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Comment by larsberg | Hacker News Reader

Servo will continue to be a next-generation browser engine and a place where we'll be doing a lot of experimentation on new standards and implementation techniques. I'm sure the community will also continue to use it for all sorts of cool things!

Joining up with the mixed reality team is more about how the Mozilla staff working on Servo will be focusing their time and some of the desire we have for things we want to do for mixed reality that are a little invasive and early-stage of the standards process to be experimenting with inside of existing production browser engines.

With regards to a full browser, there's still a pretty big gap before Servo could stand on its own in a browser (https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Remaining-work ). Filling that list out is not a higher priority for the Mozilla staff over getting the stuff done we need to experiment with delivering the web on VR & AR devices.

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I'm really proud of what the Servo team has achieved and since I'm always looking at it from a big distance, I believe you are all able to judge this much better than me.

That said, this news do not sound good to me. Again, this is from a great distance, but from here, taking a future-focused team with great respect from the community, a team with an important and invaluable mission and that has successfully delivered over years, and shifting it (or forking it) towards complete uncertainty feels like a dangerous move that reminds me of the phone OS efforts.

Good riddance and may your vision be right. We need someone with Mozilla's goals looking deeper into VR so that we don't end up in the hands of the Big Corps in the near future, that is for sure, no matter if VR ends up being niche. How important that technology will be for the masses is yet to be proven and that's why I fear for the web, the battle proven real thing that faces the greatest threats from closed silos today. I don't feel it should be taken on equal terms with what is still fictional speculation. It needs full energy to make it to the future in good health. We already failed to deliver a beautiful, open and user centered internet to the future, we can't loose the open web.

>> Filling that list out is not a higher priority for the Mozilla staff over getting the stuff done we need to experiment with delivering the web on VR & AR devices.

So building a fully functional browser is not higher priority than getting the half-baked browser working in a niche environment? I'm half joking here, and half serious. How is a browser supposed to look differently in VR? And why does it need to be aware of the fact that it's in VR? People are still developing interaction and navigation methods in VR.

> How is a browser supposed to look differently in VR?

Great question! Some of the best early work on this was done by ex-Mozilla, current-Google employee Josh Carpenter - check out:

http://www.joshcarpenter.ca/declarative-3d/ http://www.joshcarpenter.ca/vr-browsing-explorations/

There's a lot we can do that is even beyond these early explorations to deliver new features to developers to experiment with and users to try soon via Servo, alongside GeckoView in new VR/AR-focused browser products.

If you take a look at the link I provided above on remaining work and rough estimates to get things just working in Servo (and not FULLY web compat), you're looking at an effort of several years for the entire team, and that's assuming the web platform both stayed still and went ahead and finished writing all the tests and specs for everything on the web that is today neither tested nor fully spec'd. I don't see that in the cards for 2018.

So is this the end of the attempt to make Servo into a fully web compatible competitor to go up against/replace Gecko, et al? Was that ever the goal, really? It seemed like Servo was a "let's see if we can do it" and now it's changed into a "what's the point of putting all this effort into making one more 2D web renderer when we can be at the forefront of 3D web renderers?"

Not passing judgement on anything with the above statement. Just trying to make sense of it all.

We're still working on web compatibility; that's not changing.

But I don't think we've ever had a concrete goal to have a standalone Servo browser. Parts of servo in firefox? Sure. Trying out new ideas? Sure. Embedding servo a la electron or WebkitView? Sure. But Servo as a standalone browser has always been a "maybe someday" thing -- we've never worked against it, but I don't recall us ever explicitly targeting it, though I think most of us have always had some hope that we'll reach that point eventually.

What about the concept of turning Gecko into Servo piece by piece?

That is, continuing the Quantum work until there is either no C++ code left, or the C++ code left can turned off via config option ("prefer perfect security over perfect compatibility") while still having a browser that works on the vast majority of the web.

Servo components will continue to be uplifted into Gecko (e.g. WebRender and Pathfinder are on track to be in Firefox later this year). But ever since Servo's original announcement people from Mozilla have been explicitly saying that people should not expect Servo to wholesale replace Gecko in Firefox.

We already built a full VR browser, part of the current YC batch: https://supermedium.com

I wish everyone on the Servo project the best of luck, and hope this new project will be a success, but I can't help but agree with other commenters who see this as a move away from something that could have provided a huge fundamental advantage to Firefox/Mozilla to something less impactful. This feels like the end of the Servo project in all but name.

It already has provided a huge advantage via components that are already shipping (Stylo) and soon to be shipped (WebRender) in Firefox.

I have my doubts as well, but one way to look at this announcement in a charitable light is that VR and AR are technically demanding use cases which will require the Servo team to keep a strong focus on performance. In one way, it's a good testing ground for further refining the high level of performance that Servo has already achieved, especially if the work aims to make the user experience of shifting between 2D and 3D content to be seamless (which could result in performance wins for 2D content as well).

I still have a hope that Servo will be used in a next-generation Electron competitor, as that's what I thought would be the best use of Servo (in the short term). Hopefully the developers can keep this use case open by maintaining the code that allows Servo to be embedded as a component in other projects.

To me, the promise of Servo was that we could incrementally rewrite Firefox in Rust, evolving Rust alongside it, and solve memory corruption in a browser, making a giant leap forward for security. Servo was the credible alternative to Chrome's approach of just adding more sandboxing. I'm just disappointed.

> "the promise of Servo was that we could incrementally rewrite Firefox in Rust"

That's what's already happening with Project Quantum, and that project is still ongoing (as far as I'm aware).

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/01/firefox-58-the-quantum-era...

> Filling that list out is not a higher priority for the Mozilla staff over getting the stuff done we need to experiment with delivering the web on VR & AR devices.

This is extremely disappointing.

I think the amount of users you can win back from Chrome with a Servo browser is much larger than any VR audience you can hope to gain in the near future. I simply don't understand how these things cannot be done in parallel. Mozilla has hundreds of millions in cashflow, right?

Looks like Servo will be another exciting Mozilla project that will be prematurely dropped after a ton of work and hype-up. RIP Firefox OS, Persona, Thunderbird, etc... :(

Why do they keep doing this?

> I think the amount of users you can win back from Chrome with a Servo browser is much larger than any VR audience you can hope to gain in the near future.

A Servo browser product is not possible in the near future. That is very much a far future thing. Web compatibility is hard.

Servo has a lot more potential in platforms where you don't need to support the _entire_ set of browser features -- like as an electron replacement, or a platform for something like webVR, or Android embedding (which will probably come out of the VR work as well).

> A Servo browser product is not possible in the near future. That is very much a far future thing.

and an impossibly far future if the Servo team is now refocused on VR, no? how likely is it that these hard problems will be solved by fewer engineer-hours?

perhaps there's some external backer willing to bankroll VR and Servo is just an easy expense to curtail.

You still need webcompat for VR stuff.

Focusing on VR means that we may not be working on some kinds of webcompat things (the standard example is "IE6 table layout quirks") but there's plenty of webcompat work that needs to be done otherwise.

Yes, not everyone will be working on webcompat, but this has never been the case anyway.

> (the standard example is "IE6 table layout quirks")

if a new browser in 2019 could not properly render an archived 1996 Geocities webpage at time of launch, i don't think many users would care or even notice. there are almost certainly legacy bugs in Firefox that have been open for over a decade with little activity and yet it's in production.

It's not just old sites that depend on these quirks.

Seriously, web compat is very tricky.

So it is about team velocity vs standards compliance? I know the Servo team isn't large enough to make a whole new browser from scratch.

I'm not sure what you mean by team velocity.

We're still working on standards compliance, but we may focus more on the bits that are actually useful within VR.

> team velocity

Having folks spending months implementing the corner cases of standard might not researching and finding creative ways to use Rust to implement large systems.

Standards compliance probably follows some exponential curve wrt energy and results.

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