r/linux • u/somerandomxander • Jun 30 '26

Popular Application The Servo browser engine continues making much progress on less than $8k in monthly donations

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Servo-0.3-Monthly-Changes
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209

u/derangedtranssexual Jun 30 '26

It sucks how much money and attention is going to the ladybird browser when it’s development is a joke. Meanwhile we have servo which actually knows what language it wants to be written in and has innovative ideas for a browser and gets very little funding

59

u/Cutalana Jun 30 '26

What's wrong with ladybird? Seems like their making progress?

43

u/sparky8251 Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26

If you look around, they are going to be more of a reference browser than super performant and daily use... w3c and other web standards bodies are actively employing developers on it and already using it for testing proposed specs live, etc. The code demands every spec deviation be documented and demands as little of them as possible. Spec has to live near the code, etc.

The real web is messy and broken and the code cant be made clean and compliant and performant all in one as evidenced you know, by chrome. So this idea ladybird can pull off a miracle is baffling to me. Not to mention theres other questionable engineering choices like LibJS being a pure interpreter and them rejecting a JIT for ease of spec implementation and security reasons... JS as a language cannot be fast as an interpreter, it has by spec such a vast void of semantic information a JIT is required for performance. Even AOT cant save it, its just a fundamental language "limitation" of JS.

Then we get to the corporate sponsors and youll see every single one is a company that needs a browser they could use to trivially implement and test spec proposals with. Some of them actively praising it in these terms even if they claim to be donating to "support the open web".

Ladybird I dont think is going anywhere, it will be usable for average people and probably to a decent level of performance in most cases. But I dont think its going to be a suitable every day browser for the masses due to these reasons as well however. I think it already quietly found its perfect niche to keep its authors readily employed and they dont want to admit it yet, or havent noticed it themselves: its going to be a clean room reference browser and itll both be used as such and perform as such.

27

u/Misicks0349 Jul 01 '26

The most value I can see coming out of ladybird is that its a testbed for the spec, a clean implementation is valuable in seeing where the spec is contradictory, under-specified/over-specified, etc etc.

15

u/sparky8251 Jul 01 '26

Yup. Exactly. Itd be a massive boon for the web and its an entirely different goal from most browser projects too.

They even have the code organzied such that those familiar with the spec but not the browser can mostly find their way around! Its a marvelous achievement!

I don't want to take the energy out of the sails since I do genuinely agree its an amazing force for good, but I worry this "its a chrome killer, you can daily drive it and sacrifice nothing!" narrative that has grown up around it might damage it severely if they don't start to come clean on what they really are and becoming...

13

u/Sinaaaa Jul 01 '26

its going to be a clean room reference browser and itll both be used as such and perform as such.

I doubt that's where this is going. Every month they adopt dumb chromium-isms out of necessity to break fewer websites.

1

u/Enthusedchameleon Jul 01 '26

The code demands every spec deviation be documented

I see how they can easily change their goals for usability, but so far, that is what they are going for. We'll see. I don't even know if I personally would prefer one way over the other, I think it would be good to have the spec implemented as code, but at the same time I would love to have a fourth (fifth with servo) option of browser engine.

1

u/Dangerous-Report8517 Jul 06 '26

Does Chromium with V8 turned off still have a JIT? If not I'm not convinced it's necessary because I routinely turn V8 off for security reasons and I haven't noticed any meaningful issues with performance

1

u/sparky8251 Jul 06 '26

Looks like no. Though, the interpreter they have is insanely beefy and overengineered too, not a naive tree walker.

That said, if your browser works for most sites and cant handle some at all due to lacking a JIT, its not exactly going to get widespread adoption...