- Date: Thursday 7th September 2023 at 15:00 UTC
- Location: jitsi
- Status update
- Minibrowser
- Roadmap update and plans
- Linux Foundation Europe
- Outreach
- AOB
attending: atbrakhi, cybai, emilio, jdm, Manishearth, matlu, metajack, mrego, mrobinson, mukilan
rego: Work has progressed for a few months. There are float improvements. Working well, still things to fix, but now inlines are flowing around floats. Also many refactors and improvements to inline layout. Float pass rate now better than legacy layout engine. You can see all these things on the dashboard.
rego: We have switched to a linear commit history in Servo. We have switched from openssl to rustls.
rego: We are exploring building Servo on Android. Got build working, but still issues with running. Servo runs on the Raspberry Pi now. Maybe we can look at other platforms in the future.
rego: The WebGPU stack was upgraded and Servo has WebGPU support again.
rego: There has been work on adding a minibrowser to Servo (small browser with a GUI). There are still a fewer blockers to enabling it by default, but we are working on those issues.
https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap
rego: Roadmap has been updated including second half plans for this year and early plans for next year. We are exploring Android support, plans to experiment with embedding in applications like Tauri or Dioxous. Thinking about a C API so that embedders can get servo quickly.
rego: We have been working on the demo page. We have added some old demos there from servo experiments and we are looking into adding some more.
rego: One thing we need to do in the next quarter is to decide what to focus on next for layout.
rego: One thing we want to complete next year is Android support. Still working on the rest of the roadmap for 2024.
rego: Today LF published the official announcement about Servo joining LFE. It highlights the events we will attend.
https://linuxfoundation.eu/newsroom/servo-web-rendering-engine-joins-linux-foundation-europe
rego: We have been adding Servo updates to the newsletter.
https://linuxfoundation.eu/newsroom/linux-foundation-europe-newsletter-august-2023
rego: We have been doing some marketing and attending a few events. We will attend more events this week:
- TPAC: Next week
- Linux Foundation Europe members' summit: Week after
- Open Source Summit Europe
- Shanghai: GOSIM workshop & conference: Week after
rego: We may also attend EclipseCon.
rego: Also the demo website as mentioned previously.
rego: Oh, forgot to mention that we received an NLNet grant.
https://nlnet.nl/project/Servo/
rego: This may include things like tables in new layout.
martin: now that floats is in a good support in the new layout engine, I have a draft plan for the layout system
martin: it seems the new layout system is a successful experiment with the floats work, so we could consider deprecating the old engine
- Keep legacy layout around, but close all open PRs
- Later, close all legacy layout bugs that relate to layout (maybe tag them so they're easy to find)
- Later, turn off wpt tests for legacy layout
- Much later, remove legacy layout code
emilio: is anyone using legacy layout code intentionally
martin: we don't know, but right now is useful to have the code around when you implement things in the new layout system
manish: my experience working on the layout stuff, it's really useful to compare if other things are working in other engine; so it seems useful for implementation
emilio: if it's useful, I'm fine; I was just curious
martin: I suppose the less controversial part is to close the open PRs, as they are not super useful right now unfortunately
emilio: I agree, as we're not planning to look into them
martin: we've made an effort to review old PRs and merge them, but the ones related to the legacy layout system have been ignored as we were working on the new one
martin: if people are fine, we can make a more detailed version of the plan
cybai: is it worth removing expectations for legacy layout?
martin: it's been useful for the moment to compare what happens on legacy layout, even for unrelated bugs (like the web render upgraded), it gives more information to compare both and not just the new layout system
cybai: I see, thank you
mats: what's the progress on Android?
martin: we get the whole thing building, some stuff got a bit rotten, so it took a while to get things working
martin: we got a build of mozjs, which is the most complex part, and now it should keep building integrated in CI
martin: there are tricky issues with old versions on Rust in Android
martin: one problem we're having, is because of the way some things servo change in relation with surfman; the old version of the Android code doesn't work very well; we can try to recover the old version of doing this so it paints to a Android surface or something like that; we're getting OpenGL errors right now
mats: Are we using the webview in the minibrowser?
martin: We talked about a way of doing embedding that could be useful in Android and minibrowser; that's probably a phase 2 of the minibrowser work
martin: it's tricky because doing things on Android is different than doing things in the desktop, but probably we can have something that can be shared between both
mats: I thought webview was independent on Android
martin: ah the embedding API, it's independent from Android but it can be somehow useful there in a sense
martin: we still need to figure out the details
mats: you're in TPAC next week, where you could have the chance to talk to Martin Alvarez about miniapps idea
Link to the Mini App proposal: https://www.w3.org/TR/miniapp-manifest/
martin: sure it'll be a good opportunity, and also to do networking with other people working on different web engines
rego: If no more questions, I guess we can end here. Thank you everyone.