Sure would be nice to have another Web engine.
Servo, Basilisk and Ladybird make me very optimistic about the future of web browsers. I’m glad to see that people are working on alternatives divorced from Mozilla, as it seems they don’t care anymore.
Why do you think they don’t care anymore? Agreed on the Servo optimism, though. And I hadn’t heard about Basilisk before, so thanks for mentioning it.
Basilisk is the odd one out here. It is a continuation of pre-Servo Firefox ( Firefox before Rust ). It is not exactly a “new” engine.
Ladybird is probably the most exciting project as it is most likely to create a new independent browser suitable for daily use.
Servo was very exciting back when Mozilla was heavily invested in it. Sadly, it was long dormant. It really seems to be heating up again though so that is awesome.
I was so excited for Ladybird, right up until I found out the project lead and main developer, Andreas Kling, is scared of pronouns.
Again, I’m aware some folks think this is annoying, but if you’re the kind of user who shuns Brave because the CEO does stupid shit, Ladybird probably isn’t the way to go either. Not for the moment, at least. People deserve the right to make informed decisions, so I’ll keep sharing this, and I encourage others to do the same when relevant, but don’t harass anyone, please.
If you don’t care about any of this, it’s a very interesting project. I just can’t say I approve.
Long term servo is unlike to be another web engine. It’ll just replace Firefox. Firefox’s old engine won’t get as much development. Then we’ll be left with Safari, Firefox (servo) and googles web manipulation vehicle Chrome safari with more tracking and higher battery/ram consumption.
It would be really great if Mozilla could pick Servo back up, and make it Firefox’s engine, and make it like chromium, where the engine and browser are not so tighltly coupled together. GNOME Web could be so much better if it had the performance of Firefox.
If you like what you see, strongly consider contributing to Servo financially: https://opencollective.com/servo
I did and I feel quite happy about it. Here’s hoping there is more web engines out there 👍
I’m just learning there’s another web engine? I heard about Ladybird but not this. Now I need to try it.
Servo was an experimental ground for Mozilla in some ways (like testing out a new CSS engine and porting it back to Gecko if it works). So it’s quite normal for people to be unaware of it, it was not meant for the public.
But later on it was abandoned by Mozilla and stuck in a limbo, until it got picked up by the Linux Foundation. Now it’s a standalone project and I wish them well. We really need a new FOSS web engine.
One of the differences is that Gecko written in C++ while Servo is written in Rust
It’s also more optimized and modern
I tries it a couple months ago and it was horrible, didn’t even support flexbox back then and it kept crashing. The latest nightly builds are almost usable for basic web browsing though, it’s amazing how fast servo improves
