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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.
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.
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!
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!