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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.
You can already see a preview of what Mozilla will be aiming for with Servo here:
https://www.google.com/chrome/
Seriously though, we desperately need a new browser choice. I have no confidence in Mozilla and only use Firefox because it's the least bad browser. Once Mozilla replace the extension model and all the extensions stop working I really don't know what I'll use.
Are there any promising browsers in the works? One that isn't developed by complete fucktards?
Shouldn't they call it browserjs? It seems like it is built in JavaScript not HTML like it claims.
Yes. As an added bonus it creates 10,000 more exploits for your favorite Russians to use. It is truly an open browser.
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).
Are they giving up on Firefox?
What about Seamonkey?
I often find it remarkable that many people on slashdot are very happy to configure their linux to the Nth degree, diving in to the kernel to turn this option off, and editing system settings so that this thing is on, yet they moan about a feature which is 1) easily hidden by customizing the menus, meaning you never have to think about it, and 2) can be disabled in about:config.
I get it, it's a feature you don't like, and yes, it was stealthily put on to you as a user as a means of Firefox making money. But if you don't like it, don't use it, and the money won't make it to Mozilla. They will soon realize, as they did with ads on the new tab page, that it's not the revenue stream of their dreams, and it will go away.
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.
I expect to see a few features added:
Wholesale support for encrypted media extensions. Can't have those pesky add-ons removing those full page, bandwidth gobbling Flash ads.
Disable support for the user to adjust sound volume while an ad is playing.
Active disabling of adblocking technologies.
Active disablement of NoScript, Ghostery, and other privacy-protecting items.
Ability to generate a unique ID for every browser installed which is tied to the machine (similar to how Yik Yak grabs as much info as it can to individualize) and hand to advertisers for better browser fingerprinting.
A "wink wink, nudge nudge" approach to insecure browser add-ons, allowing malvertising firms to gain more territory.
A hastily invented mechanism of keeping pages, add-ons, and other stuff separate, so one rogue process can seize the web browser's entire context, then have unfettered access as the user.
I think Gopher is more important than that stuff. The World Wide Web is just a fad and will never truly take off.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
They are just dumping all of the effort of those who worked to make Firefox popular.
BTW, do you remember when Firefox was a 4mb download, and not just the downloader?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
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.
Good heavens, there sure is a lot of "old man yells at cloud" in the comments so far, given all the complaining about Firefox. Which the story isn't even about, I should note. I may have missed something, but isn't Firefox open-source/free/libre software? Couldn't you make yourselves an un-"ruined" version or just go back to an older release from an archive rather than complain incessantly about how Mozilla isn't working to give you the browser you want rather than making the browser they want (since you're not paying them or providing them with any other benefit that I can see). I'm glad they are finding motivation to continue their work from somewhere, because if I had a community/user base like this, I would flat out quit. Go back to gopher and usenet, for pete's sake.
If they allow me to customise the behaviour of the address bar that may already be one point for it. Just put me in the camp which likes to see the whole URL.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Yeah. Right.
On the bright side, they're rewriting the engine, which is long overdue. I think they're still using 15 year old code from Netscape.
Ah you are one of those "doubt everything in front of you because you think it makes you look smart" skeptics. Rust bakes memory safety into the type system. Apparently rather than learn or understand anything you will just spew contrarian statements with no evidence, thought, arguments or logic.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
support for OpenH264 codex
The OpenH264 codex is a big improvement over the scroll of Theora.
The only issue with Pocket is that I don't know what it does. "Saving a web page" to the cloud : is it a bookmark, or is it archiving that works the same as "File / Save"? What is saved exactly? Can I save a big bunch of pages on a desktop to take them offline on a smartphone/tablet?
I won't sign up for an account with who-know-are-these-guys to find out.
I didn't complain until they announced they were ending the old extension model in favor of chrome's. I hate many changes made in firefox but I dealt with them with a combination of changing settings and extensions. The powerful extension system let me run the browser how I wanted. Once that's gone it will just be "that bloated chrome clone with extra features that I hate".