Fenix VS Servo

It's been that way for years: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20351

I lost hope it and other issues would be fixed and moved to Chromium on Android.

Firefox for Android was rewritten pretty much from scratch circa 2020. Collections are one of its many unfinished and poorly-thought-out features, and they never got around to implementing the ability to sync Collections to desktop. It was a known problem in 2019, while the rewrite was being worked on, and Mozilla doesn't appear to have given it any attention in the years since.

People have been asking for this for over a year via Mozilla's current feedback channels, and for two years on the previous issue-reporting venue, to no avail. It was automatically moved from the old venue to Bugzilla ostensibly because Bugzilla makes it easier to track and work on issue reports, but they haven't actually worked on that issue report at all.

Known issue, not a new issue, and unlikely to be fixed any time soon, unfortunately. I had this before I stopped using the Android version a year ago. It was reported as a bug at least a year ago on their old issue tracker, and later moved to the current one, where last activity on the issue report was three months ago. No apparent progress toward any fix.

Since Fenix's first release they've been saying that the absurd limitations on add-ons support were only temporary, and they would have quickly increased the number of supported ones.

And instead absolutely nothing changed for three years.

Furthermore the insane bugs from which Fenix suffers from its release (https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/12731) (making it unbearable) have been left hanging, focusing the few resources on dumb ui experiments.

So everything suggested that Mozilla did not care of its Android browser, or actually that they were deliberately sabotaging it.

This news instead represents a huge improvement, hence my bewilderment.

I don't know what people who downvoted my message thought I meant.

https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/20012 and https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101865

This was sadly deprecated on Android: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/12099

It was such a huge loss for me that for at least a year I used the outdated pre-Fenix. Now they still work on Desktop but they just stopped working on Android (althouth the bookmarks itself are synced-up)

> Is there any easy to use/hack HTML layouting engine where I could experiment with custom CSS attributes and bridge that gap? Would anything from Servo be suitable?

Servo could be used for this. You'd want to add support for parsing the CSS properties themselves to the style crate in https://github.com/servo/stylo and then the layout implementation to the layout2020 crate in https://github.com/servo/servo. You do effectively get a whole browser though.

I'm currently working on building a lighter weight / hackable layout engine based on a combination of https://github.com/servo/stylo (for css parsing and selector resolution), https://github.com/DioxusLabs/taffy (for box-level layout) and https://github.com/pop-os/cosmic-text (for flow/inline layout). I expect to have something decent in around 6 months

Neither of these setups currently have any support for pagination though.

Great to see some competition still alive in browser engine development. See also Servo (previously part of Mozilla) https://servo.org/ - that and Ladybird are still very underdeveloped compared to every day browsers.

It's a huge shame that there are no nightly builds of ladybird to try out but I assume that's because they just don't want the bug reports (if everything doesn't work it's pointless getting random bugs filed).

I haven't messed with it yet but from looking into it, this should absolutely work.

https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Building-on-ARM-desktop-...

don't know, there was a downtime in 2021 and 22 but since 2023, contributions look back to where it was before .. https://github.com/servo/servo/graphs/contributors

The world has moved on though to opinionated tools, and Rust isn't even the furthest in that direction (That would be Go). The equivalent of those two lines in Cargo.toml would be this example of a basic configuration from the jacoco-maven-plugin: https://www.jacoco.org/jacoco/trunk/doc/examples/build/pom.x... - That's 40 lines in the section to do the "defaults".

Yes, you could add a load of config for files to include/exclude from coverage and so on, but the idea that that's a norm is way more common in Java projects than other languages. Like here's some example Cargo.toml files from complicated Rust projects:

Servo: https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/main/Cargo.toml

rust-gdext: https://github.com/godot-rust/gdext/blob/master/godot-core/C...

ripgrep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep/blob/master/Cargo.toml

socketio: https://github.com/1c3t3a/rust-socketio/blob/main/socketio/C...

1. Servo

It won't don't worry. There already are forks, for the worst case scenario. And Servo is on its way. Not yet ready, but it will be. Originally, from Mozilla kitchen.

To pain broad strokes, the layout phase (~= take the HTML, take the CSS, determine the position and size of boxes) is largely sequential in production browser engine today. Selector matching (~= what CSS applies to what element) is parallel in Firefox today, via the Stylo Rust crate originally developed in the research browser engine Servo. Servo can do parallel layout in some capacity (but doesn't implement everything), https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Servo-Layout-Engines-Rep... is an interesting and recent document on the matter.

Parallel layout is generally considered to be a complex engineering problem by domain experts.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/08/inside-a-super-fast-css-en... is a really cool article that is related, that is a few years old but what it says is largely correct today.

[Article author/submitter here]

I can only tell you that it is not what this is about, inasmuch as I was at the talk and there was not a single mention of Firefox Reality or Wolvic in the talk.

Wolvic might use Servo – but I think if it did they would mention it, right?

The talk didn't and the word "Wolvic" does not occur anywhere on https://servo.org

So I am guessing not, no.

Igalia has -- or rather is because it's a co-op -- about 100 developers. They are not all working on the same thing.