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Mozilla Releases First Build of Servo, Its Next-Generation Browser Engine (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader writes: As promised, Mozilla has released the first Nightly build of Servo, its new browser engine. This is the first tech demo of Servo, which Jack Moffitt, Servo project lead at Mozilla, described to us a few months ago as "a next-generation browser engine focused on performance and robustness." Packages for macOS and Linux are available to download from here: Servo Developer Preview Downloads. Mozilla promises that Windows and Android packages will be available "soon." And because this is Mozilla, you can check out all the code yourself over on GitHub.
Where does Moz get it's money from? Without Google as a sugar daddy I don't see how they pay their developers?
It's a re implementation of Webkit in Rust 2.0.
If it can stop choking on shitty flash ad panels I'll be happy.
Crow T. Robot is so jealous...
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I've just tried it. It has left a very bad impression on me. I know this is an early release, but even for that it is pretty bad. The UI, what little there is, is very glitchy. A lot of the sites I tried, even simple ones, had bad rendering glitches. This feels very amateurish for something from Moz, even if it's still new and experimental. My expectations were low to begin with but it underwhelmed me nonetheless.
Most of these newer languages force programmers to do things in ways that make them more secure, so that today's crop of programmers can find newer and more creative ways to program security holes into software.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4mEgZMxsWA
Rust does have a purpose: the power of C++ but with built-in safety mechanisms.
"Just program C++ well and it will be safe," the critics say. Unfortunately in the real world that doesn't happen often enough because not everybody is a flawless programmer. And so, what's wrong with making the tool safer?
Also, in what way are they "forcing the world onto it"? Is somebody holding a gun to your head and making you use it?
Build your damn software in a standard, mature language
what language would that be? C and C++ are not "mature", even now the compilers are still not implementing the current spec
The Linux kernel and many other complex programs make extensive use of "non-standard" features in compilers, what good is "standard"
Summary of the above post: Alpha version is buggy and unstable. That means it sucks. All good programs are bugless and stable from version 0.0.1.
Less hipsters, that's all.
I see several complaints about the UI. Servo is a rendering engine, not a full browser. The UI included for it I'm sure is just a basic slapped-together UI just to get it functional enough to browse sites. Don't expect much from that UI.
As for rendering incompletely, well it's an early build. Give it time. It already passes the Acid2 test and it will get better with time. None of the current major browsers passed Acid2 when it came out.
While I generally have a positive opinion historically of Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox I find them to be a little two faced at times.
They claim prominently on their website to care about privacy yet make it extraordinarily difficult to configure the browser not to continuously call home. Even when you follow their expansive instructions it still doesn't stop it and the sheer volume of reasons or excuses implemented in the browser and enabled by default is comically mind boggling.
Then there is the matter of "We follow the Rust Code of Conduct." which essentially codifies coddling, censorship and intolerance.
It is nice to see them doing *something* about the ease of discovering exploits in their current codebase. If it works without downsides it will be awesome for users.
Fewer.
Wasn't that what they promised when the Netscape browser was Open Sourced to become Mozilla?
If Rust is better than C++ then why is Servo still so immature even after 4+ years of development? How is Servo ever supposed to compete with Blink or WebKit or Gecko at this slow pace?
I was going to ream you for choosing your web browser based on its underlying programming language. After all, if you're not having to interface with it as a plugin-developer, what does it matter?
Then I remembered: security. Relying on a human programmer to get every memory allocation and deallocation right every single time has proven to be a security nightmare for the past 20 years the internet has been accessible by the general public. The more safety checks you can push down into the underlying platform/language/runtime/API, the fewer security holes you'll have.
And if you need proof that your standard, mature languages aren't cutting it, look no further than Symantec's recent debacle. If kernel programmers at the world's premiere security firm can't get it right, who can?
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
What good is a secure browser if it can't render web sites well? I tried this release of Servo and it is very immature. Security is important but so is usability. A secure browser that isn't usable is useless, I'm afraid to say!
I hope it can figure out where the Ads are going and how big they are. Then, stop the page from jumping around as they load.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Fewlesser.
Just saying, as far as desktop linux is concerned I'm not sold on "smooth", "accelerated" and "animated" UI yet.
The overhead as well as risks of something going wrong defeat it IMO, unless you have a fast CPU with built-in or recent well supported GPU.
So I'm grudgingly waiting for Wayland of all things, hopefully with good drivers for most cards (nouveau drivers are excused, use them as best effort depending on your hardware/software), hoping it actually works at reducing CPU overhead too, leaving aside desktop environment (xfce etc.) support.
If Servo runs well on unaccelerated graphics or whatever basic 2D acceleration is, then great. If Servo is useful even on VESA driver, remote display, virtual machine then great too.
What's with the Dogecoin mascot? Did they really think nobody would notice? They can't even come up with their own damn mascot now?
Probably because they were inventing Rust at the same time they were using it to write Servo.
Stannis? I thought you were dead.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
As Mozilla should have learned with Firefox, the reputation that the browser has now will follow it for years to come.
Firefox was initially described as being slow and bloated and it hasn't shaken that reputation even now in 2016.
Even if Firefox is actually faster than Chrome now, Firefox still has the reputation of being the slow bloated browser and lots of people won't use Firefox because of its reputation.
If Servo becomes known as the the broken and buggered up browser then people in the future will still consider it to be broken and buggered up even if it improves some day.
That's the danger in releasing software like this.
Yes it's an alpha release but it has now started giving Servo a bad reputation for being buggered.
They should have waited until it was more mature before doing this release.
Then people could have tried a really good browser instead of a buggered one.
These people would then tell their friends "I tried this fab new browser called Servo and it's great even though it's still an alpha release!"
But now these people will tell their friends "I tried this buggered new browser called Servo and it was very buggered."
I think that this release was a mistake.
It won't even help them find new bugs because the buggered bugs that Servo contains should have been obvious to the devs right away!
We haven't seen a body. Same for the Black Fish.
Why not C# then? It's open source, it has a native compiler, why are we doing YANPLTRWOPLHA (Yet Another Programing Language That Replicates What Other Programming Languages Have Already)?
OpenBSD
So using Rust has been detrimental to Servo's first few years of existence. But Rust 1.0, the first stable release of Rust, was released over a year ago. Why isn't Servo improving more rapidly now? Why is it still so immature, even though Rust is now stable?
I don't think .NET Core was open source at the time Mozilla began to develop Servo. Even if Mozilla were to drop Rust today and migrate Servo to C#, that would still take months.
There are these things called libraries, you know... standardized, regularly updated sets of code that provide a reliable platform of functions and features you do not have the experience or time to code yourself.
And then there are these things called Integrated Development Environments that put together libraries for you and give you pointers, wizards, GUI elements and such to help you build applications.
You do not need to build a new freaking language to avoid the pitfalls of being ignorant of how to program properly.
You have to learn how to use libraries and IDEs effectively, why not a new language? There are some things that are just a lot easier to fix by changing the language itself.
Security is the most imporant aspect of a web browser. We are all opening files from someone else's computers, allowing scripts to run and connect to any number of other computers. Security is literally the only thing that should matter in a web browser.
Creating a renderer on a brand new immature programming language that has not been around the block long enough for anyone to find it's flaws is a plan for disaster. No way in hell I'd use a browser running on that.
It redirects to "Taboola" instead. Mozilla should focus on making a Pocket/Hello free version of Firefox instead.
What about being able to correctly render web pages? Does that matter at all?
Rust is designed to prevent a certain class of common bugs. No programming language prevents all bugs. If the programmer types in the wrong method to call, or uses the wrong variable, there is nothing the programming language/libraries can do about it.
Currently, Firefox periodically decides to eat all memory on my MacBook Pro, until the OS notices and freezes the app (gets to about 40-50 Gb of swap space). But for days/weeks at a time, it will stay running at about 5 Gb of memory. Maybe this switch to using Rust will prevent whatever problem that is causing all the memory to get gobbled up...
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
+1 funny
^^^ you read my mind.
Theo is one of the greatest people of our generation. IMHO, Theo > Steve woz, stallman, torvalds, etc..
He has consistently pumped out secure functioning code year after year with minimal security holes. And he hasn't sold out.
Nope.
Obviously the most secure thing to do is simply ignore whatever data arrives from the webserver and tell the user to unplug the ethernet cable, since his OS is written in an insecure language.
Currently, Firefox periodically decides to eat all memory on my MacBook Pro, until the OS notices and freezes the app (gets to about 40-50 Gb of swap space). But for days/weeks at a time, it will stay running at about 5 Gb of memory.
That's bizarro. It's been years since I've had memory leaks that bad--do you still use Flash? I'd recommend checking out the developer version of Firefox. It has electrolysis and some other features that handle processes differently and is very stable (I've been using it for the past 7 months and am very pleased). Otherwise electrolysis should be making it into the next main release of FF. You can run the developer and normal FF side by side, so I think it's at least worth checking out.
If it ain't written in Rust, then GTFOH. Everyone knows Rust gets rid of bugs, and we all know your programs have a lot of bugs. It's a win win APK. Program it in Rust or GTFO. :P
Why is there such a difference?
Slashdot has devolved into a fetid backwater of malcontent cubical trolls; most of the stories aren't even technical in nature, and the technical stories get the least attention from commentors. Rust isn't some hipster fancy Mozilla is playing with for fun. It's an amazing language developed by brilliant designers over many years and it is attracting a lot of smart people because it offers a great deal to professionals that aren't afraid to learn and aren't threatened by new, better tools. Toxic and irrational people like the GP aren't welcome at Hacker News and they tend to do poorly there.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
I occasionally run Flash to see some video's, mainly because Firefox doesn't have the option to not tell websites flash in available, but those pages aren't left open very long (watch the video then close the tab). I was considering switching to the nightly build to enable the separate process support (that's the other thing, some pages, particularly amazon and ebay, like to peg the CPU as part of their effort to track what is happening...)
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I haven't played around with it much, but Rust doesn't do garbage collection, which is a major feature in my book. It uses RAII instead which means that memory management is deterministic. It's a lot like using C++ correctly.
So why is Servo so bad? Why isn't Rust letting them develop Servo faster and better?
I should have mentioned: in the URL bar go to "about:memory" (works in regular version of FF) and "about:performance" (shows CPU usage and other stats by tab/add-on, it may only be in the developer edition of FF right now). You should be able to figure out the offending website or add-on that way, assuming it's not a FirefoxMBP issue.
For the same reason you won't do it in Visual Basic: It would be slow as molasses and eat RAM as if there was no tomorrow. Go ahead, try it. Microsoft have already and it doesn't look nice.
" It's an amazing language developed by brilliant designers over many years and it is attracting a lot of smart people because"
Blah blah blah....
Newflash - they said exactly the same damn thing about Java and how it was going to change the world when it came out. Ditto C#. They have their niches but C & C++ still keep on trucking. Don't expect Rust to gain much traction in a rather overcrowded market. Unless it does something that C++ DOESN'T do then not many people will bother to learn it if it gains them nothing. And no, bounds checking and no segfaults isn't a USP. Java does that too.
I was going to ream you for choosing your web browser based on its underlying programming language. After all, if you're not having to interface with it as a plugin-developer, what does it matter?
Then I remembered: security. Relying on a human programmer to get every memory allocation and deallocation right every single time has proven to be a security nightmare for the past 20 years the internet has been accessible by the general public. The more safety checks you can push down into the underlying platform/language/runtime/API, the fewer security holes you'll have.
And if you need proof that your standard, mature languages aren't cutting it, look no further than Symantec's recent debacle. If kernel programmers at the world's premiere security firm can't get it right, who can?
Honestly it wouldn't surprise me if Symantec didn't purposely allow those bugs to stay. It helps sell more advanced, feature filled copies of their products instead. Oh that malware came through? Better buy the premier edition or you might get infected. There's a reason why my companies virus issues went from 2-300 tickets every couple weeks to less than 10 a week. We switched to McAfee.
Hey, off topic perhaps, but has anyone notice that the number of Anonymous Coward postings on Slashdot taking pot shots at primarily open source projects seems to have dramatically increased? What's with all the snide comments of people who refuse to get an account? I've read one piece of useful analysis in 6 months on here posted under AC. The rest are just cracks.
Then there is the matter of "We follow the Rust Code of Conduct." which essentially codifies coddling, censorship and intolerance.
I didn't think you were right, so I checked the Rust Code of Conduct for myself.
In there I saw this:
We will exclude you from interaction if you insult, demean or harass anyone. That is not welcome behaviour. We interpret the term “harassment” as including the definition in the Citizen Code of Conduct; if you have any lack of clarity about what might be included in that concept, please read their definition. In particular, we don’t tolerate behavior that excludes people in socially marginalized groups.
You are absolutely right!
The same paragraph that says "we don’t tolerate behavior that excludes people" also states that they "will exclude you from interaction"!
That is extremely hypocritical and contradictory. They say that it's wrong to exclude people, but then threaten to exclude people! And they do this all in the same paragraph!
This policy also contradicts with the part of their CoC that says they are "committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all". The CoC itself violates this policy that it contains, because it makes the threat of exclusion, and threats are contradictory to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment.
Are you sure that the Rust CoC is meant to be taken seriously? Are you sure it isn't a joke?
So why is Servo so bad?
Browsers are hard. I remember the early days of Firefox, then "Firebird." It was terrible, crashy alpha software and completely unusable for years. And that was based on a "mature" language; they weren't developing the implementation language in parallel. The "browser" problem today is an order of magnitude more difficult because a browser is vastly more complex than it was 15+ years ago; browsers must precisely implement a much larger body of legacy and contemporary "standards" and do so with excellent performance on a much larger spectrum of devices.
Why isn't Rust letting them develop Servo faster and better?
Rust only reached 1.0 13 months ago; most of Servo development has been based on a rapidly moving target while trying to hit a rapidly moving target. Other than the fact that Rust isn't miraculous — and no one has ever claimed it is — the current state of Servo doesn't really tell us much about Rust.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Aha, but the malware airgap-hopping via infrasonics already managed to install itself.
I don't recall how OS X reports memory use but double check the difference between virtual and real. For example, right now my Firefox is using 3.5 GB virtual but only 1.1 GB real. And I've got piles of stuff open at the moment.
This means adding a new column to every comparison table involving Web Browsers on Wikipedia, and every head to head article analysing performance including Servo.
It's a re-implementation of Gecko in Rust x.x
I tried this release of Servo and it is very immature.
Ummm... Yeah, it is. This is, after all, the first nightly build. What the hell did you expect?
Oh, for what it's worth, nightly builds are often badly broken. This is not a reflection on the quality of the software, just the state of the software at the time of that particular build. Ask anyone at any shop that does daily builds and they'll tell you the same thing.
Does Servo leak memory like a sieve like Firefox, causing one to relaunch one or two times a day or watch memory use climb to > 1 GB?
Toxic and irrational people? Fuck off you god damn faggot!
They should have waited until it was more mature before doing this release.
They promised builds you didn't have to compile yourself by June, and they delivered that on June 30. Everything beyond that is in your head.
Servo is the name of the engine. It's like the current gecko, not many people know about this name.
They will probably release a browser with this engine under another name once it has matured more.
See subject: It doesn't have problems that say C/C++ have (no null-terminated string bs, length is built in for example) & yet has outperformed C++ before too.
APK
P.S.=> It's a GREAT programming language & toolset (I like Delphi XE2 onward which it was 1st created in, & then lately in Delphi XE4 - & there's Delphi XE10 out there now but I don't need it for this program (& it does Win32/64, MacOS X + ANDROID apps even))... apk
Uninstall Flash
browsers must precisely implement a much larger body of legacy and contemporary "standards" and do so with excellent performance on a much larger spectrum of devices.
If that were "all" they had to do the job would be much, much easier than it is. The real problem lies in the clause you need to add: "... and also gracefully handle the astonishing and manifold varieties of bizzarely broken, nonstandard, evil, and often just plain utter shit-content that web servers routinely vomit forth when queried."
See subject: There no bug in it & You won't validly answer as you troll by unidentifiable AC posts!
APK
P.S.=> It's "100% bulletproof & bugfree" as I like to call my work (usually is)... apk
I wish I had mod points; Both your comments are well-stated and you seem to be the only mature sensible poster who knows what he's talking about, and not just spitting out swear words without substance.
I've been a loyal Netscape follower and then following Mozilla since they released the source, and I've contributed with bug reports and test cases from the early days of the milestone releases. I switched from using Netscape to Mozilla, even during the unstable and buggy release period.
However, I don't remember Phoenix being terribly crashy or alpha, that was prior to Phoenix was created as a subset of the entire Mozilla-suite (which included composer / irc chat / email / etc).
Nonetheless, you're right about everything else, especially the enormous complexity of modern-day browsers and how the complexity is only increasing.
I think it wouldn't be too outrageous to say that browsers are becoming like operating systems in their own right - in terms of complexity (not necessarily hardware interaction).
And it annoys me hugely when people compare Firefox to Chrome or even Safari, both of which are supported by multi-billion dollar corporate empires, while Firefox is supported by a tiny group of people under a non-profit charity and with only a miniscule of funding.
Yes, people have a right to complain to some extent, but at the same time, need to be grateful and realise who Mozilla is, and how much they've done for us and the open web and pushing everyone else to closely follow the standards!
Sorry this is harsh, but...
if people are too stupid to understand what an alpha release is, or a "nightly build", then they shouldn't be using it in the first place!
i.e. it's not for the point-and-click community, it's meant as an invitation for developers to sample their work and possibly invite others onboard to contribute code.
I'm relieved to see that you're posting here with your full legal name, "puddingebola", and that you're not using some sort of a pseudonym. Otherwise we'd have to think that you're posting anonymously, like some sort of a coward!
I just skimmed the article, I didn't get the impression it will be replacing the engine in Firefox.
Why run the two products? If Firefox is so fundamentally broken (?) then move development over to this new thing? If not, then continue to work on improving Firefox and implimenting the same features.
Working on 2 seems counterproductive.
They don't need to get every URL you visit. Read up on hashing and Bloom filters.
It was terrible, crashy alpha software and completely unusable for years.
it was so much better than IE though
Normally FF sits there for me as well, around 4 Gb. But every now and then, boom, something in Firefox starts gobbling memory, until the OS winds up pausing FF because the system runs out of swap space (about 50 Gb). I force-quit FF, wait maybe a minute or so, and the OS goes back to 1 Gb of swap space (with 16 Gb of RAM).
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
thanks for these two ffrls. they both work with the regular version of FF. the performance one I can definitely use, as i will have a bunch of tabs open and then something will just kill ff, and I can't tell what tab/s is/are doing it. the memory one will also be useful, but it's not easy for me to notice that ff is suddenly increasing it's memory usage until it's too late (once the OS notifies you somethings up, ff is unusable).
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I'm not sure I want a browser that streams cheesy movies and I can't control when they begin or end.
Browsers are hard. I remember the early days of Firefox, then "Firebird." It was terrible, crashy alpha software and completely unusable for years. [...] The "browser" problem today is an order of magnitude more difficult because a browser is vastly more complex than it was 15+ years ago
You insinuate that they wrote a whole new rendering engine for Firefox alone.
The rendering engine, the largest part of a browser, had already many years under its belt under the Mozilla Suite. You know, the browser/mailagent/newsreader Mozilla were known for before they reprioritised and started drumming up public awareness of Firefox with ads at around version 1.0.
I was a user of Phoenix, which later became Firebird, and after that Firefox.
"Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 58 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment" -- slashdot, driving users away.
Not only that but as Firefox continues to eat RAM like a pig the rendering speeds of the browser fall through the floor. What used to be nearly instantaneous to render takes at least a second of more time to render. You can see how the browser is choking on the memory load.
Same shit with bullshit excitement name "Servo" that gets scraped on search engines more because the name is not very unique.
The performance is already fine, nobody wants to have a whole OS in their web browser app. Stop building. Make it secure and stop removing privacy features like time spoofing.
When the US government comes up to you and says Hey, we need this "feature" in your software it is part of a National Security directive tell them to fuck off next time.
> the current state of Servo doesn't really tell us much about Rust
It tells us that Rust is nothing but a sect.
APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit http://www.bing.com/search?q=%...
Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS/routers/addons/antivirus (slows you) + less security issues/complexity. Compliments firewalls (w/ layered drivers blocking less used IP addys vs. hosts blocking more used domains) & DNS (lightens dns load). Gets data via 10 security sites.
Ads rob bandwidth/speed, security (malvertising), privacy (tracking) + anonymity.
Hosts add speed (hardcodes/adblocks), security (bad sites/poisoned dns), reliability (dns down), & anonymity (dns requestlogs/trackers) natively. Hosts != ClarityRay blockable (vs. souled-out to admen inferior wasteful redundant slow usermode addons)
Works vs. caps & HTTP PUSH ads w/ firewalls.
Avg. webpage = big as Doom http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... & ads = 40% of the size.
APK
P.S. - Safe https://www.virustotal.com/en/... (Verified by Malwarebytes' S. Burn "I've seen the code & it's safe" http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... )