needs a fucking massive amount of work to be comparable even to old versions of Firefox or Chrome. I don't see how they can say there will be an alpha grade release this summer. Based on my experience, their engine is a couple of decades behind the times.
Maybe the Servo release process will be like Rust 1.0's was, where they say it'll be ready in a few months, then it isn't, then they say it'll be ready in a few months, then it isn't, then they say again that it'll be ready in a few months, and it isn't, and finally they say it's "ready" but what they release is far from being ready.
You can also fork this story to your own version of /. instead of complaining about all the complaining about Firefox.