Servo to Advance in 2023 (opens in new tab)

Not only that but they're a worker-owned cooperative. This is all very impressive.

> Igalia is a private, worker-owned, employee-run cooperative model consultancy focused on open source software. Based in A Coruña, Galicia (Spain), Igalia is known for its contributions and commitments to both open-source and open standards. Igalia's primary focus is on open source solutions for a large set of hardware and software platforms centering on browsers, graphics, multimedia, compilers, device drivers, virtualization, embedded Linux, and device drivers.[2][3]

I don't know, but my guess from their stated mid-term goals [1] would be that they're funding this themselves, in the hope of being hired for consultancy/feature development jobs on Servo once it gets used in small embedded devices, similar to how they get paid for contributing to other browser engines.

Edit: I also imagine most of the answer to "Who is funding Igalia?" in the FAQ of a similarly Igalia-led project, Wolvic, is relevant here [2]:

> Generally speaking, Igalia is funded by a wide variety clients. Some of our contracts allow or encourage us to discuss the work; others do not.

> Igalia works on a lot of things, from graphic drivers to multimedia, as well as the web platform. Igalia’s model expands the ability for investment into the web platform and web engines. We think that is not only good for businesses, developers, and users, but fundamentally useful to the long term health of the Web.

> Igalia itself re-invests in things we feel are important, but that we think under-served or else very, very interesting. Very often we are able to find good alignments with client work. Igalia is also the maintainer of a few official WebKit ports, including WPEWebkit, which powers millions of devices. We are able to do this and build a team around a diverse combination of investments, which in turn makes WebKit better and helps the larger web ecosystem remain healthier. Our ideas around XR are not dissimilar.

[1] https://people.igalia.com/mrego/servo/igalia-servo-tsc-2022/...

[2] https://wolvic.com/en/faq/#who-is-funding-igalia%3F

The pace at which Ladybird is evolving is impressive, both LibWeb and LibJS. I've never seen anything like it. The amount of work needed to make a browser work is uncanny and they're making it look easy (it's not).

I was around when webkit browsers started to appear. Back then, the engine was leveraging almost a decade of work on KHTML. It wasn't something pulled out of thin air. All popular browsers nowadays have their roots in 90's and early 2000's codebases.

Servo is a very cool project as well, I'm rooting for them!

> I'd love to see done to Chrome what WireGuard did to OpenVPN.

While I share the hope, the situation is (imho) very different. OpenVPN is FOSS while Chrome is proprietary... OpenVPN is a tool which still helps many many many users while Chrome is a mixed bag - pretty good browser made by a worlds largest advertising company.

Because an unexploitable browser (which is the main fundamental advantage of Servo) is more important for Tor than elsewhere since an exploit will compromise anonymity.

Also, since Tor browsing is often done with JavaScript off, and removing JavaScript removes a huge amount of web features that need to be supported (including a JavaScript engine, which I think Servo still doesn't have a pure Rust implementation of), it's much easier to make a usable browser for this use case than others.

Servo has always been easy to embed. Basically the host needs to provide a GL surface and input events, and gets some callbacks from Servo.

Maybe I should revive the Gonk port[0]...

[0] https://github.com/fabricedesre/servonk/

>first priority for the project would be to make it easy to integrate into other applications, instead of building a full fledged browser

That's the case. From homepage:

> Servo’s mission is to provide an independent, modular, embeddable web engine, which allows developers to deliver content and applications using web standards.

Exactly - there are cases there where it wouldn't matter too much that it isn't complete yet.

Wolvic uses Gecko.

It was far obvious it would be used to provide things piecemeal to Gecko when it was started. The decision to port WebRender came more or less at the same time when it was decided that Servo, which had a great velocity at that point, would focus on VR and AR usage.

It wasn't too hard to read between the lines for what was happening especially considering how political Mozilla is from the inside. The decision to stop the project some time later wasn't much of a surprise from then on.

Servo was a PoC browser that did not need to become an actually usable browser by itself, but it served as a test bed for writing browser parts in Rust so they could be used to replace bits of Firefox (Gecko).

Now it seems they are pushing for Servo as a browser and goal by itself.

Technically Mozilla incomes come from being a foil to Google for an hypothetical antitrust probe. At this point both Gecko and Firefox are utterly irrelevant.