dinnI feel like this meme when it comes to web technologies in desktop apps
Nelson Lopez@dinn me after saying "PWAs are good actually" all those years back
@nelson I feel the idea is super good but their implementation is still undesirable. inside they feel fine but the OS still makes it obvious you're just opening a chrome tab from the exterior (at least on my phone)
but I'm seeing the issue more in depth. like ditch HTML and JS, keep the DOM and CSS. I don't see why that would not be lightweight (at least why would it be less lightweight than like Qt or GTK)
cf my last posts
@dinn I feel like this is mostly an issue of just... layers upon layers upon layers upon layers of legacy code, thousands of features that nobody uses except for a couple of important government or banking websites which have not been properly updated, more than some inherent complexity to JS, HTML, and CSS, conceptually.
Like, so far, Servo has been incredibly efficient in all of my devices, in terms of Memory, CPU and GPU, probably because they're actually engineering the entire thing from top to bottom with the specific needs of the modern internet instead of using a fork of a fork of a fork like everything else does
@nelson the Chromium-WebKit-KHTML relationship is not talked about enough for sure lmao
at the same time in the Unix world you got a similar situation with a bunch of them being direct descendants of the 1960s codebase (macOS, freebsd, etc) and non relative clones (Linux) and they seem to do mostly fine
Servo just handles the CSS right ? or the rendering also ? because I'm pretty sure Firefox's codebase is a mess and that's how we end up with 10+ years old issues on basic stuff like gradients not being rendered properly. I don't think there's a single good citizen in the browser-tech space
@dinn Servo is actually a full blown browser, well, more like a browser engine with a basic UI on top for demonstration purposes
I think it was originally a Mozilla thing before Mozilla went like "nahhhh who cares, i'm going to invest in AI instead"
Servo actually implements the web from scratch, except for some components such as Curl, but those don't really count.
I feel like the difference between the Unices and browsers is that there have been meaningful changes in how they work internally but the APIs remain the same, for browsers to improve, in my opinion, we actually have to start deprecating and removing features, which would be horrendous for stuff like the forementioned sites, where they are, sadly, part of the world's core infrastructure.
Servo is the product of absolute insanity, and I am afraid it'll also become like the rest, but at least for now, it's doing pretty well!
@nelson oh wow I was really out of date on my information. I thought Servo was just the CSS engine of Firefox since Firefox Quantum. turns out it's kinda in Firefox but it's a bigger thing. neat! I'll try it (and might just use at as a proof of concept for my stupid desktop GUI ideas)
I don't think removing features is a great idea in itself (could break websites that are no longer maintained) but I think an epoch system could be used for that. you declare an "edition" in the HTML tag and ggs now it's modern and old features can break
@dinn I think that could be a very nice proposition! The people writing the web standards could make it a thing where there could be different editions of the web
By the way, Servo is in no way done or finished, it still struggles to render things properly, but they have done an incredible amount of advancements in very little time, so I have hope for it.