> Servo wants to build an embeddable engine

That’s what they pivoted to after being expelled from Mozilla, but that wasn’t the original goal, was it? It’s the safer(?) one they turned to when the job security evaporated.

(Not sure if that changes anything, just feel obligated to point out the retcon here.)

It would be very cool if Servo were picked up as the engine for a new browser.

You can download Servo right now and use it as a browser: https://servo.org/download/

It is just extremely rough. It is in a far less-usable state than Ladybird even is and very prone to crashing.

But it's memory safe.

Agreed, I really hope that someday we'll get a full rust browser, because rust is a language where I could see myself contributing (e.g. fixing bugs that annoy me when using it all day) to it, compared to other languages like C/C++.

>that wasn’t the original goal

They always aimed for a better embeddable story than Gecko. That and more parallelism in layout and processing.

> It’s the safer(?) one they turned to when the job security evaporated.

Not safer, more like saner multithreading story. Safe rust isn't so much for security as it is safety in a parallel context.

Re better embeddability, sure. As best as I can tell the Firefox devs have been feeling some amount of dismay because of the fact that everyone embeds Chromium/Blink, despite the whole thing having been built more as an application platform rather than as a foundation for one specific web browser. And that’s entirely understandable, as is attempting to do better on the second go-round. But now it seems that Servo is explicitly targeting embedding and -adjacent use cases only, and that’s a post-Mozilla thing.

Re “safe”, I meant that targeting the embedding usecase is safer in a social and project-planning way, as in smaller probability of other people calling them nuts and greater probability of getting something usable in a finite amount of time. Which is fair enough.

> as is attempting to do better on the second go-round

You seem to be under some impression that Servo before Mozilla layoff and after Mozilla layoffs are the same? They aren't. I mean, the code is a continuation of effort, but the people who worked on it before and after the Mozilla exodus aren't the same.

Servo originally did have the same goal of better embeddability, but after it's resurrection it's only the same by mostly coincidence. Sponsors (Tizen IIRC) wants a fast embeddable browser. That's about it.

The talk about correctness gets me thinking.

If there is a difference between how specs define something, and how browsers behave (and website expect them to behave), will you choose technical correctness or websites actually functioning?

Technically this has been the big problem of HTML5 vs XHTML, and "technical correctness" lost to actual usability.

Nowadays the spec mostly is "whatever Chrome does".

Firefox has often been forced to just conform to Chrome behaviour, despite differing specs, or because the spec was rejected/not agreed upon.

We're back to good ol' days of "Internet Explorer is the spec". It's just made by Google.

> We're back to good ol' days of "Internet Explorer is the spec". It's just made by Google.

and the code (at least a large part of it in the form of Chromium) is Open Source. I don't think it's as bleak as people make it out to be.

Chromium is basically everything important anyway; Chrome is some sprinkle on top (I think some DRM stuff?)