Servo is unique for a few other reasons, too. It’s managed by the Linux Foundation Europe with decisions made by a technical steering committee, not a big tech company. One of the main goals is to be an “embeddable web rendering engine,” meaning it’s not just for browsers—it could be a replacement for Electron or the Android WebView. Servo is also the first completely new browser engine in decades, so it’s taking lessons learned from mainstream browsers while building a new foundation.
↫ Corbin Davenport
At the moment, as Davenport notes, Servo is far from ready to be a daily driver browser engine. Tons of websites’ rendering is broken and some crash the browser altogether, and performance is nowhere near that of the other browser engines. This makes perfect sense, as Servo is still in heavy development, and there’s no massive corporation with endless money (and ulterior motives) backing it.
Still, out of all the various attempts at wrestling control away from Blink and WebKit, I feel like Servo’s the one with the most promise in the long term.
> Servo is also the first completely new browser engine in decades
Perhaps it was the “first” in decades but it is of course not the only completely new browser:
https://ladybird.org/
> there’s no massive corporation with endless money (and ulterior motives) backing it
True. But there is a company backing it–Igalia:
https://blogs.igalia.com/mrego/servo-revival-2023-2024/
I really have high hopes for Ladybird.
I am leaving this reply from Ladybird. I test it fairly often and one of the things I like to do is come to OSnews as it works well (except one tiny layout issue) and most of the sites that OSnews points to work well also. Functionality wise, it is already quite impressive how much of the web Ladybird can handle.
It is still pretty slow though. It may be the Javascript.
I should have mentioned that Ladybird currently scores 93 on Acid 3 (article says that Servo is 83 and that “modern” browsers score around 95).
Servo stands out as a promising browser engine due to its unique management by the Linux Foundation Europe and its goal of being an embeddable web rendering engine, although it is still in early development and not yet ready for daily use.@head basketball