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One Year of Sponsored Servo Development

https://servo.org/blog/2026/09/15/one-year-of-sponsorship/
110AshleysBrain | | 46 | HN
flossly | parent | next
I really wish a patron would step up and sponsor this project. Not just by money, but also by plugging it in their browser-carrying products. Maybe Hauwei of Samgsung; they now sling a browser derived of another for-profit --usually competitor-- company's browser.
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macic | parent | next
The Hurd of browser engines
flossly | parent | next
I remember waiting on the Mozilla project to deliver something that could browse as well on linux as closed source browsers on windows/mac did.

It... took... long...

But there it was. And it still works.

embedding-shape | root | parent
Was this recent? Because Firefox were the browser that worked better than all the rest, for quite many years, maybe 2005-2010, and Firefox had no competition basically until Chrome arrived on the scene.

Just the fact that Firefox got browser tabs before anyone else, and Firebug, just took it to another level compared to all the other browsers available at the time.

vlovich123 | root | parent | next
Your history is off. Opera was the first mainstream browser to implement tabs and boy was Opera also much faster than Firefox at its peak (both UI, resource usage, and rendering) which overlaps that “peak” Firefox period by a lot.

Firefox was great because it was open source but it wasn’t ever really the “best” browser - it was the best open source browser.

saidinesh5 | root | parent | next
> Hardware accelerated video decoding (for video playback or for WebRTC) is available via VA-API for both X11 and Wayland. Since firefox-101.0.1-4 package it's enabled by default for Intel/AMD users.

From https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Firefox_Hardware_acceleration

I think that was around 2022-23.

I remember this affecting my laptop video watching a lot. Google meet feeling sluggish on Firefox is also something I remember until very recently..

lukan | root | parent
Firefox was bad on linux for a long time. Even running the windows ff build via wine/proton got you better performance than the "native" build (I think that was around 10 years ago).
mrmincent | parent
Feels like ladybird is going to Linux Servo
| root | parent | next
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flossly | root | parent
That's news! Would be really cool.
vyaa | parent | next
Congrats on the successful year!
fifilura | parent | next
Hot take... There is something about programming projects spending 10x (or 1000x) the effort to parallelize execution when everything is still restricted by von Neumann architecture.
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p-e-w | parent | next
What can one actually do with Servo today?

It’s apparently still not ready to be used as a browser engine (and may never be), so what exactly is it for?

nextaccountic | parent | next
https://v2.tauri.app/blog/tauri-verso-integration/

https://github.com/versotile-org/tauri-runtime-verso

Servo doesn't implement the whole web platform, but your own desktop app isn't the whole web. You can generally work around any limitations or missing features. And it might be lighter than CEF or whatever.

gyulai | root | parent
Couldn't agree more. Looking at [1], it seems to me like Servo has a much better adoption story than Ladybird. The latter seems to be just building a browser that's going to be crashy and not really work on the web. The former is addressing problem spaces where, even with the limitations of the half-finished state it's in, it can be usefully applied: WebView/Electron-replacement and headless browsers. Things not currently on this list that could/should be: HTML rendering for desktop E-Mail clients. Also, I wonder to what extent they're implementing paged media and capable of targetting PDF output or similar (like weasyprint). That could be another domain, where you don't need full web-scale abilities.

And yet, somehow, Ladybird seems to be the darling of the masses (in certain circles at least). Doing vibe-ports to Rust, while going closed-contribution also, in my mind, sits in a marked contrast to the origin story that initially generated so much goodwill.

[1] https://servo.org/made-with/

foresterre | parent | next
Regardless of actual use as an (embedded) browser, it is useful in the sense that it can be used to provide (another) source of validation about whether specs and WPT [1] tests are properly and clearly defined. That helps for long term browser compatibility.

[1] https://wpt.fyi/results/?label=experimental&label=master&pro...

charcircuit | root | parent
>long term browser compatibility

Making a new browser engine hurts browser compatibility more than it helps it. It now becomes one more target that needs to be tested against, limitations need to be kept tracked of, etc. The best thing for long term browser compatibility is focusing resources into Blink. In regards to the standard we can use LLMs to cross reference the spec, with tests, and with the implementation to make sure all match.

teekert | root | parent | next
Ah, you must be too young to have experienced early Internet Explorer, which attempted just this.
charcircuit | root | parent
Internet Explorer was not open source acting as engine everyone's browser could use and it got abandoned by Microsoft. It is not the same situation.
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latexr | root | parent | next
> The best thing for long term browser compatibility is focusing resources into Blink.

That’s what makes Google more dominant, and if you think that’s a good idea you should really put down your LLM and go read up on a bit of history. Do you want to live in a world where a single company controls your access to the web? Are you eager to navigate through ad pages with a little bit of web? To have even more of your data mined?

Browser diversity may be a bit annoying for developers, but it is good for users, and developers are users too. When there’s a lack of diversity, everyone but the dominant player is squeezed.

charcircuit | root | parent
Google's dominance comes from market share not from owning upstream. If a different fork took 90% market share that fork would have the dominance and power.
embedding-shape | root | parent | next
> The best thing for long term browser compatibility is focusing resources into Blink.

Lol, for Blink perhaps, what about the rest of the ecosystem, the web and the users, like the ones who don't even use Blink?

Very idealistic point-of-view with no basis in reality, sadly, because wouldn't it be nice if we could care about just one engine?

Oxodao | root | parent
yeah in a perfect world google dictates how the standard will evolve, we kill all competition so we're sure that you have only one target to build your software against, I'm sure a monopoly will greatly improves innovation and not be used to stiffen competition. /s
charcircuit | root | parent
Using Blink doesn't mean you have to defer all decisions to Google. You just benefit from not having to duplicate work.
nerdypepper | parent
servo is incredibly cool. super easy API to embed, and to build browsers around it.
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bpbp-mango | parent
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