Mozilla Releases First Build of Servo, Its Next-Generation Browser Engine (venturebeat.com) 131
An anonymous reader writes: As promised, Mozilla has released the first Nightly build of Servo, its new browser engine. This is the first tech demo of Servo, which Jack Moffitt, Servo project lead at Mozilla, described to us a few months ago as "a next-generation browser engine focused on performance and robustness." Packages for macOS and Linux are available to download from here: Servo Developer Preview Downloads. Mozilla promises that Windows and Android packages will be available "soon." And because this is Mozilla, you can check out all the code yourself over on GitHub.
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Donations and ad revenue from search engines from the built in search box.
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Probably from George Sorros for promoting Social Justice
stop choking on flash (Score:1)
If it can stop choking on shitty flash ad panels I'll be happy.
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Go into your browser settings and set flash to "ask to activate".
Holy fuck does it make the web browsing experience better.
Ad Placement (Score:2)
I hope it can figure out where the Ads are going and how big they are. Then, stop the page from jumping around as they load.
The problem is Flash (Score:2)
Uninstall Flash
And... (Score:2)
Crow T. Robot is so jealous...
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In the not-too-distant future --
Next Sunday A.D. --
There was a guy named Joel,
Not too different from you or me.
He worked at Mozilla Institute,
Just another face in a red jumpsuit.
He did a good job cleaning up the place,
But his bosses didn't like him
So they shot him into space.
We'll make a cheesy browser,
The worst we can find (la-la-la).
He'll have to sit and browse the web,
And we'll monitor his mind (la-la-la).
Now keep in mind Joel can't control
Where the programs begin or end (la-la-la)
Because he used those s
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But making a web browser is basically as complex as a whole OS. More like GNU Hurd than a text editor or pdf reader.
This is like a version 0.1 version of an OS where it supports 64 CPUs efficiently and has OpenGL graphics (for Quake and teapots exclusively), but mouse, printing and USB 2.0 support are completely missing, dhcp is broken and the console displays garbage if you try to use color text, to give a silly example of an unimportant feature.
There are many browsers out there but most wrap around Webkit
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No, it's not an "early release".
Sorry this is harsh, but...
if people are too stupid to understand what an alpha release is, or a "nightly build", then they shouldn't be using it in the first place!
i.e. it's not for the point-and-click community, it's meant as an invitation for developers to sample their work and possibly invite others onboard to contribute code.
Complaints about the UI (Score:1)
I see several complaints about the UI. Servo is a rendering engine, not a full browser. The UI included for it I'm sure is just a basic slapped-together UI just to get it functional enough to browse sites. Don't expect much from that UI.
As for rendering incompletely, well it's an early build. Give it time. It already passes the Acid2 test and it will get better with time. None of the current major browsers passed Acid2 when it came out.
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Code of conduct (Score:5, Interesting)
While I generally have a positive opinion historically of Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox I find them to be a little two faced at times.
They claim prominently on their website to care about privacy yet make it extraordinarily difficult to configure the browser not to continuously call home. Even when you follow their expansive instructions it still doesn't stop it and the sheer volume of reasons or excuses implemented in the browser and enabled by default is comically mind boggling.
Then there is the matter of "We follow the Rust Code of Conduct." which essentially codifies coddling, censorship and intolerance.
It is nice to see them doing *something* about the ease of discovering exploits in their current codebase. If it works without downsides it will be awesome for users.
Re: Code of conduct (Score:2)
It has the Mozilla Public Licence, so none of that matters in the end. Ant downstream project fork may choose to ignore the code of conduct and remove the phone home calls. Default settings don't really matter to free libre open source code.
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Being open source gives your users a licence to ignore you if you're a prick.
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Aaah so you have a flawed understanding of English and how words work. Trying to find outrage in a list of rules that are only necessary because some people have no idea how to behave in public doesn't exactly paint you in the most flattering of lights.
"To the privileged, equality looks like oppression".
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Yes, and it happened. And it happened again with Firebird/Firefox. And now is happening again. Technology evolves and changes over time. Get used to it.
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It was faster and more robust than IE and Netscape by leaps and bounds.
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IE5 was great. Fast, low on RAM, rendered all of Web 1.0 as expected, turned into an FTP file manager on ftp:// [ftp] addresses, displayed a lot of porn pop-ups.
Wayland please (Score:2)
Just saying, as far as desktop linux is concerned I'm not sold on "smooth", "accelerated" and "animated" UI yet.
The overhead as well as risks of something going wrong defeat it IMO, unless you have a fast CPU with built-in or recent well supported GPU.
So I'm grudgingly waiting for Wayland of all things, hopefully with good drivers for most cards (nouveau drivers are excused, use them as best effort depending on your hardware/software), hoping it actually works at reducing CPU overhead too, leaving aside des
Logo? (Score:2)
What's with the Dogecoin mascot? Did they really think nobody would notice? They can't even come up with their own damn mascot now?
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That is more of a meme image than a Dogecoin image, although it is the same. I'm sure the real owners of said image are not aware of it's use here.
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Well, the point still stands, there's still something else using that meme in the technology sector. And with a name like "servo" the best they could pick is that Shibe?
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Servo makes me think of either motors or the robot's from the Sims universe. I don't understand the use of that graphic either. I'm sure it is just a placeholder for now.
Anonymous Coward (Score:2, Interesting)
Memory Leak? (Score:2)
Does Servo leak memory like a sieve like Firefox, causing one to relaunch one or two times a day or watch memory use climb to > 1 GB?
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Firefox doesn't leak memory like a sieve, and hasn't since somewhere around version 7 before they managed to find a miracle cure for the shitty addons of that time. Now you really have to have bad luck to get it leaking memory like a sieve: shitty drivers, shitty addons/plugins, shitty third-party apps plugging into it, etc. Anyone claiming to the contrary has yet to prove it, though they like to bandy the claim about regardless.
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I don't know if it's a leak, but taking it for a spin through 5 common homepages has this 1-tab Servo at 750mb Real memory and 3.5gb VM size.
But it's also extremely buggy, so normal for a developer preview.
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haven't seen an actual leak in ages and i've been running minefield/nightly as my browser for a long time.
fwiw i didn't even start to see problems until i got up to 1.6 GB with the mess of tabs i have. there are settings for minimizing and reducing the aggressive ram usage and ways to troubleshoot add-ons. good luck
What is the point of this? (Score:2)
I just skimmed the article, I didn't get the impression it will be replacing the engine in Firefox.
Why run the two products? If Firefox is so fundamentally broken (?) then move development over to this new thing? If not, then continue to work on improving Firefox and implimenting the same features.
Working on 2 seems counterproductive.
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Tom Servo? (Score:2)
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It's a re implementation of Webkit in Rust 2.0.
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"Just program C++ well and it will be safe," the critics say. Unfortunately in the real world that doesn't happen often enough because not everybody is a flawless programmer. And so, what's wrong with making the tool safer?
Also, in what way are they "forcing the world onto it"? Is somebody holding a gun to your head and making you use it?
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Probably because they were inventing Rust at the same time they were using it to write Servo.
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C# wasn't free back then (Score:2)
I don't think .NET Core was open source at the time Mozilla began to develop Servo. Even if Mozilla were to drop Rust today and migrate Servo to C#, that would still take months.
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Mono [wikipedia.org] has existed since 2004. Mozilla has no excuse.
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I haven't played around with it much, but Rust doesn't do garbage collection, which is a major feature in my book. It uses RAII instead which means that memory management is deterministic. It's a lot like using C++ correctly.
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For the same reason you won't do it in Visual Basic: It would be slow as molasses and eat RAM as if there was no tomorrow. Go ahead, try it. Microsoft have already and it doesn't look nice.
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And then there are these things called Integrated Development Environments that put together libraries for you and give you pointers, wizards, GUI elements and such to help you build applications.
You do not need to build a new freaking language to avoid the pitfalls of being ignorant of how t
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They are literally the definition of a mature programming language and you toss them out like they are not.
And what do you mean "non-standard features in compilers", if it's a feature in a popular, mature compiler, it's a damn standard isn't it?
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I was going to ream you for choosing your web browser based on its underlying programming language. After all, if you're not having to interface with it as a plugin-developer, what does it matter?
Then I remembered: security. Relying on a human programmer to get every memory allocation and deallocation right every single time has proven to be a security nightmare for the past 20 years the internet has been accessible by the general public. The more safety checks you can push down into the underlying platf
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Creating a renderer on a brand new immature programming language that has not been around the block long enough for anyone to find it's flaws is a plan for disaster. No way in hell I'd use a browser running on that.
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I was going to ream you for choosing your web browser based on its underlying programming language. After all, if you're not having to interface with it as a plugin-developer, what does it matter?
Then I remembered: security. Relying on a human programmer to get every memory allocation and deallocation right every single time has proven to be a security nightmare for the past 20 years the internet has been accessible by the general public. The more safety checks you can push down into the underlying platform/language/runtime/API, the fewer security holes you'll have.
And if you need proof that your standard, mature languages aren't cutting it, look no further than Symantec's recent debacle. If kernel programmers at the world's premiere security firm can't get it right, who can?
Honestly it wouldn't surprise me if Symantec didn't purposely allow those bugs to stay. It helps sell more advanced, feature filled copies of their products instead. Oh that malware came through? Better buy the premier edition or you might get infected. There's a reason why my companies virus issues went from 2-300 tickets every couple weeks to less than 10 a week. We switched to McAfee.
Re: Refuse to support Rust (Score:4, Funny)
Why is there such a difference?
Slashdot has devolved into a fetid backwater of malcontent cubical trolls; most of the stories aren't even technical in nature, and the technical stories get the least attention from commentors. Rust isn't some hipster fancy Mozilla is playing with for fun. It's an amazing language developed by brilliant designers over many years and it is attracting a lot of smart people because it offers a great deal to professionals that aren't afraid to learn and aren't threatened by new, better tools. Toxic and irrational people like the GP aren't welcome at Hacker News and they tend to do poorly there.
Re: Refuse to support Rust (Score:4, Informative)
So why is Servo so bad?
Browsers are hard. I remember the early days of Firefox, then "Firebird." It was terrible, crashy alpha software and completely unusable for years. And that was based on a "mature" language; they weren't developing the implementation language in parallel. The "browser" problem today is an order of magnitude more difficult because a browser is vastly more complex than it was 15+ years ago; browsers must precisely implement a much larger body of legacy and contemporary "standards" and do so with excellent performance on a much larger spectrum of devices.
Why isn't Rust letting them develop Servo faster and better?
Rust only reached 1.0 13 months ago; most of Servo development has been based on a rapidly moving target while trying to hit a rapidly moving target. Other than the fact that Rust isn't miraculous — and no one has ever claimed it is — the current state of Servo doesn't really tell us much about Rust.
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browsers must precisely implement a much larger body of legacy and contemporary "standards" and do so with excellent performance on a much larger spectrum of devices.
If that were "all" they had to do the job would be much, much easier than it is. The real problem lies in the clause you need to add: "... and also gracefully handle the astonishing and manifold varieties of bizzarely broken, nonstandard, evil, and often just plain utter shit-content that web servers routinely vomit forth when queried."
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I wish I had mod points; Both your comments are well-stated and you seem to be the only mature sensible poster who knows what he's talking about, and not just spitting out swear words without substance.
I've been a loyal Netscape follower and then following Mozilla since they released the source, and I've contributed with bug reports and test cases from the early days of the milestone releases. I switched from using Netscape to Mozilla, even during the unstable and buggy release period.
However, I don't remem
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Browsers are hard. I remember the early days of Firefox, then "Firebird." It was terrible, crashy alpha software and completely unusable for years. [...] The "browser" problem today is an order of magnitude more difficult because a browser is vastly more complex than it was 15+ years ago
You insinuate that they wrote a whole new rendering engine for Firefox alone.
The rendering engine, the largest part of a browser, had already many years under its belt under the Mozilla Suite. You know, the browser/mailagent/newsreader Mozilla were known for before they reprioritised and started drumming up public awareness of Firefox with ads at around version 1.0.
I was a user of Phoenix, which later became Firebird, and after that Firefox.
Yeah right. (Score:2)
" It's an amazing language developed by brilliant designers over many years and it is attracting a lot of smart people because"
Blah blah blah....
Newflash - they said exactly the same damn thing about Java and how it was going to change the world when it came out. Ditto C#. They have their niches but C & C++ still keep on trucking. Don't expect Rust to gain much traction in a rather overcrowded market. Unless it does something that C++ DOESN'T do then not many people will bother to learn it if it gains t
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they said exactly the same damn thing about Java and how it was going to change the world when it came out. Ditto C#.
I'd be thrilled If Rust became as important as Java and C#. Those have been hugely influential and important languages. They must have known what they were talking about, and if they are right again Rust will be a wonderful success.
C & C++ still keep on trucking
If the only thing Rust accomplishes is to force improvements to these legacy languages (as it apparently already is [slashdot.org]) is will be a great contribution. I happen to think it will become more than that, and even as C/C++ continue to evolve and improve, as I'm sure they will, I'm h
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Newflash - they said exactly the same damn thing about Java and how it was going to change the world when it came out.
And it did. Java is the most [tiobe.com] widely [github.io] used [redmonk.com] language in the world.
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Fewer.
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Fewlesser.
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Stannis? I thought you were dead.
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We haven't seen a body. Same for the Black Fish.
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They will probably release a browser with this engine under another name once it has matured more.
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Sorry this is harsh, but...
if people are too stupid to understand what an alpha release is, or a "nightly build", then they shouldn't be using it in the first place!
i.e. it's not for the point-and-click community, it's meant as an invitation for developers to sample their work and possibly invite others onboard to contribute code.
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Rust is designed to prevent a certain class of common bugs. No programming language prevents all bugs. If the programmer types in the wrong method to call, or uses the wrong variable, there is nothing the programming language/libraries can do about it.
Currently, Firefox periodically decides to eat all memory on my MacBook Pro, until the OS notices and freezes the app (gets to about 40-50 Gb of swap space). But for days/weeks at a time, it will stay running at about 5 Gb of memory. Maybe this switch to u
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I occasionally run Flash to see some video's, mainly because Firefox doesn't have the option to not tell websites flash in available, but those pages aren't left open very long (watch the video then close the tab). I was considering switching to the nightly build to enable the separate process support (that's the other thing, some pages, particularly amazon and ebay, like to peg the CPU as part of their effort to track what is happening...)
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thanks for these two ffrls. they both work with the regular version of FF. the performance one I can definitely use, as i will have a bunch of tabs open and then something will just kill ff, and I can't tell what tab/s is/are doing it. the memory one will also be useful, but it's not easy for me to notice that ff is suddenly increasing it's memory usage until it's too late (once the OS notifies you somethings up, ff is unusable).
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I don't recall how OS X reports memory use but double check the difference between virtual and real. For example, right now my Firefox is using 3.5 GB virtual but only 1.1 GB real. And I've got piles of stuff open at the moment.
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Normally FF sits there for me as well, around 4 Gb. But every now and then, boom, something in Firefox starts gobbling memory, until the OS winds up pausing FF because the system runs out of swap space (about 50 Gb). I force-quit FF, wait maybe a minute or so, and the OS goes back to 1 Gb of swap space (with 16 Gb of RAM).
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