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Fervicus 7 hours ago [-]
Congrats on the new release. Anything that creates more competition in the browser space has my support. I was hyped about Ladybird but their recent adoption of LLMs and going source-available only has put a bit of a dent in it.
bobajeff 6 hours ago [-]
I think you mean that the Ladybird project doesn't accept outside contributions anymore but it's still open source (just checked it's under BSD 2-Clause License). Pretty important distinction I think.
kingwill101 6 hours ago [-]
It's just a pause until they get to their alpha deadline. Hard to do that when you can't quickly validate all the drive by llm contributions
bobajeff 6 hours ago [-]
The last few times I've tried to build Servo it's failed for me. (It's also one the very few rust projects that have ever failed to build for me).
minraws 3 hours ago [-]
On a Linux system or something else? Iirc a proper build uses spider money which is hell to build/embed.
bobajeff 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it's a Linux system. I can't remember if it was spidermonkey that it failed on or not. Though it sounds like maybe they should consider using another JavaScript engine if it's causing problems.
9cb14c1ec0 7 hours ago [-]
Does anyone actually use Servo for anything?
ChrisSD 6 hours ago [-]
Maybe give them a second? Yes, it's usable for applications web views if you're willing to restrict yourself but for general purpose web browsing there's still a lot that needs doing (but work is progressing). Under Google's management, web tech has grown fast. And it's an ever shifting living standard. There is a lot for any alternative browser engine to implement, let alone keep pace with the changes.
NetOpWibby 11 minutes ago [-]
> Maybe give them a second?
It's been a decade plus and new browsers have come out in that time.
acephal 53 seconds ago [-]
New browser engines have not
esprehn 6 hours ago [-]
Servo is 14 years old, it's hardly a new project. Ladybird has come much farther in a shorter amount of time. The issue has always been Mozilla not being focused.
ChrisSD 6 hours ago [-]
Servo was sparsely maintained for years after Mozilla abandoned the project. Just in the last year it has picked steam as an independent project with a range of third party sponsors. Work is now progressing apace and it's becoming increasingly compatible with real-world websites.
dabinat 5 hours ago [-]
Ladybird has far more funding. The original blog post said Servo brought in $7k last month. Compare that to Ladybird and the first donation on this list already exceeds Servo’s total:
https://ladybird.org/newsletter/2026-06-30/
sieabahlpark 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
akiselev 6 hours ago [-]
> Ladybird has come much farther in a shorter amount of time.
That's hardly a fair assessment when large parts of Servo were mainlined into Firefox years before Ladybird even existed. Stylo, their CSS engine, landed in Firefox 57 in 2017 replacing ~160k lines of C++ with ~85k lines of Rust.
Servo wasn't originally really intended as a browser competitor. It was the flagship experimental project of the Rust language to replace parts of Firefox with memory safe implementations, which it pulled off in style. It's only recently that people have picked it back up as a browser project, years after Mozilla killed the development.
Klonoar 5 hours ago [-]
It’s been around for 14 years but it wasn’t always developed during those 14 years.
It’s also no longer a Mozilla project.
Permik 5 hours ago [-]
I've got a stripped down installation of win11 in a vm that has Servo as its only browser if there's ever a need to open a website in it. It's something!
cyberax 6 hours ago [-]
I played around with it as a replacement for embedded WebKit in a desktop app. It's getting there!
It's obviously not ready yet, but it's also not "infinitely far" anymore. I'm donating to them, because I think that they're the only realistic successor to the dying Firefox.
rpdillon 7 hours ago [-]
Not really. There's a parallel thread on the front page where everybody's talking about writing a browser engine in anything other than Rust is irresponsible, and ridiculous. And yet, no one's rushing to pick up Servo. There seem to be some projects in GTK and QT to embed it, but other than a handful of pretty niche browsers, doesn't seem like there's much use.
Rohansi 7 hours ago [-]
Nobody is using it because it's not ready to be used. Compatibility with web standards is nowhere near the level of browsers people actually want to use.
Xirdus 7 hours ago [-]
Writing a new browser engine at all is irresponsible and ridiculous. Doing it in anything other than Rust just makes it slightly more irresponsible than it already is.
adzm 6 hours ago [-]
I don't see how it is irresponsible or ridiculous. More browser engines is a good thing. It might be irresponsible to bet your company on it at this point, but on its own I think it is a worthy endeavor. Plus it looks like a lot of fun to work on! This is hacker news after all.
akiselev 5 hours ago [-]
> And yet, no one's rushing to pick up Servo.
Mozilla Firefox merged Servo's Stylo CSS engine into Firefox 57 in 2017 and their WebRender renderer into Firefox 67 in 2019. I guess you could call that a "pretty niche browser" even then but that's a stretch.
No one's rushing to pick it up because Servo was originally an experimental Rust project meant to incrementally replace parts of Firefox. Then Mozilla stopped funding its development, and only recently have people picked it back up again as an independent browser implementation.
cyberax 6 hours ago [-]
Up until ~2015 one of the world's most deployed browser engines was Sciter. A work of _one_ person. A fast embedded browser engine, a binary about 4Mb in size.
It was used to render the UI in apps like our favorite McAfee antivirus.
This niche is still wide open. Electron apps are just terrible, and a focused fast embeddable browser engine would be very welcome.
nicoburns 5 hours ago [-]
I've been building for the fast/embeddable browser engine niche:
Typical binary sizes are around 10-20mb, although you can go smaller by doing things like excluding features or compiling with `Os`/`Oz`.
There's no JavaScript yet (which can also be a benefit of course!), but people have recently started experimenting, and we may well start on this soon.
cyberax 5 hours ago [-]
This is awesome! Do you think you can host something like React Native if you add a JS engine?
nicoburns 2 hours ago [-]
Yes! There are a few experiments with JS engines going on (all very early stage atm (and many vibe coded) but looking promising enough to justify doing a proper implementation in future).
With this you can actually run regular React DOM (so fully compatible with deploying the same codebase to web). There is then the potential to mix in native components, although that's not fully built-out today.
Finally, as part of this project we develop Dioxus Native (see https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus and https://dioxuslabs.com). This allows you to write your app in a React-like framework in Rust, which also allows you to write a single codebase and compile to both native (desktop/mobile) using Blitz and to web (compiles to WASM, renders using real DOM nodes).
Rohansi 6 hours ago [-]
> This niche is still wide open. Electron apps are just terrible, and a focused fast embeddable browser engine would be very welcome.
I agree with you but throwing web standards out the window like Sciter is a non-starter. One of the benefits of Electron apps is still having the option to run it in your browser.
cyberax 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, that's why Servo is so exciting.
It doesn't have to implement _all_ the standards, just a subset that is compatible with the full set. So that if you can develop an app within that subset and have it working in other browsers. But not necessarily vice versa.
Rohansi 1 hours ago [-]
If you're going by binary size then Servo is already as big as other browsers. 106 MB excluding dependencies, or 274 MB including dependencies.
hn_submit 6 hours ago [-]
I believe Ladybird is being ported to Rust as we speak.
kingwill101 6 hours ago [-]
Nah, just individual components where memory haters
nicoburns 5 hours ago [-]
> just individual components
That kinda undersells it I think. It's really core components being ported: the JavaScript engine is already ported, with the style and layout systems underway.
7 hours ago [-]
Xirdus 7 hours ago [-]
Servo has always been a purely reasearch project with no intention to be ever used in production.
stackghost 7 hours ago [-]
I thought the original purpose was to rEwRiTe iT iN rUsT and replace gecko in Firefox?
It's been a decade plus and new browsers have come out in that time.
That's hardly a fair assessment when large parts of Servo were mainlined into Firefox years before Ladybird even existed. Stylo, their CSS engine, landed in Firefox 57 in 2017 replacing ~160k lines of C++ with ~85k lines of Rust.
Servo wasn't originally really intended as a browser competitor. It was the flagship experimental project of the Rust language to replace parts of Firefox with memory safe implementations, which it pulled off in style. It's only recently that people have picked it back up as a browser project, years after Mozilla killed the development.
It’s also no longer a Mozilla project.
It's obviously not ready yet, but it's also not "infinitely far" anymore. I'm donating to them, because I think that they're the only realistic successor to the dying Firefox.
Mozilla Firefox merged Servo's Stylo CSS engine into Firefox 57 in 2017 and their WebRender renderer into Firefox 67 in 2019. I guess you could call that a "pretty niche browser" even then but that's a stretch.
No one's rushing to pick it up because Servo was originally an experimental Rust project meant to incrementally replace parts of Firefox. Then Mozilla stopped funding its development, and only recently have people picked it back up again as an independent browser implementation.
It was used to render the UI in apps like our favorite McAfee antivirus.
This niche is still wide open. Electron apps are just terrible, and a focused fast embeddable browser engine would be very welcome.
Source: https://github.com/dioxuslabs/blitz
Status: https://blitz.is/status/css
Typical binary sizes are around 10-20mb, although you can go smaller by doing things like excluding features or compiling with `Os`/`Oz`.
There's no JavaScript yet (which can also be a benefit of course!), but people have recently started experimenting, and we may well start on this soon.
With this you can actually run regular React DOM (so fully compatible with deploying the same codebase to web). There is then the potential to mix in native components, although that's not fully built-out today.
Finally, as part of this project we develop Dioxus Native (see https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus and https://dioxuslabs.com). This allows you to write your app in a React-like framework in Rust, which also allows you to write a single codebase and compile to both native (desktop/mobile) using Blitz and to web (compiles to WASM, renders using real DOM nodes).
I agree with you but throwing web standards out the window like Sciter is a non-starter. One of the benefits of Electron apps is still having the option to run it in your browser.
It doesn't have to implement _all_ the standards, just a subset that is compatible with the full set. So that if you can develop an app within that subset and have it working in other browsers. But not necessarily vice versa.
That kinda undersells it I think. It's really core components being ported: the JavaScript engine is already ported, with the style and layout systems underway.
> We are not “rewriting the browser”. That's impossible. Put down the gun.