Mozilla's Servo Engine Is Crazy Fast Compared To Gecko

[patrickjdempsey]

As for the interface, I'm not sure. The growing sentiment seems to be "No XUL". It could very well be Qt. Anything's possible.

Which is really a shame because XUL was *designed* for interfaces. For years there has been talk of moving Firefox to an HTML-based interface, which in my opinion would be a complete disaster. HTML is IMO not even sufficient for the basic requirements for websites anymore, let alone interfaces. If it takes 30 lines of CSS just to make a horizontal toolbar than contains buttons, that's a serious problem. But I also seriously doubt if there's been any kind of consideration for rendering XUL with Servo.

[Drumbrake]

You obviously don't have a job that has an office.

And not only that:what about studying,research work of any kind,or just properly and thoroughly reading the news...is all of that even remotely possible on a "smart" thing?

[Sabardeyn]

Tablets (and some other devices) are currently focused on the mobile entertainment market -- texting, simple photography, social networking, games, tv/movies, video, etc -- but are not up to serious business productivity tool standards. These devices are not suitable for long term use, data entry, or productivity tasks "as is". The tablet's recent decrease in overall sales as a percentage of market share, while desktops regain market share, are an acknowledgement of their limited abilities.

Despite increasing functionality in apps, the Touch UI needs more innovations. Perhaps some kind of hardware paradigm shift as well. But until these arrive I don't think desktops are dead.

No, the "killer form-factor" is already present in a limited form -- something vaguely similar to the Surface Pro 3. The laptop itself is not likely to kill off the desktop although it will continue to gain market share at the desktop's expense.

[Drumbrake]

Tablets (and some other devices) are currently focused on the mobile entertainment market (...)

Well right there there's the whole point:unthinkable and outrageous as it may seem,for some people computers are more than just entertainment,and software vendors/producers should take note.

[itisomegakai]

Mozilla's Servo Engine that's written in the Rust programming language and designed to be a highly parallel layout engine continues to be advancing very well and could see an alpha release this year.

Jack Moffitt of Mozilla talked at last week's Linux.Conf.Au 2015 conference about the work he and a dozen or so other Mozilla engineers have been doing on the experimental Servo engine.

As explained during a status update from November, Servo's performance has been very fast compared to Gecko and other web layout engines. As mentioned in that update and reaffirmed last week, Servo developers are indeed hoping to have an alpha quality release of the engine out in 2015.

Besides being fast and written to offer greater standards compliance, Servo should be more secure with being written in Rust. Servo has also been designed to be embeddable from the start. The first bits of Servo support in Firefox OS are now working in experimental form -- at least for booting to the ACID2 test. Jack said during his presentation that he hopes to have about 50% of standard web features implemented this year while the most popular web pages are all rendering well.

The performance of Servo has been described as "amazingly well" compared to Gecko and that even a single thread ofServo is faster than Gecko. However, the results for now should be taken for a grain of salt given that more functionality still needs to be implemented. CNN and Reddit were frequently mentioned as popular sites rendering well with Servo. The goal with Servo is to deliver better responsiveness and lower power use than Gecko (and alternatives).

With Servo coming along, the developers hope to eventually begin landing Servo and Rust support within Gecko to allow more developers to begin familiarizing themselves with the new engine. The first component likely to find its way implemented in Gecko/Firefox from Servo is probably the BMP decoder, given that it's a small piece of the puzzle and shouldn't cause too much fallout in the case of problems. Other Servo/Rust components likely to get green lit early on is also a new HTML parser and URL parsing library.



Those wishing to watch Jack Moffitt's LCA2015 presentation can find it embedded below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q9vIMX ... tion=share

[sabret00the]

Interesting stuff that's for sure but it sounds like it'll be a couple years before we see it replace Gecko.

[Chewey]

The interesting thing is that it sounds like it won't be a Netscape -> Gecko type of change, but they'll upgrade specific components of Firefox over time. I'm sure there will be larger uploads of Servo code into Firefox, but I was expecting it to be a new build entirely. I was thinking it'd be like downloading Phoenix to test out while still running the suite for regular use (damn, I'm old).

[sabret00the]

The interesting thing is that it sounds like it won't be a Netscape -> Gecko type of change, but they'll upgrade specific components of Firefox over time. I'm sure there will be larger uploads of Servo code into Firefox, but I was expecting it to be a new build entirely. I was thinking it'd be like downloading Phoenix to test out while still running the suite for regular use (damn, I'm old).

With the release of Windows 10, Mozilla will be the last browser to switch to a new engine, I wouldn't be surprised if they expedited some of the work and consolidated the changes so that it does drop in one large chunk by the time it gets to RTM.

[Ver Greeneyes]

With the release of Windows 10, Mozilla will be the last browser to switch to a new engine,

I don't think that's really accurate - Webkit is a fork of KHTML, and Blink is a fork of Webkit. Neither was written from the ground up, like Servo. I guess Spartan is new, but who can say with closed source. I wouldn't be surprised if Gecko has the oldest remaining code in it though.

[Chewey]

With the release of Windows 10, Mozilla will be the last browser to switch to a new engine,

I don't think that's really accurate - Webkit is a fork of KHTML, and Blink is a fork of Webkit. Neither was written from the ground up, like Servo. I guess Spartan is new, but who can say with closed source. I wouldn't be surprised if Gecko has the oldest remaining code in it though.

Wikipedia would back you up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browse ... e#Timeline

I would think it's in Mozilla's interest to get something like this out in user's hands as a 'Firefox NG' type of product soon. If nothing else it will show that they are serious about being a competitor to Chrome and Internet Explorer. Keeping your brand in the public's conscious is usually a good thing. Even doing a weekly alpha type of release for several platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android, iOS (maybe)), would go a long way to keep interest in Firefox going. Assuming even this is months away.

[Grantius]

I can't wait for this - it seems like it'll be great!

[itisomegakai]

With the release of Windows 10, Mozilla will be the last browser to switch to a new engine,

I don't think that's really accurate - Webkit is a fork of KHTML, and Blink is a fork of Webkit. Neither was written from the ground up, like Servo. I guess Spartan is new, but who can say with closed source. I wouldn't be surprised if Gecko has the oldest remaining code in it though.

Wikipedia would back you up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browse ... e#Timeline

I would think it's in Mozilla's interest to get something like this out in user's hands as a 'Firefox NG' type of product soon. If nothing else it will show that they are serious about being a competitor to Chrome and Internet Explorer. Keeping your brand in the public's conscious is usually a good thing. Even doing a weekly alpha type of release for several platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOS, Android, iOS (maybe)), would go a long way to keep interest in Firefox going. Assuming even this is months away.

In 2015, we have two high-level goals for Servo:

Release an alpha-quality browser that uses Servo as its rendering engine
Land a Servo component that is authored in Rust into Gecko

Q1 2015

Extensive CSS property coverage (> 70%)
Android browser and APK
OSX and Linux platform daily builds of "miniservo"
Get the browser "safe enough" to use for basic browsing scenarios
Identify and begin building a Rust component inside of Firefox
Begin reporting and tracking Servo's Web Platform conformance, performance, and power usage over time
Initial fragmentation (multicol)
Initial flexbox
Upgrade SpiderMonkey
Zero-copy HTML & CSS parsing

Q2 2015

Create dynamic test suite
Add high impact platform features
Add a Rust component to Gecko

Critical 2015 work

Layout

variables
transforms
transitions
animations
tables: the rest of colspan, rowspan, percantage heights, and web-compat bugs
will-change

Other

Explore using Servo as a UI toolkit
Visualization support
multiprocess
multimedia
sandboxing
addons
prefs
bookmarks
history
cookies

[mayankleoboy1]

Without Windows nightly builds, Servo word of mouth will be almost zero.

[Josa]

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1135640 - (oxidation) Add rust compiler support !

First thing that will move from C++ to Rust seems to be the URL parser (but it seems it will take a while yet).

[supergirl260]

could be interesting my bet that we see servo replace gecko fully by 2017 at the earliest though