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Comment by pcwalton | Hacker News Reader

To echo what Paul said, this will not be a browser you will want to use as a replacement for all your day-to-day browsing. If you try to, you won't end up happy.

Web compatibility is a long road, and it's crucial for us to be able to know what missing functionality is most important and the places where we need to focus on performance the most. The purpose of the package is to help us find and prioritize bugs and missing features. We want to know which sites are the most broken (and, even more importantly, which missing features are breaking those sites). From the Web developer side, we also want early feedback on use cases that may be slow today, so that the browser engine can eventually become a great experience for everyone.

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Thank you for the warning, but I suspect I for one might end up happy anyway. :)

I already see lots of broken pages because of NoScript, I often use bookmarklets to strip the page of excessive (mis)use of design... so as long as you can show me the text I will be fine, thank you. ;) Not the typical user though, I know.

On the other hand I am thrilled about security and privacy possibilities this brings to the table! So I can't wait to try it out. Keep up the good work!

No, it really is alpha quality; it's not really usable even if you're willing to put up with bugs.

ironically, it's NoScript that blocks the javascript URI scheme. I just never bothered to find out how to unblock it selectively (to stop sites linking to those) or at all.

I already use a crippled browser for my day-to-day browsing: Tor Browser. I'd be happy with a browser that's as non-leaky as that. Tor Browser works fairly well, but I'd prefer a lighter browser if I had the option.

Given the security properties of Rust, it would be pretty compelling to use Servo over Tor

I would recommend against using the Servo alpha against Tor, though; some web security features (eg stuff like CORS, though our CORS support is okay) aren't there yet IIRC.

(Of course, this will change over time, just that I don't expect it to be 100% secure by June)

Rust is secondary to the issue. I am more concerned about how much browsers divulge when asked. Test your browser at https://www.browserleaks.com/

> From the Web developer side, we also want early feedback on use cases that may be slow today

Have you ever tried Google+? In my experience this is one of the most demanding pages out there and it is almost unusable in Firefox for me. The only reasonable way for me to use it is to switch to Chrome. (Linux, cheap Intel Celeron with 2.6 GHz)

Have you tried spoofing user-agent (and other identifiers) to Chrome?

Have you tried it without any extensions enabled? Google+ has always performed roughly the same in Firefox as Chrome in my usage — fairly good but not great due to the massive amount of work they're doing in JS. That's improved over the years but it's taken a long time to approach native scrolling performance in any browser.

Even worse, Google Keep with ~3 years of notes. Actually unusable in a web browser for me at this point - chrome, Safari, Firefox, doesn't matter. Trying to figure out the best way to export all my notes. Sucks, because it's fantastic on mobile, and the built in reminder features are really useful. Anyone have a good mobile + webpage alternative?

Out of curiosity, how many notes? No suggestions, sorry.

I would give you a count if I could. My guess is on the order of thousands, but not tens of thousands. Seems like the browsers are trying to download every single note I've ever created at once (from looking at the network requests and seeing the huge amounts of data being transferred).

Also, just tried loading the site on a much faster internet connection and everything worked, although text entry was slightly laggy on a new note. Still couldn't figure out how to get a count of my notes though.

Will there be any Telemetry for this packages? Or will we have to report it by hand?

I have an idea to give Servo a great use case. At this moment, for crawling websites and testing web apps phantomjs and Selenium are used. While those libraries are okay, it can definitely be replaced by something better.

PhantomJS is based on WebKit, which is a commonly used HTML rendering engine, using Servo in PhantomJS will only make sense once Servo has double digit market share. Selenium isn't a browser engine, so not sure how Servo could replace it.

I don't think its a terrible idea.

There has been talk in PhantomJS on making multiple engines available. It's the 11th most commented issue[1], out of 1k+ issues.

Sometimes a broadly used browser-engine is important, but other things servo could be useful.

One issue with PhantomJS (on webkit) is that it crashes quite frequently and use a lot of memory[2], areas where Servo may do better.

[1] https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/10209

[2] https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=i...

Are there daily binaries available somewhere? It stopped building for me starting some time ago and I was too lazy figuring out what's wrong (plus, build-times for prod-build are quite long).

Are you on OS X? Apple stopped shipping an OpenSSL header that's needed by a Servo dependency (https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/7303). If you're using Homebrew, you should be able to build by manually pointing to a brew-installed copy of OpenSSL:

    export OPENSSL_INCLUDE_DIR=$(brew --prefix openssl)/include 
    export DEP_OPENSSL_INCLUDE=$(brew --prefix openssl)/include
    ./mach build

Alternatively, if you don't mind shadowing the system's default version of OpenSSL, you can try `brew link --force openssl`.

>To echo what Paul said, this will not be a browser you will want to use as a replacement for all your day-to-day browsing. If you try to, you won't end up happy.

Well, we obviously all gonna use it that way though :-)

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