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There really needs to be a "Linux" of browser engines.
Keep an eye on https://servo.org/
This... LOOKS AWESOME
Can someone who is more knowledgeable about these things explain why I should be hyped for Servo?
So there are a few reasons I'm personally interested in it:
- It isn't being created as the "heart" of a browser - i.e. it is a project to develop the engine and not to develop a browser
- Supported by the Linux Foundation rather than any of the tech corps like Facebook or Google
- Written in Rust - I'm not claiming that this is good because of the language technology itself but Rust is currently very popular with lots of people wanting to learn it and contribute to projects so hopefully this inspires people to get involved with it.
- Not a KHTML/WebKit/Blink (or even a Gecko) fork
- Repo is on GitHub - Don't get me wrong, I'm not a GitHub shill, but generally people monitor and know how to use GitHub better than Google and Mozilla's systems. I'd honestly be just as happy if using GitLab or any other alternatives as they still confirm to that same user experience (and to be fair WebKit is also on GitHub).
And none of those touch on the technology itself which, honestly, I'm not experienced enough to speak on why it is as good as/better/worse than KHTML/WebKit/Blink or Gecko. Words and phrases like "memory safety", "parallelizing" and "performance" are thrown around but I'll leave that to the judgement of those who know better. You might like to have a look at some of the links in https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Browser-Engine-Research if you are interested in that front.
Isn't that gecko, Firefox's engine?
From what I understand, Gecko was a terrible engine from the get-go. It is also difficult to work with, and had a lot of idiosyncrasies that made hard to build anything that isn't just a clone of Firefox. There's a reason why Apple used KHTML as the basis of Safari and not Gecko. Even Brave is based off of Chromium, and the founder of Brave is one of Mozilla's founders!
So apparently no, Gecko is not it. We need something closer to a pure browser engine that is open source.
The current Firefox engine is so much better than before the rewrite. It was literally multiple magnitudes slower than Chrome.
The above commenter is not talking about speed. At least it's not the main point.
I'd argue that's what Gecko is tbh
Well, if you're on linux, there's gnome web, but, It's not very good
Is that not what Chromium is? An open source browser that anyone can adapt to suit their needs.
People are worried that Google controls the project. Anyone using Chromium is basically making their own version of Chrome but with extra features.
Which means they don't fucking understand how browsers work.
Anyone can make a new fork of chromium, Vivaldi has created their own ad and tracker blocking that doesn't rely on Google or the manifest v3 change that broke ad blocking on chromium for everyone else.
You don't have to rely on Google for shit if you're committed to making the fork your own.
And what happens when your fork diverges too much? That will be maintenance nightmare, good luck with that.
How is it any different from developing a new Linux distro?
If that's your metaphore, then the browser engine is the kernel. Have you ever seen a Linux distro forking the kernel and taking it into a different direction? It's always just (relatively) minor changes, if any, so that keeping up with the upstream kernel is possible. Mostly a matter of built-in drivers, and a security feature here and there.
It's exactly what chromium is.
Claiming there's a chromium monopoly is like claiming cars have an internal combustion engine monopoly.
We have that, it's called chromium.