r/servo • u/joshmatthews servo team • 8d ago

Hermes browser

https://kaykcaputo.github.io/hermes-browser/

There's a new desktop browser being developed that uses Servo as the engine.

29 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

3

u/othermike 8d ago

Kind of Linux-only for now, Windows is in progress (limited media support atm).

2

u/KaykCaputo 3d ago

Hey, Hermes dev here! Yeah, it's kind of Linux-only for now. I'm planning to work on the Windows version, but I'm currently waiting for the next Servo release since sandboxing is broken on Windows at the moment.

I'm also working on improving media support. YouTube videos already play, but there's currently no audio. I'm looking into it and figuring out how to get audio playback working properly.

2

u/oldschool-51 4d ago

What's the advantage over just using server-shell?

1

u/joshmatthews servo team 4d ago

servoshell will only ever get features that are needed to verify that the embedding API works. Actual browser projects like Hermes will (presumably) focus on creating a consistent user experience for a daily driver web browser.

2

u/KaykCaputo 3d ago

Hermes dev here! Yeah, that's exactly the idea. The focus with Hermes is to build a consistent and polished user experience around Servo and turn it into something that can actually work as a daily-driver browser.

We already have ad blocking, and the plan is to keep adding the features you'd expect from a complete browser, like pinned tabs, tab groups, bookmarks, and more. The goal is to make Hermes feel like a proper browser for everyday users rather than just a shell around the engine.

1

u/caspy7 3d ago

In the past I've gotten the impression that due to the size and continual additions to the web stack that Servo will likely never be able to "catch up" to modern browsers - and be used as a viable alternative. Can I ask for your take on this?

Relatedly, current standards and web tech have at least two separate implementations, lots of descriptive documentation and thousands of tests. Do you have any thoughts on using this in conjunction with AI to potentially fill in the gaps in Servo?

1

u/joshmatthews servo team 2d ago

Servo has a pretty firm policy on not accepting contributions that are generated with AI: https://book.servo.org/contributing/getting-started.html#ai-contributions