> Mozilla does not intend this to be a new browser for regular people - It's an extension of their new language, and R&D.
I disagree. While I'm not sure what the internal planning is, we are doing a bunch of things to move towards having a shippable Servo browser. If Servo was more of an experiment with no possibility of shipping there would be a whole host of features that we wouldn't even bother implementing it.
Servo's existence is also not to serve as a use case for Rust. If anything, it's the other way around, Mozilla was interested in Rust development because of Servo. However, over time Rust has gained a life of its own which is pretty awesome. (Yes, Servo does serve as a pretty good canary for Rust, but it's not the raison d'etre)
As far as Servo's future is concerned, there are a bunch of non-mutually-exclusive steps that can be taken going forward:
- Start moving components into Gecko (already being done) and write new ones (already being done): https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation . Gecko can use Servo's URL parser, and wrote its own MP4 metadata parser. There's active work going on replacing Gecko's style/CSS system, and discussions about webrender. I've also seen some interest in dropping Rust into Spidermonkey.
- Expose a webview-like library (not being done yet, but there's interest)
- Release servo as its own browser, perhaps using browser.html (this is being coordinated at browser.html)
- Replace Gecko on Firefox for Android (this is not too hard, since the browser UI is simpler. Not being done yet)
- Replace Gecko in Firefox for Desktop (this is pretty hard -- there's no clear delineation between "Gecko" and "Firefox" and the UI uses things like XUL which I'd rather keep out of Servo). This is not being done yet.
I disagree. While I'm not sure what the internal planning is, we are doing a bunch of things to move towards having a shippable Servo browser. If Servo was more of an experiment with no possibility of shipping there would be a whole host of features that we wouldn't even bother implementing it.
Servo's existence is also not to serve as a use case for Rust. If anything, it's the other way around, Mozilla was interested in Rust development because of Servo. However, over time Rust has gained a life of its own which is pretty awesome. (Yes, Servo does serve as a pretty good canary for Rust, but it's not the raison d'etre)
As far as Servo's future is concerned, there are a bunch of non-mutually-exclusive steps that can be taken going forward:
- Start moving components into Gecko (already being done) and write new ones (already being done): https://wiki.mozilla.org/Oxidation . Gecko can use Servo's URL parser, and wrote its own MP4 metadata parser. There's active work going on replacing Gecko's style/CSS system, and discussions about webrender. I've also seen some interest in dropping Rust into Spidermonkey.
- Expose a webview-like library (not being done yet, but there's interest)
- Release servo as its own browser, perhaps using browser.html (this is being coordinated at browser.html)
- Replace Gecko on Firefox for Android (this is not too hard, since the browser UI is simpler. Not being done yet)
- Replace Gecko in Firefox for Desktop (this is pretty hard -- there's no clear delineation between "Gecko" and "Firefox" and the UI uses things like XUL which I'd rather keep out of Servo). This is not being done yet.