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Comment by grayrest | Hacker News Reader

I compile Servo twice per week or so to check out the progress. It's really not ready to go as a daily browser. You can load pages, they're recognizable but generally not fully correct, the form input fields are rudimentary, and it crashes every time I go back to the previous page.

There's been one proof of concept basic chrome [1] and it wouldn't be THAT difficult to build a more robust one but I'd be much more interested in seeing it running in Electron so you could run Atom or VS Code since the domains are much more limited and rendering perf is a fairly significant limiting factor in those apps.

[1] https://github.com/glennw/servo-shell

P.S. I've never had perf issues with Firefox like you're talking about. You might want to try cleaning out your profile and if it's not that, you might have addons doing something screwy.

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https://github.com/browserhtml/browser.html works fine as a basic chrome too.

Could you expand on "form input fields are rudimentary"? (I know they are, I'm wondering what part of this you're referring to). Is it the styling, lack of selection support, lack of HTML5 input fields, bugs, or something else? (I might be looking into improving these later)

The "go back" crash is something that can be fixed easily; I think we know why it happens but haven't fixed it yet (I forgot the reason though).

> Could you expand on "form input fields are rudimentary"?

All of the above except the lack of HTML5 fields. :) I don't mean to be negative, just to give reasons it's not as simple as "just slap chrome on it". I really should start contributing.

Yeah, no I get it :)

Thanks for the feedback.

I have done the profile cleaning routing (I think that's something like the defragmentation runs of old...) and disabled all add-ons except for uBlock, Reddit Enhancement Suite and greasemonkey (for a total of 3 GM scripts).

I don't understand what's up either, but I have it both on my Windows work machine with a 4+4 core desktop CPU and 32GB RAM and my Macbook with 16GB. After a couple of hours, I can type in a text-field and see the text lagging. On a 2.4Ghz machine.

I do have lots of tabs open, but since they only load on activation I doubt that's the reason. Maybe it's the Web Telegram app. It's totally frustrating that I am not even able to find the culprit if there's one since not even the dev tools have something like `ps -aux` to show what the tabs are consuming.

Granted, it's gotten better with v.45, but still I just hope something useful comes out of Servo, and soon.

Try going to about:memory to see if some tab is taking up a lot of memory. I've got this CI system where if I leave it open overnight it takes a gig or two and makes the browser unusable (Firefox and Chrome; it's a problem with DOM elements). If your GM scripts retain DOM elements for a long time (and the tabs aren't closed) that might be an issue too.

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