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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 will pay for a modern, fast, memory efficient ad blocking browser. It literally needs to have literally 2 features on top of "rendering shit correctly". Ad blocking. Tabs. While I'm not the sharpest tool in the toolshed Might I suggest ad blocking not be written in Javascript. Make it part of core functionality.
I have reached a point in my life where not only have I stopped pirating expensive stuff but am tired of dealing with "Free" stuff that is near useless. My time is how do you say it... "valuable" and dealing with all of the feature bloat that has crept into every browser on the market is wasting it. And no, not as a 'service' or subscription.
I hand you money. You hand me a browser that works like I want it. And if you come up with a new browser with Features+1 and I want Features+1 I will pay for that too. I don't need an SSH client. Or 'apps' that let me play Angry Fruit Jeweled. And I really don't want something written in C that interprets something in XML to render something through Javascript to display HTML5.
Multimedia aside, the 2016 web shouldn't feel slower on my 25Mbit connection with an 4 core i7 than I remember it being on my .056Mbit connection and my single core 68k. Hell you could host an IRC server with hundreds of thousands of users with as much CPU as it takes to stay up on 5-6 Facebook 'discussion' open in separate tabs.
(That goes for a 2016 E-mail client as well).
How exactly is Servo supposed to get any traction within the browser market?
Riding on Firefox's coattails is the obvious way, but even that doesn't make any sense. Firefox's share of the market has been falling like crazy. The latest stats show that Firefox has maybe 7% of the browser market across all versions of it and across all of the platforms it supports.
If Servo is only entering alpha this summer, then it'll be years before it's fully usable. By that time Firefox could very well have almost no share of the market, especially after their upcoming extension changes which may very well be a total disaster given how disruptive they have the potential to be. These extension changes alone could be what will push Firefox well below 5% of the market.
The other browsers won't be standing still, either. Chrome, Edge, Safari, Vivaldi, and Opera will continue to evolve. So not only do the Servo devs need to catch up with these competitors, but they'll need to surpass them, too! If they don't surpass their competitors, then nobody will have any reason to switch to Servo.
Then there are the unpredictable scenarios that could happen. Let's suppose that Microsoft open sources Edge, and releases it for Linux and OS X. We've already seen them open source a lot of the .NET code recently so it could support those platforms. Hell, IE used to run on Macs years ago. So it's not unreasonable to think that it could happen. An open source and portable release of Edge would absolutely destroy Firefox, and likely Servo, too. Edge is quite a good browser, and there are many OS X and Linux users who would love to us it if only it supported their platforms. The few stragglers who still use Firefox could very well ditch it in an instant.
All in all, the future looks extremely bleak for Firefox and Servo. There's nothing compelling about them that entices users to switch to them, and to continue using them.