Servo: a vision for the future of Firefox

http://www.2ality.com/2012/02/servo.html

https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/

 

A disturbance in the force is telling me Mozilla may launch a new browser called 'Servo' one day ...

 

so they are giving up on 64 bit firefox so that they can make a 2nd browser. awsome!

 

That second browser may be 64bit. No way to know.

It's interesting, but we knew they were planning to do this for a while. They've been working on Rust and saying they're going to move to it for Firefox.

The security team stated that they see it as a better solution than a sandbox. I disagree with this, but we'll have to see. Ada never caught on and it wanted to be a secure language. It was somewhat successful in that scope, which is why it's used for critical infrastructure and DOD work.

Whereas programming languages tend to make bugs more difficult for programming languages it's things like stack cookies that make entire classes of bugs unexploitable. And sandboxes, historically, have proven effective.

Jumping to Rust may be a good idea but I'm not convinced. It's not a really established language, developers won't necessarily be as comfortable committing to Firefox in a new language.

We'll see.

 

Look forward to plenty of bugs.

 

The Servo Parallel Browser Project - https://github.com/mozilla/servo#readme

Servo Development - https://github.com/mozilla/servo

The Rust Programming Language - http://www.rust-lang.org/

 

I wonder if they stick with the name Firefox, or go with Firefox II, Firefox Servo, Firefox Plus or anything else for that matter.

 

They just need to stick to the same name Firefox. I hate when they make additions such as Super, Dupler, Ultra, Mega, or all 4 combined Super Dupler Ultra Mega Firefox 200.

 

I agree. But would it still be Firefox?

 

Servo isn't a complete rewrite of Firefox.

http://paulrouget.com/e/servo/

 

I'll miss Gecko when it goes. It would be interesting to see what Servo would be like in SeaMonkey though.

 

How about ServoFox Pro?

 

I'm trying Pale Moon 64x. I find it to be a snappier FF or Waterfox. No problems so far.

 

LOL! I pity someone trying to pitch that at an advertising agency.

 

The problem with Pale Moon is that 3rd party applications such as AVs/AntiLoggers don't recognize it. In my case the Outpost firewall and Zemana Antilogger that are both not compatible with it. Besides that, yeah, it is an awsome browser.

 

Keep the same UI as in Firefox 2.0. And give us extensions and as far as I am aware it will be firefox.

 

Sounds like a good plan. In my experience though, different rendering engines all have similar quirks. Whether I used Maxthon 2, Firefox, SeaMonkey or K-Meleon, I could always tell they had Gecko. Change that & they would 'feel' very different. Maxthon 3 feels more like Chrome or Safari now, it acts like it has a WebKit engine. Which is not surprising, as it has.

 

I'm running Outpost and I don't see it protesting PM. Could there be something not obvious? My Avast doesn't show any problems I can see either. The only thing I notice is that on some sites I can't run videos because they say I have javascript disabled, and it isn't disabled. U Tube works OK.

 

Actually it is a good thing. This gives me hope that Firefox actually is working on moving the browser forward in areas that it was lacking so I am no much less bothered that they dumped the 64 bit development. Probably a waste of time in light of this.

 

The issue is things like Norton/Kaspersky toolbars and other binary add-ons that specifically look for Firefox. They will not function in a browser that is not named Firefox even if it is compatible in every other way.

 

App guard doesnt recognize Pale Moon and will mot show under protected app list.

 

I agree different engines do feel different but I just dont think that abandoning your flagship product name would be beneficial.

 

I look forward to this. The main problem with Firefox is its huge legacy code base, the lingering memory management issues, XUL rendering etc. Improving these is a huge task because of the nature of the code. Spidermonkey is the most modern part of the browser and reusing that while rewriting everything else is the right approach.

 

Yeah, I'm sure they'll still call it Firefox.

 

I cannot believe how clunky, bloated, and behind Mozilla seems to be. Opera is the only alternative to Chromium I would consider, so I like having them as an option, despite the problems.

Let's hope they focus more on speed, and less on features. Opera has enough features, and looks great.. Now we need to keep tweaking speed.