Servo, the Rust browser engine originally developed by Mozilla, has posted an update about the project’s progress over the past month, and there’s a lot of good stuff in there.
While our WebGPU support is still very much experimental (
[…]--pref dom.webgpu.enabled), it now passes over 5000 more tests in the Conformance Test Suite, after an upgrade from wgpu 0.6 (2020) to 0.16 (2023) and the addition of GPUSupportedFeatures. A few WebGPU demos now run too, notably those that don’t require changing the width or height on the fly, such as the Conway’s Game of Life built in Your first WebGPU app.On the CSS front, floats and ‘white-space: nowrap’ were previously only supported in our legacy layout engine (
--legacy-layout), but now they are supported again, and better than ever before! Floats in particular are one of the trickiest parts of CSS2, and our legacy version had many bugs that were essentially unfixable due to the legacy layout architecture.
On top of this and other improvements, Servo’s reference browser now also comes with a new user interface, and it comes with a location bar! Keep in mind this is not supposed to be a full-fledged user interface comparable with Chrome or Firefox, so don’t expect the world as a user.
Servo needs to stop pretending it isn’t a browser… and just make itself a decent interface already its like they lowest hanging fruit ever, and nobody is ever going to use it otherwise.
“and just make itself a decent interface already its like they lowest hanging fruit ever”
Are we GUI Yet? 😉
microsoft google and apple are all moving towards fugly flat shit design.
Maybe there is an opening there.
Somebody else is going to have to step up to do that. It does not appear to me that Igalia has any interest.
The do not care if anybody uses it as a browser. They see it as an embedded web engine for things like kiosks. There aims seem to be commercial, not consumer and not even enterprise really.
Which is all fine actually. I am super happy that they have stepped up to move Servo forward. It is an immensely valuable piece of Open Source tech.
It would be great to see it as a browser though. The world would be a better place if, a few years from now, we had Servo and Ladybird as truly community driven browsers alongside the increasingly corporate Firefox, Chrome itself, and the army of browsers built on whatever Google wants to build into Chromium.
tanishaj,
I’m actually curious who their intended demographic is myself. Nothing wrong with a purpose built embeded browser with a rust code base. But then you’ve got features like webgpu and standards compliance covered in the article that really make it seem like they’re not focusing on an embedded niche so much as a general purpose browser.. Since it interests the devs, then by all means they should have a go at it, but I agree with cb88 about releasing it as a full browser. It seems wasteful not to after putting so much work into features that there really isn’t strong demand for in the embedded demographic.