Servo Alternatives

Posts

• In the process of complete degoogling, is there a friendly way of watching YouTube videos on a smart TV?
  reddit.com/r/degoogle | 2021-02-26

  Regarding browser alternatives I heard about servo sometime back.

• Tauri: An Electron alternative written in Rust
  news.ycombinator.com | 2021-02-19

  Do you have more specifics, and/or have you advised them of the difficulties? It seems to use the same "mach" build process as does firefox, and I build FF developer edition regularly (not every day, but damn near): https://github.com/servo/servo#normal-build

  While investigating this, I have deep sympathies for whoever has to work with that taskcluster silliness because yikes that is some A++ grade obfuscation as compared to a .gitlab-ci.yml or .circleci or even the .travis.yml they migrated off of

• Qutebrowser v2.0.0 released (with better adblocker)
  news.ycombinator.com | 2021-01-28

  Chromium/WebKit is available as a library in various ways; Gecko isn't really.

  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

  news.ycombinator.com | 2021-01-28

  I agree, all approaches to this have some kind of major drawback. The main pain point with the approach chosen by qutebrowser is probably missing support for WebExtensions (i.e. Chrome/Firefox extensions), though I still hope that'll change with QtWebEngine some day: https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-61676

  Other similar projects are using WebKitGTK, or indeed Electron: https://vieb.dev/ - again, probably not better/worse than QtWebEngine, just a different set of problems.

  qutebrowser actually has an abstraction layer over the backend (which is why it can support QtWebEngine and the older/outdated QtWebKit, with little effort needed to keep support for the latter). If there is some new kind of library appearing some day which can draw to a Qt window and used from Python, it'd totally be possible to add support for it to qutebrowser without too much effort.

  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

  As for extensions - other replies to your comment already mention this, but the main problem is that the WebExtension API is very constrained. On top of that, there's no API for handling keyboard input, so those extensions work by injecting JavaScript code handling keyboard inputs into every page you visit. That works, but only barely - lots of hacks are required for those kind of WebExtension limitations, and they won't work on pages where Mozilla decides extensions can't inject JS (such as internal pages or the Mozilla addons page). Again the folks behind Tridactyl have some ideas on how to improve the situation, but so far this hasn't happened yet: https://tridactyl.xyz/ideas/#write-a-keyboard-api-for-firefo...

  news.ycombinator.com | 2021-01-28

  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

  news.ycombinator.com | 2021-01-28

  > 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

• How Vivaldi browser is different from Google Chrome
  news.ycombinator.com | 2021-01-15

  > This seems a little dismissive of the Servo project.

  I disagree. The servo project has not (yet) "built a new engine from scratch". In fact it is very far from being a complete engine, if you look at their "Remainig Work" Page[^1].

  BTW, last year, they focused on Virtual Reality, which isn't helpful to build a basic web engine. According to their roadmap[^2], they're not even sure of what their long-term target is: a new web browser or an embedable lib.

  [^1]: https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Remaining-work

  [^2] https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap

• Hacktoberfest: 69 Beginner-Friendly Projects You Can Contribute To
  dev.to | 2020-09-29

  https://github.com/servo/servo The Servo Browser Engine