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Dr Kaiser Youve been Servoed Good day

Dr Kaiser Youve been Servoed Good day

TenFourFox 45 is about 30% merged so far. Ive been able to streamline a few changesets and cut out some others, which is mostly a feel-good futile move since 45 is the last changeset merge Ill have to do personally, but so far its an easier port than 43 was and Ive probably just jinxed myself saying so. Nevertheless, the target for beta 1 in mid-July still stands so far and 38.10, hopefully the final release of TenFourFox 38, is scheduled for August 2. After that the target is for 45.4 to reach release in September.

Once 45 hits release and 38 is retired, well start the old unstable builds up again for new features (i.e., feature parity). My plan is one new functionality improvement and one new optimization each cycle, with 6-12 week cycles for baking due to our smaller user base. Youll get some clues about the user-facing features as part of tenfourfox.dtd, which will be pre-written so that localizers can have it done and features can just roll out as I complete them.

On to other things. Mozilla announced yesterday the (very preliminary) release of the Servo Developer Preview, using their next-generation Servo engine instead of the Gecko engine that presently powers Firefox (and TenFourFox). Dont get your hopes up for this one: Servo is written in Rust, Rust needs llvm (which doesnt work yet on OS X/ppc, part of the reason were dropping source parity), and even the extant PowerPC Rust compiler on Linux may never be capable of building it. This ones strictly for the Intel Mac lulz.

So heres Servo, rendering Ars Technica:

Servos interface is very sparse, but novel, and functional enough. Im not going to speak further about that because its quite obviously nowhere near finished or final. It works well enough to test and I wasnt able to make the browser crash in my brief usage. Thumbs up there.

With regard to the layout engine, though, many things dont work. You can see several rendering glitches immediately on the main page with the gradient and font block backgrounds. Comment threads in articles appear crazily spaced. Incidentally, I dont care if you can see my browser tabs or that Im trying to figure out how to interface a joystick port to a Raspberry Pi (actually, its for a C.H.I.P., but the Pi schematics should work for the GPIO pins, as well as whatevers needed to connect it to 5V logic).

The TenFourFox home page doesnt fare much better:

The background is missing and the top Classilla link seems to have gotten fixed to the top. On the other hand, the Help and Support Tab does load, but articles are not clickable and you cant pick anything from drop-down select form elements.

Now, Ill admit this last one is an unfair test, but Floodgaps home page is also pretty wrecked:

This is an unfair test because I intentionally wrote the Floodgap web page to be useable and "proper" as far back as Netscape Navigator 3, festooning it with lots of naughtiness like <font face> and other unmentionables that are the equivalent of HTML syphilis. Gecko handles it fine, but Servo chokes on the interlaced GIFs and just about completely ignores any of the font colour and face stuff. But I wasnt really expecting it to do otherwise at this stage; no doubt quirks mode is not currently a priority.

I think the best that can be said about this first public release of Servo, admittedly from my fairly uninformed outsider view, is that it exists and that it works. There was certainly a lot of doubt about those things not too long ago, and Mozilla has demonstrated clearly with this release that Servo is viable as a technology if not yet as a browser. What is less clear is what advantages it will ultimately offer. Though the aim with Servo is better performance on modern systems, especially systems with cores to burn, on this 2014 i7 MacBook Air Servo didnt really seem to offer any speed advantage over Gecko -- even with the understanding this version is almost certainly unoptimized, right now Gecko is rather faster, substantially less buggy and infinitely more functional. Its going to take a very long time before Servo can stand on its own, let alone become a Gecko replacement, and I think in the meantime Mozilla needs to do a better job of not alienating the users theyve got or Servo-Firefox will remain a purely academic experiment.

Meanwhile, I look forward to the next version and seeing how it evolves, even though I doubt it will ever run on a Power Mac.

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