I'm convinced that using an embedded browser engine to render app UI is the future. Browser rendering engines are so powerful and versatile and universal I don't see how they can lose.<p>"But Electron!" Yes, Electron hasn't taken the world by storm because it has two huge deficiencies: 1. It takes an enormous amount of resources including ram and disk. 2. It has no native DOM API bindings so it takes even more ram and cpu to compile and run JS quickly.<p>I'm excited for the new crop of browser engines because they could fix those deficiencies, opening up browser tech to app developers without hugely compromising the experience.
I think Servo's killer application would be a mobile-first browser for postmarketOS/Mobian/other mobile Linux distros. It's a weird vacuum because Firefox has its Android port, but when you run Firefox on small linux (touch)screen, the experience is very suboptimal. I'd call it unbearable if it wasn't for bunch of tweaks in form of <a href="https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/mobile-config-firefox" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/mobile-config-f...</a><p>Chrome is no better, as it has a very weird hardcoded minimum window width of 500px.
Ladybird and Servo are exciting and much needed projects since Microsoft abandoned their own independent browser engine to use Chromium.<p>If you didn't know you could see the massive progress both projects have made in web compatibility here: <a href="https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&product=chrome&product=firefox&product=safari&product=ladybird&product=servo&aligned" rel="nofollow">https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=master&product=chrome&product...</a><p>As of today, browsers pass this percent of tests:<p><pre><code> Chrome: 96.82%
Firefox: 95.41%
Safari: 94.97%
Ladybird: 89.30%
Servo: 78.61%</code></pre>
If servo (or something like it) succeeds, would that mean potentially being able to swap out chromium in Electron? Would that help with performance / application size?
Wondering how useful this would be for the agentic workflows that need browsing. The open deep research tread from yesterday mentioned using a pure text based browser sort of thing to quickly get info.
That's great news! I thought the project had died and that this meant that V8 was the only serious JavaScript engine for the future.<p>For those who don't know: "Servo is a web browser rendering engine written in Rust, with WebGL and WebGPU support, and adaptable to desktop, mobile, and embedded applications."