I haven't measured Acid2 layout performance, because it's not particularly interesting; Acid2's CSS is nowhere near the CSS that someone would actually write in the real world. On real pages, from our small amount of testing, we've seen promising results.
Oh, Servo certainly isn't a production-ready browser engine yet, if that's what you're looking for; the incomplete DOM code and network code prevent many sites from working.
More than just being production ready. I'm wondering what lessons have been learned that will actually help current browsers. Seems that servo is in a massive game of catch up, with no guarantees that things will be faster/better/whatever.
If you're looking for guarantees, you may not understand how research works :)
When it comes to areas in which Servo is ahead of current browsers, I can name many: off-main-thread layout, parallel layout, off-main-thread iframes (not out of process to avoid scaling issues), a fully garbage-collected DOM without cycle collection/reference counting or stop-all-threads GC, and, most of all, being written in a memory-safe language. These are all areas in which other browser engines would need to catch up to Servo--though it's unclear how to do that without a complete rewrite, especially for that last one.
I'm thinking there will at least be lessons learned. That lesson may be that going parallel offers no benefit. Which sucks, in that we are hoping otherwise, but it is a possibility. Right?
That is, I am more asking as to what lessons have been learned. Not demanding that we know what progress was made. Since, as you point out, we may not have made any.
Which is to say, I should throw up a huge "I'm not trying to dissuade any of this effort." If I have been too negative in my comments here, I humbly apologize!
Interesting. how does one go about proving a negative?
To support my side, do a Google search for "Joel spolsky Mozilla". Hope that helps. Granted, it was written four months into 2000, but was reflecting murmurings one would read on Slashdot months earlier (back when /. was the HN of its time).
I'd say that the first thing it proves is you don't remember the tech scene in '98. All the comments you brought up in your GP post were reflected loudly by most pundits during that time. Cringley, spolsky, and many others said AOL was doing a fool's errand by allowing the then-unproven open source bazaar model to rewrite the browser. And that they'd be playing catch-up. And that IE would win because nobody would care about the rewrite. Fast forward to 2014, and blink/Firefox fight for first place, while IE continues to lose market share. Mozilla not only caught up, but is now setting the pace.
The second thing it shows is that history repeats itself. The pundits, much like you will prove to be, were wrong. Thanks to the brilliance of jwz, the Mozilla project and the gecko rewrite has outlived both Netscape and AOL. Firefox is a flagship example of how open development can create a superior product that can outlast the companies that make it.
The next thing this proves is that open development is continuing to show that rewriting an engine doesn't require "betting the company" anymore. Mozilla and Samsung are both heavily-invested in Servo, and are expecting this rewrite to be at the core of your future operating system. But if servo doesn't pan out, Mozilla won't be filing for chapter 11 protection
I'm not sure what I'm reading here. First thing to remember, is that Netscape 4 was pretty rushed and terrible. To the point that I remember thinking of how awesome IE was at a few points. And I already had a large distrust of MS.
That is, MS used some underhanded tactics to gain market share. They also took advantage of (and probably forced) a major misstep by a competitor.
That Phoenix/Firefox was able to be resurrected from the ashes is a fortunate occurrence, but at no time did that at all come of as if it was planned. I pretty much consider it the "classic coke" of the browser wars. (Remember, phoenix was originally Mozilla's suite, stripped down to just the browser.)
So, yes, it has gone rather well. However, I'm not sure the codebase can afford to survive the death of its stewardship again. The statistics show a clear dominance of "not Mozilla" historically.
To the point that I'm not all sure on what you are basing your claim of Mozilla "now setting the pace." Don't get me wrong, I'm glad it is doing well. It is my browser of choice. However, I realize I am the minority both in my friends/family and statistics.
Which is funny. In my family, the browser choice is either Safari or IE. Depending on OS of choice. In my friends, it is Chrome. To the point that I'm not even clear what lessons are to be learned from these choices, honestly.
So, back to the point. How were the pundits wrong? Did AOL/Netscape somehow come off well by the rewrite? Was it a sound investment? If anything, I would think the continued active development of the non-servo codebase shows that it is sound advice not to bet the company on a rewrite, and that they learned it. Are you really claiming otherwise?
> Of course, firefox is already bloody fast on any site I can think of.
That's because all the sites we can think of are designed to be fast in Firefox (and other current browsers). Once super-fast browsers become standard, we can start designing sites that would be unusable on today's Firefox :)
