The Servo team at Mozilla, later Linux Foundation, posts updates on Servo, the experimental parallel browser engine written in Rust.
HN commenters point to it for progress updates like flexbox and Fetch support, and one wishes it were updated more often.
> As others have mentioned, while this article is about Test Pilot and focused around how you can help with UX experiments, there are lots of wonderful devs hard at work on platform features.
I don't doubt that. I just wish more resource was allocated to that, and less on new features. I do use the "share with twitter" feature, "hello" or the gtk3 integration, but I would trade it for better perf in a blink.
On the other hand, FF never saw a very disruptive feature for years. It could have added integrated torrent download or a kick ass JS/CSS IDE in browser. No perf and no disruption make is less appealing.
I'm not just complaining. I register to all the feedback program from Mozilla I encounter. I donate money to Mozilla. I activate the tracking features in my browser so they can use the metrics and crash reports.
I've been using firefox since it's been called phoenix, and it sadden me that I can't now honestly recommand it to others in any other way than "it's more ethical".
> You might be more interested in reading about platform improvements like getting Servo/Rust components into Gecko: https://blog.servo.org/2016/05/09/twis-62/
I'm dying to see servo in action. For those reasons, and also because I follow closely Rust.
As others have mentioned, while this article is about Test Pilot and focused around how you can help with UX experiments, there are lots of wonderful devs hard at work on platform features.
Some are just starting to land after literally years of work:
You might be more interested in reading about platform improvements like getting Servo/Rust components into Gecko:
https://blog.servo.org/2016/05/09/twis-62/
Or progress in multi-process support (codename e10s):
http://arewee10syet.com/
While these are focused on Firefox to improve performance, stability and responsiveness, there are also experiments like the Positron project, which is making Gecko able to host Electron applications:
https://github.com/mozilla/positron
Doing everything in parallel is pretty much the point of the project. I'm not directly involved but I have been watching the project. There a few specific parts of layout that can't be parallelized[0] but pretty much every page [1][2] has work that can be done in parallel. The last batch of perf numbers I know of is from last November [3] and I'm unaware of any major perf regressions.
[0] http://pcwalton.github.io/blog/2014/02/25/revamped-parallel-layout-in-servo/
[1] https://github.com/servo/servo/pull/4969
[2] http://blog.servo.org/2015/04/02/twis-29/ (scroll down)
[3] http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/LinuxConEU2014.pdf
In https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/ ,
- At 03:00: pcwalton explains how this experiment leans on the GPU-ization of our Intel CPUs since Haswell.
- At 14:50: slide says "WebRender supports OpenGL ES 2.1 and OpenGL 3.x"
- "Benchmarks" at 26:00 running on his macbook, which may fit what you are looking for
TL;DR, yes this early work is for "integrated graphics such as those in normal laptops". Or try it yourself on your laptop with a nightly build: http://blog.servo.org/2016/06/30/servo-nightlies/
Servo was never meant to be a full engine replacement for mainline Firefox; whatever Rust code could be implemented/useful for Firefox was ported already.
However, regarding Servo specifically, there are contributions on their GitHub[1] and the stewardship of the project is now under the Linux Foundation[2].
[1] https://github.com/servo/servo/commits/master
[2] https://blog.servo.org/2020/11/17/servo-home/
From what I've seen, the current rate of progress on Servo is quite good. Here is a recent demo of what it can now do http://blog.servo.org/2016/01/25/twis-48/. In a few years, it might be able to do everything that other browsers can do.
The servo project also makes it really easy to get involved http://servo.github.io/servo-starters/.