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phplovesongtoday at 2:26 PM4 repliesview on HN

Did firefox drop servo? I recalled they where in the progress of "rewrite in rust"?


Replies

dralleytoday at 2:29 PM

Firefox incorporated parts of the Servo effort which were able to reach maturity. Stylo (Firefox's current CSS engine) and Webrender (the rendering engine) and a few other small components came from the Servo project.

Most other parts of Servo were not mature enough to integrate at the time Mozilla decided to end support for the project and didn't look like they would be mature enough any time soon. The DOM engine for example was in the early stages of being completely rewritten at the time because the original version had an architecture that made supporting the entire breadth of web standards challenging.

Keep in mind that you can continue adding Rust to Firefox without replacing whole components. It's not like Mozilla abandoned the idea of using more Rust in Firefox just because they stopped trying to rewrite whole components from the ground up.

andrubytoday at 2:34 PM

Yes, during the layoff of August 2020

Mozilla laid off the full Servo team, but never publicly announced this afaik. Wikipedia includes it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox#cite_ref-120

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estebanktoday at 4:19 PM

To add to the other replies, Firefox was explicitly never going to consume all of Servo. It was always meant to be a test bed project where sub-projects could be migrated to Firefox. I suspect that the long term intent might have been for Servo to get to a point where it could become Firefox, but that wasn't the stated plan.

alarmingfoxtoday at 2:31 PM

I think they implemented parts of it into their Gecko engine. But they laid of all the Servo development team in like 2020 I believe.

Only recently when it moved over to the Linux Foundation has Servo started being worked on again