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Mozilla Firefox Open Source Software

Mozilla's New Servo Browser Will Hit Alpha In June 2016 (softpedia.com) 95

Posted by timothy from the now-it's-in-negative-omega dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Mozilla has announced it is releasing the first alpha versions of its Servo browser this upcoming June. The project uses browser.html for the browser's UI and Rust for the browser's core. There's a similarity between how Microsoft launched Spartan (Edge) and how Mozilla is launching Servo now. While many might think Mozilla is sneakily working on a Firefox replacement, Mozilla has also invested quite a lot in Firefox these days, like WebExtensions and e10s, and it may be more plausible that Servo might slowly be integrated in Firefox to replace Gecko, rather than replace Firefox altogether, like Microsoft did with Edge to IE.
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Mozilla's New Servo Browser Will Hit Alpha In June 2016 More

Mozilla's New Servo Browser Will Hit Alpha In June 2016

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  • Wake me up when this browser can make a skinny vanilla latte.

  • Preview Already Available (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    You can already see a preview of what Mozilla will be aiming for with Servo here:

    https://www.google.com/chrome/

    Seriously though, we desperately need a new browser choice. I have no confidence in Mozilla and only use Firefox because it's the least bad browser. Once Mozilla replace the extension model and all the extensions stop working I really don't know what I'll use.

    Are there any promising browsers in the works? One that isn't developed by complete fucktards?

    • I switched to Chromium a while ago and never looked back. The later Firefox releases are just awful.

    • Chrome?! It's barely at Netscape Navigator 3! (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I tried Servo recently. Holy shit, was I ever disappointed.

      There's so much hype about Servo on Hacker News and Reddit, so I thought that maybe it was going to be usable, even considering it's a relatively young project. I was totally wrong!

      It has essentially no usable UI of any sort, at least when I built it from source recently. You run it from the command line and tell it what URL to fetch and render. Maybe this is excusable since it's just a rendering engine, and not an entire browser, but it's still dis

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Dude, it's not even *alpha* yet.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Yes, that's exactly the point!

          Read the comment again (or for the first time, because you might not have read it fully to begin with). You will see:

          Servo needs a fucking massive amount of work to be comparable even to old versions of Firefox or Chrome. I don't see how they can say there will be an alpha grade release this summer. Based on my experience, their engine is a couple of decades behind the times.

          They have a lot of catching up to do in only a few months if they want to get an alpha release out somet

          • An alpha release is supposed to be usable.

            And then a beta release is supposed to be... what? Alpha release are _always_ crashy piles of trash, methinks you've got your standards set too high my good friend.

            Servo isn't, never has been, and has never been intended to be an end-user web browser. Mozilla keeps waffling on whether they want to _make_ it one (probably because they don't want to scare off all their existing contributors on the Gecko side) but their stated priorities have always been 1. do research into parallel execution of web content wh

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by serviscope_minor ( 664417 )

        I tried Servo recently. Holy shit, was I ever disappointed.

        Then you had your expectations way too high. It's not even due to be alpha for a few months. And when it's alpha its in the state of "this is crap let us know when it breaks and it WILL break all the time".

        There's so much hype about Servo on Hacker News and Reddit, so I thought that maybe it was going to be usable,

        Wow, you managed to actually ignore all the hype and only remember that there was hype and not what it'a about. The hype is that it's wri

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by darkain ( 749283 )

      There is always Opera, which is basically the stable version of Chrome. The other option is Vivaldi: https://vivaldi.com/ [vivaldi.com]

    • Maybe check out Vivaldi. It's not stable yet but there are preview builds out. It's from the dude that started up Opera.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by aix tom ( 902140 )

      Are there any promising browsers in the works? One that isn't developed by complete fucktards?

      I like PaleMoon. Basically a "pre-Australis" fork of Firefox, where the developer pledged to leave the UI alone as much as possible ( And also to keep the existing extension model working. )

      Have a read through the release notes to check the "level of fucktardness", which I personally would place at "very low" ;-) : https://www.palemoon.org/relea... [palemoon.org]

  • Shouldn't they call it browserjs? It seems like it is built in JavaScript not HTML like it claims.

    • Rust is just the new language Servo is being written in. Servo is meant only as the core of a browser engine, not the browser itself. I really don't care about Servo, but I am excited about rust. I have a proof-of-concept product written in Perl. After watching a dozen or so later dated rust videos, and reading 1/4 of their nightly book, I have decided to convert my product from the Perl proof-of-concept code to a final product written in rust. I was going to do it in C.

      Rust has constructs that autom

  • Dear Browser Manufaturers. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2016 @10:41AM (#51700515)

    I will pay for a modern, fast, memory efficient ad blocking browser. It literally needs to have literally 2 features on top of "rendering shit correctly". Ad blocking. Tabs. While I'm not the sharpest tool in the toolshed Might I suggest ad blocking not be written in Javascript. Make it part of core functionality.

    I have reached a point in my life where not only have I stopped pirating expensive stuff but am tired of dealing with "Free" stuff that is near useless. My time is how do you say it... "valuable" and dealing with all of the feature bloat that has crept into every browser on the market is wasting it. And no, not as a 'service' or subscription.

    I hand you money. You hand me a browser that works like I want it. And if you come up with a new browser with Features+1 and I want Features+1 I will pay for that too. I don't need an SSH client. Or 'apps' that let me play Angry Fruit Jeweled. And I really don't want something written in C that interprets something in XML to render something through Javascript to display HTML5.

    Multimedia aside, the 2016 web shouldn't feel slower on my 25Mbit connection with an 4 core i7 than I remember it being on my .056Mbit connection and my single core 68k. Hell you could host an IRC server with hundreds of thousands of users with as much CPU as it takes to stay up on 5-6 Facebook 'discussion' open in separate tabs.

    (That goes for a 2016 E-mail client as well).

    • Re:Dear Browser Manufaturers. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Lisandro ( 799651 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2016 @10:54AM (#51700595)

      You're describing Opera before they for some fucked up reason decided to throw their code away and rewrite it as a Chromium skin. I'm still weeping over it.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by cb88 ( 1410145 )
        This exactly... I loaded up the last version of opera that would run on my Sparcstation recently..a pair of 60 and 80Mhz SuperSparcs in there were browsing faster than I've seen firefox load some pages on a netbook with 4x the ram.... sure there is stuff that doesn't work since opera 9.27 or so lacks the features but still... every full featured browser out there is dog slow right now.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by aliquis ( 678370 )

          I don't think Chrome is slow. Firefox is slower (I have 54 000+ bookmarks and lots of tabs open so your benchmark experience may be different), Edge is complete crap and new Opera I don't use because it's not complete.

          I don't get why this article separates Edge from IE because it's still just more of the same crap. It could had been better - it's not. It's slow as fuck if you open some tabs and if you open some more tabs it won't even let you see or change to the newly opened tabs to the right for some reas

          • I have real high hopes for Vivaldi - everything i read about it is something i like. It is still on beta though so some things aren't as polished as they should, but they're slowly getting there.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

          • That and when you go to a site there's an HTML pop-up asking you to sign up for an email newsletter. I just got to the fucking site and haven't had a chance to read the article because you've brought this up asking me for my email address. How am I supposed to know if your site is any good if you don't give me the chance to read it first? At that point I go back and try to remember never to go back to that site.

      • He's describing most browsers circa 2005 except for Internet Explorer

    • I just want a web browser that doesn't register as unique when you visit eff.org's Panopticlick. The only way to deal with fingerprinting these days, is to have multiple VMs, and vagrant up your VM for web browsing, erasing it and bringing it back up every so often to minimize how often one fingerprint is used.

      Some browser that randomizes the order of add-ons presented to the server, fonts, and perhaps turns on and off fake add-ons as well.

      I'd pay for this.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ccr ( 168366 )

        I see that you don't realize that randomizing, etc. just makes your "signature" more unique. And if you give less information, it makes you more unique too.

        The best way to be less unique would be to be very average, or at least look like the majority - e.g. probably the average Windows installation with basic fonts, etc. and most common version of Firefox/Chrome (which varies as time goes by).

        • It looks more and more like a Vagrant install of Windows that uses a PowerShell provisioning script to auto install Chrome, an ad blocker, might just be the way to go. This way, every time the machine is dropped and brought up, it has a new install ID and items present.

          Ideally, the Web browser should feed websites bogus, random data about what is installed and what isn't.

    • Chrome used to be this before Google bought doubleclick, then everything changed. Well maybe not memory efficient.

      Seriously ad's can't get through if you block a few javascript API's. Javascript can't do anything without certain API's and access to the DOM. We know what API's/DOM get abused, lets create ways of letting users easily block those. Website abuses contextmenu functions. Let me block that easily.

      Google even had it in their comics about how a popup would be minimized to the corner and required a

    • Angry Fruit Jeweled

      Reading through your post, I actually thought to myself for a second, "That sounds fun. I'd play that."

      Then I threw up a bit in my mouth.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Sounds like you want Chromium. You can try here for some builds: http://chromium.woolyss.com/ [woolyss.com]

      It's basically Chrome, but with the Google stuff and some closed source modules (like Flash and some codecs) removed. You can install uBlock - it's Javascript but on your i7 you aren't going to notice. Has tabs.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by short ( 66530 )
        The Chromium problem is that any basic functionality - like disabling animated GIFs - is an extension there. And while I can read/review any XPI Firefox extension before installing it from a local copy I haven't figured out how to review the Chrome/Chromium extensions. I can only click on the web to some JavaScript button which gets it installed. Installing closedsource code is insecure. No matter Chromium security jails the extension - as most of the extensions need to read all the web pages I see togethe

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by aliquis ( 678370 )

      I will pay for a modern, fast, memory efficient ad blocking browser. It literally needs to have literally 2 features on top of "rendering shit correctly". Ad blocking. Tabs. While I'm not the sharpest tool in the toolshed Might I suggest ad blocking not be written in Javascript. Make it part of core functionality.

      You don't need to.
      https://vivaldi.com/ [vivaldi.com]
      You're welcome.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      Re "Make it part of core functionality."
      http://icab.de/info.html [icab.de] offers that on OS X.

  • so (Score:2, Insightful)

    by rossdee ( 243626 )

    Are they giving up on Firefox?

    What about Seamonkey?

  • ...comes the sequel, a browser that removes the "legacy cruft" that is the only reason anyone was even still using the first one. There's no longer a need to sneakily remove often used features that you're to incompetent to fix the bugs in, those features will never exist in the first place!

    A new chrome clone turd, sleek and efficient. Free of any imperfections such as "functionality" or "existing user base" that that might slow these brave new developers down.

  • A Waste (Score:3)

    by BrendaEM ( 871664 ) on Tuesday March 15, 2016 @11:55AM (#51701039) Homepage

    They are just dumping all of the effort of those who worked to make Firefox popular.

    BTW, do you remember when Firefox was a 4mb download, and not just the downloader?

  • Grumpy curmudgeons of the world, unite! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Good heavens, there sure is a lot of "old man yells at cloud" in the comments so far, given all the complaining about Firefox. Which the story isn't even about, I should note. I may have missed something, but isn't Firefox open-source/free/libre software? Couldn't you make yourselves an un-"ruined" version or just go back to an older release from an archive rather than complain incessantly about how Mozilla isn't working to give you the browser you want rather than making the browser they want (since you

  • If they allow me to customise the behaviour of the address bar that may already be one point for it. Just put me in the camp which likes to see the whole URL.

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