Layout 2013 and Layout 2020

TIL servo was still actively developed. I thought it was dead after Mozilla stopped developing it.

Servo is now under the Linux Foundation umbrella. It&#x27;s refreshing to finally see some more players in the browser engine space than the tri-opoly of Google (Blink), Apple (WebKit) and Gecko (Mozilla). LibWeb (Ladybird Browser) is another browser engine, but also in very early days of development.<p>Gecko is depressingly tied to Firefox and not easily embedded. Blink has somehow become the de facto browser engine thanks to Electron. Even Qt (QtWebEngine) is now based on Blink instead of WebKit. A lot of web apps like Teams only support Blink&#x2F;Chromium, just like the dark old days of Internet Explorer. Chrome and Edge are basically spyware which people are most drawn to because of being somewhat default and&#x2F;or well known for their phone&#x2F;PC.

I’m not sure I understand the context.<p>They began a replacement engine 7 years later to address shortcomings, and 3 years after that still aren’t sure if it’s actually better and worth switching over to?<p>Now that I write this, I kind of get it. But I’ve only experienced this for weeks worth of work, not for years.

Servo is an independent, modular, embeddable web rendering engine written in Rust

Love that servo is still being worked on. Don’t love that the new layout engine doesn’t support floats or flexbox. We need to do more to stave off the homogenisation of the web into the chromium spyware machine. What a shame that Mozilla’s funding was so drastically cut.

None of this would be so difficult if the CSS specifications were well defined.<p>But they’re not, so we all have to more or less guess what the intrinsic algorithms for drawing fundamental aspects of the web are supposed to be.<p>Such a failure of the CSS specs.

How far is Servo from being daily-driveable? What&#x27;s stopping someone from slapping it together with SpiderMonkey or some other JS runtime and calling it a browser?

I’m amazed that Servo is actually a thing.<p>Firefox abandoned it years ago, and now Flow and Ladybird are from-scratch new, efficient browsers.

Servo nukem forever.

And how will this layout engine help the browser gain market share over Chrome?<p>While you are busy improving the layout engine other browsers are working on features that bring value to users.