Posting this using servoshell, the rudimentary browser UI based on the Servo engine which has made great strides lately and now is starting to become usable for general-purpose browsing.
I genuinely wonder what "starting to become usable" means there. Is it the first time that anyone can load a simple static page? Or is it good enough to browse most of the web, but some features are missing like... I don't know WebRTC or passkeys?
A simple static page is not equal to 'starting to become usable', that'd be 'passes the first experimental test'. By 'starting to become usable' I mean Nextcloud and all related apps I've tested work as intended and I'm posting this message from within servoshell. I've kept track of its progress just like I did back in the time of its spiritual predecessor - Mozilla, then Phoenix which became Firebird which became Firefox - and was until recently not able to get it to show much more than that simple static page you mentioned. While it may have passed a bunch of verification suites it - servoshell if not the Servo rendering engine itself - it was not usable for much more than showing that static page. Now, it is. Its usability resembles that of early, pre 1.0-versions of Firefox. I used those just like many others did, warts and all, and reported and where possible fixed bugs.
Why now post this for Servo and servoshell? Because it seems to be close to the same state as Firefox was when it became somewhat usable and with that it became possible for others to start using it and report any bugs and hiccups. The more people do this, the fast the progress will be. A usable alternative browser engine and with that usable alternative browsers is a big, BIG thing and worth reporting as well as supporting in its progress.
I was kindly asking more details about what "starting to become usable" means (i.e. should I try it or does it feel like a tech demo?), and I feel like I am being sermoned in return :-).
> Its usability resembles that of early, pre 1.0-versions of Firefox.
Not sure what it means to me. Pre 1.0 of Firefox was what... 20 years ago?
> The more people do this, the fast the progress will be.
As a developer myself, I kindly disagree. I mean this is not a general rule. When my code is not ready, having tons of people test it doesn't help me: I just ignore their reports because anyway my code was not ready for their testing.
Is the Servo team asking for that, or is it just your feeling?
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 18.1 ms ] threadhttps://servo.org/download/
Why now post this for Servo and servoshell? Because it seems to be close to the same state as Firefox was when it became somewhat usable and with that it became possible for others to start using it and report any bugs and hiccups. The more people do this, the fast the progress will be. A usable alternative browser engine and with that usable alternative browsers is a big, BIG thing and worth reporting as well as supporting in its progress.
> Its usability resembles that of early, pre 1.0-versions of Firefox.
Not sure what it means to me. Pre 1.0 of Firefox was what... 20 years ago?
> The more people do this, the fast the progress will be.
As a developer myself, I kindly disagree. I mean this is not a general rule. When my code is not ready, having tons of people test it doesn't help me: I just ignore their reports because anyway my code was not ready for their testing.
Is the Servo team asking for that, or is it just your feeling?