What Is the Point of the Servo Rendering Engine?

Yesterday, in the article about IBM “donating” Lotus Symphony as they sabotage LibreOffice and give Microsoft free advertising, most of which was still proprietary and not able to be incorporated in any open source program, I mentioned Mozilla donating Servo to the Linux Foundation after Mitchell Baker laid off many Gecko developers.

At this point, I’m not sure what Servo is even there to do.

It’s not the rendering engine of any Web browser.

It hasn’t even been around THAT long, and already the “Rust Programmers” have decided that most of the modules are “legacy code” and will be re-written.

It’s very interesting that the favored way to develop software in Rust is to declare working code that’s not even old “legacy” and rewrite it.

Many of the applications I use have code that goes back into the 80s or 90s, and those are actually the best applications.

The developers have actual goals for the project other than being someone’s subsidy black hole which can’t even correctly render the Acid2 test. A test designed to beat Web browsers of 2005 into conformance with (mostly) Cascading Style Sheets Level 2.

Mozilla’s CEO Mitchell Baker has squandered an enormous amount of money, opportunity, and goodwill by investing in cash furnaces to replace written and working code, and dump a new programming language into their competitors’ laps.

Calling Mozilla independent from Google is like saying that Belarus isn’t part of Russia.

There’s this incestuous relationship where they get 90% of their money from Google and Mitchell Baker makes sure almost everything nasty and non-standard that they “propose” for Chrome makes its way into Firefox.

But it’s still not enough and mainstream Web sites still give Firefox users the finger, which is why you can’t select a pickup time at Walmart and checkout with your order.

In the 1990s, there was a relationship sort of like this. Microsoft was under a lot of heat from the government. Apple was on the verge of failure, so Microsoft bought $700 million worth of the company that it didn’t even want and told the government, “We have really bad competition, that has 0.7% of computer users. And these folks are fucking WEIRD man, oh and we own 31% of the shares. But they’re a competitor.”

(My Uncle had a Mac. It was System 7.5.5 or something. If all you wanted to do was open a spreadsheet, it worked I guess. I played around on it messing around opening windows and checking out the screensavers, but it didn’t have any games so I got bored. When OS X came out I tried some demo computers out, but at this point it had a dock that took up most of the screen and window management didn’t work. It was hilariously even more of a usability nightmare than Windows XP.)

As Mozilla kicks SeaMonkey out (possibly as a prelude to shutting down the Wiki and Bugzilla entirely and renting something else from Google), SeaMonkey has a chance to actually outlive Mozilla and Firefox.

At the rate Mozilla is losing Firefox users (which they admit to, in statistics they publish themselves), it will cease to be a viable company in between 5 and 7 years.

All SeaMonkey has to do is last longer than that, and it will have outlived Facebook Blake and Apple Dave’s Firefox fork.

(Disclaimer: I’ve always disliked Firefox. The fork didn’t even solve its ungodly, at the time, consumption of RAM. It just deleted Mail, News, IRC, and the Web Development tools. At the time I tried Phoenix 0.1, they had to rename it twice, I said “Oh what in the Hell is this?”)

But Servo…..at the “Linux Foundation”. What ARE they even doing in there? For what purpose does it serve?

I recently downloaded a copy and ran it, and it was pretty useless.

It’s basically like trying to install ReactOS to a PC to run Windows programs. That’s about the level of Web support Servo has.

I recently downloaded ReactOS to try it in a VM and I couldn’t do anything with it because there’s been an error message in it for months stating that it couldn’t find its own installer. That’s a lot of progress since 1996.

There really is a ReactOS project, and apparently people do something with it, although God only knows what it is if you can’t even reliably install it in VirtualBox, but you’re better off with Wine on Linux.

ReactOS “developers” gather around the dumpster fire of their borked Windows clone singing campfire songs about how much they despise Linux.

This seems to be what “Rust Developers” do in relation to C and C++.

Whereas you can have a working program then go back and nail your bugs in other languages, in ReactOS, I mean Rust, you can just rewrite the entire program every few years because the runtimes changed that much and get new code with more bugs.