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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I believe Ladybird is being ported to Rust as we speak.
Nah, just individual components where memory haters
> 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.
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.
I've been building for the fast/embeddable browser engine niche:
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.
This is awesome! Do you think you can host something like React Native if you add a JS engine?
> 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.
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.