Comment by larsberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by larsberg | Hacker News Reader

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> 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.

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