Servo 0.5 Released: DuckDuckGo Properly Rendering, Up To 10x Faster Text Rendering

193

This was the non-chromium web browser in development? I hope the best to them.

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u/Ghost_x_Knight 1d ago

There is also Ladybird Browser in development; alpha is planned this year.

Instead of immediately trying to be a daily driver web browser, Servo is currently prioritizing a shorter term goal of being a production-ready WebView, that is able to replace Chromium Embeded Framework.

25

u/global-gauge-field 1d ago

Hmm. This seems interesting and smart some ways. I would be more willing to try some of my electron/tauri apps with new webview than trying out whole new browser.

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u/KhorneLordOfChaos 1d ago

it's also how they're managing to get funding without doing whatever the hell firefox is up to

9

u/chic_luke 1d ago

I think Mozilla's main mistake was deprecating the Firefox container.

For the explicit goal of shipping a browser, Mozilla is doing what they can. There is only so much money you can create out of thin air.

Unfortunately, browsers don't sell

10

u/stupid-stories 1d ago

speaking of webviews i dearly hope one of these new browsers can replace the sluggish mess that is webkitgtk. developing tauri apps on linux (which uses webkitgtk) can be such a massive pain the ass.

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u/Icy-Cup 1d ago

There are two - Servo and Ladybird. The second one is far more advanced in it’s efforts.

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u/FryBoyter 1d ago

The second one is far more advanced in it’s efforts.

But it's still a long way from being usable. Officially, the project is classified as pre-alpha. That's not meant as a criticism, though. Projects like this just take a long time.

34

u/gavff64 1d ago

2 months ago or so I built Ladybird from source just to see how behind it actually was. I gotta say it’s surprising. Google Maps, street view, all working, reddit mostly working, I could even play YouTube videos (albeit slowly).

Funnily enough, on my main browser I didn’t realize I had some sort of popup window blocker enabled and it wasn’t letting a signin page show up. The only other browser I had installed was Ladybird, so I used it to sign in properly and do what I needed to do, it worked.

8

u/PaddiM8 1d ago

A year ago it was a long way from being usable. Today it is actually kinda usable. Most sites I tried worked and looked just fine. Even advanced ones. It is improving rapidly.

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u/zyzzogeton 1d ago

I bet AI enhances the speed that these projects advance. Say what you will about AI coding, but it is fast.

-5

u/Rubbiish 1d ago

Why the downvotes?

7

u/gavff64 1d ago

I mean Ladybird stopped accepting code from public forks and pull requests for this exact reason. I don’t think the statement is inherently wrong, but truthfully something as complicated as a from-scratch web browser is just one of those things that needs to be severely well understood.

They have sponsors and expectations to meet. I’m sure they’ve been flooded with garbage code, it’s a waste of time to sift through.

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u/zyzzogeton 1d ago

Lots of people don't understand how useful AI is for coding?

8

u/James20k 1d ago

Its because they aren't nearly as useful for coding as the "Just Use AI" folks claim

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u/Sjoerd93 1d ago edited 23h ago

A web browser is the last thing people want to see sped up by LLMs.

If there’s a use for LLMs in development for these serious and large projects that come with a lot of responsibility, then it’s the kind that slows down development, like vulnerability analysis or automated testing.

Otherwise boilerplate was never the bottleneck, and the complicated stuff is not the part you want to let an LLM do.

56

u/IAm_A_Complete_Idiot 1d ago edited 1d ago

Servo isn't really a browser in of itself afaik. It's a rendering engine. It doesn't do things like JS, you'd use servo to make a browser rather than it being one itself. Ladybird meanwhile is a full fledged browser.

Edit: I'm wrong. Servo is an embeddable web rendering engine, but it seems to include spidermonkey - so it can do JavaScript and the like. It's an embeddable browser.

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u/Legitimate_Echo_701 1d ago edited 1d ago

oh ok

Edit: lol ok so not at all

4

u/Sjoerd93 1d ago

Well they were mostly correct, Servo is primarily the web engine. The browser they ship is more of a demo to be able to show the engine working and test it out. But it’s developed as an engine.

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u/dnu-pdjdjdidndjs 1d ago

not true

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u/IAm_A_Complete_Idiot 1d ago

Looked it up and apparently you're right. I could have sworn it was primarily a rendering engine, but it seems to also include spidermonkey. Guess I'm spreading misinformation :/

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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13

u/mort96 1d ago edited 1d ago

Well it's kinda true. Servo has a reference browser called servoshell but its main goal is to be a browser rendering engine you can embed into other applications. And it's intentionally lacking major components like a JavaScript engine, instead relying on Firefox's Spidermonkey. Ladybird, on the other hand, 1) intends to primarily be a web browser, and 2) has its own JavaScript engine.

But the border between "web browser" and "browser rendering engine with a reference GUI and bundled with a third party JavaScript engine" is pretty blurry. It's not wrong to call servoshell a web browser. But it's also not wrong to say that the Servo project is primarily not about making a browser but rather a rendering engine.

1

u/silon 1d ago

Any idea how hard is to remove the JS support?

-24

u/dnu-pdjdjdidndjs 1d ago

Is using italics a lot your love language

8

u/BillTran163 1d ago

Rich text is rich.

9

u/stylist-trend 1d ago

They... italicized 2 words in 7 sentences? That doesn't seem unreasonable?

EDIT: oh, it's a troll account

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u/dnu-pdjdjdidndjs 1d ago

Cant make jokes anymore

5

u/stylist-trend 1d ago

Oh yeah, 100% a troll account

The first step to being able to make a joke is knowing what a joke even is

-4

u/dnu-pdjdjdidndjs 1d ago

You can definitely make a joke without having a foundation of what a joke is so that's just straight up not true, but sure continue believing im a troll and ignore my genuine effortpost in this thread

→ More replies (0)

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u/ImNotABotScoutsHonor 1d ago

in its* efforts

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u/SmileyBMM 1d ago

There's also Pale Moon which is still seeing active development (which has been mostly drama free as of late). It's pretty usable, but obviously inferior to Firefox and Chromium.

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u/Retzerrt 1d ago

Pale moon is based on Firefox.

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u/SmileyBMM 1d ago

It's a hard fork (that happened before Firefox Quantum), the amount of code it shares with modern Firefox is very little. To reduce it to another Firefox browser is just not accurate.

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u/Helmic 1d ago

I mean, eh. It is a hard fork from back before FIrefox got good again, back when there was a really good reason people were switching to Chrome to such a degree that FIrefox lost its majority browser marketshare. I don't think they've advanced it enough since then to really call it more than Firefox from eons ago with less than sufficient updates to keep up with CVE's.

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u/Retzerrt 1d ago

Servo and Ladybird are independent browser engines, which aren't forks of an existing engine, which are still in development, as opposed to being released. (There are also some other works being done, for example DioxusLab has been working on rendering, during that process they released the very popular taffy rust crate)

WebKit is a fork of KHTML, Blink is a fork of WebKit.

Gecko seems to be independent, having been developed for Netscape, by Mozilla. I don't quite understand the history of Gecko and the other components of Firefox.

There probably isn't a good definition of what makes a browser independent or not, and the history is reasonably convoluted. I personally don't see Pale Moon as a from scratch independent browser engine, even if it diverges a lot from the upstream code. It's the same for Blink and WebKit, I wouldn't describe those as independent.

Even Ladybird browser comes from SerenityOS, which is an operating system that Andreas King started, who later decided to take the web browser functionality and and make it a standalone browser, freeing it from the culture of SerenityOS (avoiding external dependencies, for example OpenSSL).

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u/FryBoyter 1d ago

What you're probably referring to is the Ladybird browser, which, as far as I know, uses its own browser engine.

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u/theRealGrahamDorsey 1d ago

Yes

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u/cornmonger_ 1d ago

it's a rendering engine and then they ship a self-named cross-platform browser on top of it

started at mozilla and now it's its own thing

it's still extremely early, but i've started playing with the headless engine api for things like integration testing and it works pretty well in some cases

my guess is that it will replace use-cases similar to where electron was used if it keeps pace

tauri has been playing with integration and dioxus uses components for its blitz engine

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u/Due_Dragonfly_5328 1d ago

HOLY FUCK thats actually huge.

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u/flocosdemillo 1d ago

Servo is not a browser. Is a web engine, i.e. a piece of software that runs web content. You can use Servo to create browser though

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u/silencer_ar 1d ago

wasn't a rendering engine from Mozilla called like this?

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u/Irverter 1d ago

Yes and no.

Firefox rendering engine is gecko.

Servo started as an exprimental engine/browser by mozilla, which then used parts of it to replace/upgrade parts of gecko/firefox and then discarded servo. I think the multiprocess was one of those parts (I could be misrembering that part though).

0

u/Business_Reindeer910 1d ago

is webrender what you're thinking of?

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u/Irverter 1d ago

After looking up what that is, no, I'm thinking of Servo. Webrenderer is just one of the parts taken from servo into gecko.

1

u/Business_Reindeer910 1d ago

I was referring to this . Stylo was another part I know of.

I think the multiprocess was one of those parts (I could be misrembering that part though).

4

u/kauhat 1d ago

Servo was a Mozilla project. they canned all the Servo developers (amongst others, very sad) in 2020, so the project was on life support for a few years. Happy to see the project has found it's footing on it's own now. Modern Mozilla is more interested in AI than having a cool new browser in the works.

1

u/Due_Dragonfly_5328 1d ago

isnt servo a web engine to build a browser?

(please correct me if im wrong i have no idea)

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u/gplanon 1d ago

TLDR:

“Servo 0.5 is out today as the newest monthly update to this open-source, Rust-based browser engine…”

“With Servo 0.5 they are also now able to render the DuckDuckGo landing page correctly after addressing an SVG image preload bug…”

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u/Maximum-Bobcat5612 1d ago

You can see their progress and pass rate of tests here: https://servo.org/wpt/

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u/RaageUgaas 1d ago

I hope servo succeeds so we can take back the web browser from these greedy tech companies.

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u/visor841 1d ago

Interesting. Maybe one day Steam could use Servo instead of CEF.

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u/tukanoid 1d ago

Been using servo in iced (hard forked iced_webview2 and stripped away other engines for personal project) since 0.3 and didn't realize DuckDuckGo wasn't rendering properly 😅

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u/iBoMbY 1d ago

Would be nice to have a browser engine that has a high performance/efficiency (especially using a lot less memory).

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u/Due_Dragonfly_5328 1d ago

checked out their website page and it says they support OpenHarmony

wtf is OpenHarmony

1

u/Due_Dragonfly_5328 12h ago

why i got downvoted for asking a question bruh???

1

u/GoogleDisDick 19h ago

It's Huawei's OS for the domestic Chinese market. Oof.

1

u/frnxt 1d ago

On Android the performance improvement compared to the last release a couple of months ago is impressive, I'm very very glad to see how healthy Servo development is !

1

u/FlatAssembler 1d ago

What happened with NetSurf lately? And the Duktape JavaScript engine embedded into it? The Finnish developer Sami Vaarala is no longer active on GitHub, as far as I can see.

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u/beegtuna 1d ago

Can I install uBlock Origin on it?

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u/Liquid_Fire 1d ago

No, it's not a browser. It's an engine for building browsers or web-based applications.

It does include a very simple browser called servo shell, but it's just for testing the engine, not really intended for everyday use.

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u/beegtuna 1d ago

But it is a browser and it can open any webpage. And having an ad blocker can offload the task of removing trackers and noise, to reduce resources for processing those websites without the overhead of a consumer browser or your user needs to login with their Google account from within the application.

2

u/Liquid_Fire 1d ago

There's no doubt an ad blocker can be useful, but it's functionality for a browser to implement (much like: tabs, history, bookmarks, UI) not for a browser engine, which is what this is.

Not sure what you mean about logging in with a Google account?

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u/binocry_ 1d ago

I think they still haven't provided the extension feature

1

u/beegtuna 1d ago

Wake me when they do

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u/FunnyMustache 1d ago

Linux-related because..?

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u/Dramatic_Mastodon_93 1d ago

Linux Foundation

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u/formegadriverscustom 1d ago

Because nowadays Servo is a Linux Foundation Europe project.

0

u/FunnyMustache 1d ago

I stand corrected!

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u/binocry_ 1d ago

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Software Release Servo 0.5 Released: DuckDuckGo Properly Rendering, Up To 10x Faster Text Rendering

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