Servo, the Rust-based browsing engine spun off from Mozilla, keeps making progress every month, and this made Ignacio Casal Quinteiro wonder: what if we make a GTK widget so we can test Servo and compare it to WebKitGTK?
As part of my job at Amazon I started working in a GTK widget which will allow embedding a Servo Webview inside a GTK application. This was mostly a research project just to understand the current state of Servo and whether it was at a good enough state to migrate from WebkitGTK to it. I have to admit that it is always a pleasure to work with Rust and the great gtk-rs bindings. Instead, Servo while it is not yet ready for production, or at least not for what we need in our product, it was simple to embed and to get something running in just a few days. The community is also amazing, I had some problems along the way and they were providing good suggestions to get me unblocked in no time.
↫ Ignacio Casal Quinteiro
The code is now out there, and while not yet ready for widespread use, this will make it easier for GTK developer to periodically assess the state of Servo, hopefully some day concluding it can serve as a replacement for WebKitGTK.
Servo is not even close to being ready to be a web browser but it is already a capable web rendering engine if you have control over the content. Perhaps people making things like Kiosks or embedding an HTML viewer in an application that views internally generated content could make use of this. Servo could offer a smaller footprint and higher security for this to make sense.
As an actual desktop or mobile web engine to challenge Blink (Chrome) or Gecko (Firefox), Ladybird is still the most likely candidate. It is quite a bit further along at implementing the modern web and I think there are more people working on it at this point.