It's been a decade plus and new browsers have come out in that time.
That's hardly a fair assessment when large parts of Servo were mainlined into Firefox years before Ladybird even existed. Stylo, their CSS engine, landed in Firefox 57 in 2017 replacing ~160k lines of C++ with ~85k lines of Rust.
Servo wasn't originally really intended as a browser competitor. It was the flagship experimental project of the Rust language to replace parts of Firefox with memory safe implementations, which it pulled off in style. It's only recently that people have picked it back up as a browser project, years after Mozilla killed the development.
It’s also no longer a Mozilla project.
It's obviously not ready yet, but it's also not "infinitely far" anymore. I'm donating to them, because I think that they're the only realistic successor to the dying Firefox.
Mozilla Firefox merged Servo's Stylo CSS engine into Firefox 57 in 2017 and their WebRender renderer into Firefox 67 in 2019. I guess you could call that a "pretty niche browser" even then but that's a stretch.
No one's rushing to pick it up because Servo was originally an experimental Rust project meant to incrementally replace parts of Firefox. Then Mozilla stopped funding its development, and only recently have people picked it back up again as an independent browser implementation.
It was used to render the UI in apps like our favorite McAfee antivirus.
This niche is still wide open. Electron apps are just terrible, and a focused fast embeddable browser engine would be very welcome.
Source: https://github.com/dioxuslabs/blitz
Status: https://blitz.is/status/css
Typical binary sizes are around 10-20mb, although you can go smaller by doing things like excluding features or compiling with `Os`/`Oz`.
There's no JavaScript yet (which can also be a benefit of course!), but people have recently started experimenting, and we may well start on this soon.
With this you can actually run regular React DOM (so fully compatible with deploying the same codebase to web). There is then the potential to mix in native components, although that's not fully built-out today.
Finally, as part of this project we develop Dioxus Native (see https://github.com/DioxusLabs/dioxus and https://dioxuslabs.com). This allows you to write your app in a React-like framework in Rust, which also allows you to write a single codebase and compile to both native (desktop/mobile) using Blitz and to web (compiles to WASM, renders using real DOM nodes).
I agree with you but throwing web standards out the window like Sciter is a non-starter. One of the benefits of Electron apps is still having the option to run it in your browser.
It doesn't have to implement _all_ the standards, just a subset that is compatible with the full set. So that if you can develop an app within that subset and have it working in other browsers. But not necessarily vice versa.
That kinda undersells it I think. It's really core components being ported: the JavaScript engine is already ported, with the style and layout systems underway.
> We are not “rewriting the browser”. That's impossible. Put down the gun.