Servo VS qtwebkit

> 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.

Not so ancient - Otter uses QtWebKit 5.212 from Mar 10, 2020.

AFAIK, Otter Browser uses the latest QtWebkit-ng on Windows. It scores 341 points in HTML5Test. There is also an experimental Qt WebEngine backend.

The main backend for Otter Browser is QtWebkit Reloaded, last updated in 2020, see the screenshot.

As for Otter Browser, there is a bug in QtWebKit. Try using Otter Browser on Qt WebEngine.

Otter Browser is based on QtWebKit-NG, which is from 2020, so still relevant. That said, you can use the nightly WebKit build from Playwright: https://i.postimg.cc/Fz7FwRQW/Playwright.png

Lastly, the other webkit based project, QtWebkit. It is also very lightweight and fast, It also provides a cross-platform render and It has access to the system dialogs. The down side is that you will have to make a Qt App to use it. If you don't want to implement it, then you cannot use It

> I hate that it's based on Chromium though

There aren't really many alternatives. The main one is WebKitGTK, but that comes with its own set of issues (mostly performance/compatibility). You can use qutebrowser with QtWebKit as well, but I wouldn't recommend it - it's based on a 2018 WebKit with many known security issues: https://github.com/qtwebkit/qtwebkit/releases

I had hoped for Servo to fill that gap at some point, but so far that hasn't happened yet: https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/27579

Another possibility is for Geckoview to be ported to Desktop platforms some day: https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ - something the people behind Tridactyl would like to happen: https://tridactyl.xyz/ideas/#port-geckoview-to-x86_64

> and Qutebrowser privacy related settings also seem quite limited compared to Firefox... (and even compared to Chromium.)

Can you be more specific? Pretty much anything that's possible to expose (either via a QtWebEngine API or via Chromium commandline arguments) is exposed. Certain things (like deleting cookies belonging to a tab when it's closed) just aren't possible without implementing them in QtWebEngine first unfortunately.

FWIW there's an overview here: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/issues/4045

and Qt has mostly moved to qtwebengine/blink. qt-webkit is sort-of-not-really maintained by very few volunteers. https://github.com/qtwebkit/qtwebkit/releases

While you can still use it with QtWebKit instead, I wouldn't recommend doing so, as that's still based on a 2018 WebKit with no process isolation or sandboxing.