Having a viable alternative to the KHTML-lineage engines (blink/webkit) besides Gecko will be a boon for the web.
I haven't been super happy with Mozilla's management of Firefox, although it's my daily driver and a great browser. I just don't have super high confidence it'll be viable long term from a corporate standpoint, especially since it's largely been payrolled by Google which makes Blink, so having another real alternative would be great. Having a sustainable, grassroots community project in Servo makes me have hope again (after Mozilla dropped the ball on them...)
I haven't been keeping track on servo's progress too much, but I was pleasantly surprised. I was able to download and run it without having to worry about building it. It already supports multiple tabs. It was able to load HN and a few other sites I threw at it just fine. Couldn't run YouTube videos but that's understandable. Gives me at least some optimism for the future.
I am also really rooting for Ladybird [0]. I wish they'll take some inspiration from this and provide prebuilt versions for people to try soon.
Ladybird is further ahead than Servo, at least with what it can render and how correct it is. But Ladybird is a lot slower at this point.
One reason of course is that Ladybird wrote its own JavaScript engine while Servo uses SpiderMonkey.
Ladybird scores over 500 on https://html5test.co which is better than Firefox 60. And Ladybird is not too far behind Safari on the Web Playform Tests (ahead of Servo).
I am running the latest version of Firefox, but I said it was better than version 60 of Firefox (years old). I am certainly not suggesting that Ladybird is more feature complete than modern Firefox. Ladybird is pre—Alpha.
But the fact that Ladybird scores over 500 and you are getting 546 in Firefox tells us how advanced Ladybird is getting.
When I tried Servo a month ago, it was scoring around 400.
In both of the cases people criticize the Ladybird founder for, he was explicitly asking to avoid conflict. If you do not have time to read up on it, maybe temper these accusations with that knowledge.
He was first branded as a fascist when a non-contributor to SerenityOS submitted a bug or a pull request to change male pronouns to something else. Kling asked to keep the project contributions and discussion technical and not political. That is it. His crime was the classic “asking me not to be political is political” drama.
Next, and admittedly worse, he said something related to Charlie Kirk like “I hope more people engage with words and not fists”. Since Charlie Kirk was a massive douche, people do not like implying that there was anything good about him. While I get this, the idea that this comment confirms Andreas Kling to be a fascist is, well, a bit fascist for my taste.
Kling is famous for starting his videos with “Hello friends”, he has hundreds of good natured videos online, he is very open and humble of his experiences with drug addiction, and he lives in a country that is almost exclusively left wing by US standards. He seems far better behaved than his critics. I am going to have to see a bit more evidence than the above to start boycotting Ladybird over his politics. But that is just me I guess.
It is nice to see the multiple windows feature finally working. I have seen many projects fail because they could not handle the complexity of the modern web. This update shows that Servo is becoming a serious tool and not just an experiment. We need this to succeed to keep the internet healthy.
- The Sovereign Tech Agency (a branch of the German government) is funding Igalia ~€500,000 over two years to work on Servo (https://www.sovereign.tech/tech/servo).
- And there have been several NLnet grants (that are worth up to €50,000 each) to individuals working on Servo (NLnet gets there money from the EU).
Those aren't huge sums in the context of browser development, but they're not nothing either.
Having a viable alternative to the KHTML-lineage engines (blink/webkit) besides Gecko will be a boon for the web.
I haven't been super happy with Mozilla's management of Firefox, although it's my daily driver and a great browser. I just don't have super high confidence it'll be viable long term from a corporate standpoint, especially since it's largely been payrolled by Google which makes Blink, so having another real alternative would be great. Having a sustainable, grassroots community project in Servo makes me have hope again (after Mozilla dropped the ball on them...)
not mozilla-related, but there's also the ladybird project if you're looking for sustainable alternatives: https://ladybird.org/
I haven't been keeping track on servo's progress too much, but I was pleasantly surprised. I was able to download and run it without having to worry about building it. It already supports multiple tabs. It was able to load HN and a few other sites I threw at it just fine. Couldn't run YouTube videos but that's understandable. Gives me at least some optimism for the future.
I am also really rooting for Ladybird [0]. I wish they'll take some inspiration from this and provide prebuilt versions for people to try soon.
[0] - https://ladybird.org/
Ladybird is further ahead than Servo, at least with what it can render and how correct it is. But Ladybird is a lot slower at this point.
One reason of course is that Ladybird wrote its own JavaScript engine while Servo uses SpiderMonkey.
Ladybird scores over 500 on https://html5test.co which is better than Firefox 60. And Ladybird is not too far behind Safari on the Web Playform Tests (ahead of Servo).
I wish both projects well.
I've just tested my Firefox at https://html5test.co and it shows `546 out of 588 points`. Are you running an outdated version?
I am running the latest version of Firefox, but I said it was better than version 60 of Firefox (years old). I am certainly not suggesting that Ladybird is more feature complete than modern Firefox. Ladybird is pre—Alpha.
But the fact that Ladybird scores over 500 and you are getting 546 in Firefox tells us how advanced Ladybird is getting.
When I tried Servo a month ago, it was scoring around 400.
The FAQ says:
> We are targeting Summer 2026 for a first Alpha version on Linux and macOS. This will be aimed at developers and early adopters.
With that being said, building Ladybird is quite trivial, the scripts in the repo take care of everything, it just takes some time.
I must have missed that, thanks. I did build it recently, and yes it wasn't complicated, but it took ages.
I too was looking forward to Ladybird, until the main author revealed his political alignment, which is alas, not something I can support (https://drewdevault.com/2025/09/24/2025-09-24-Cloudflare-and...).
In both of the cases people criticize the Ladybird founder for, he was explicitly asking to avoid conflict. If you do not have time to read up on it, maybe temper these accusations with that knowledge.
He was first branded as a fascist when a non-contributor to SerenityOS submitted a bug or a pull request to change male pronouns to something else. Kling asked to keep the project contributions and discussion technical and not political. That is it. His crime was the classic “asking me not to be political is political” drama.
Next, and admittedly worse, he said something related to Charlie Kirk like “I hope more people engage with words and not fists”. Since Charlie Kirk was a massive douche, people do not like implying that there was anything good about him. While I get this, the idea that this comment confirms Andreas Kling to be a fascist is, well, a bit fascist for my taste.
Kling is famous for starting his videos with “Hello friends”, he has hundreds of good natured videos online, he is very open and humble of his experiences with drug addiction, and he lives in a country that is almost exclusively left wing by US standards. He seems far better behaved than his critics. I am going to have to see a bit more evidence than the above to start boycotting Ladybird over his politics. But that is just me I guess.
It seems a lot of progress is being made towards making this a viable embedded web engine.
Nice to see donations are steadily growing, it's a well deserved project for the health of the web.
Direct link for those interested in chipping in: https://servo.org/sponsorship/
It is nice to see the multiple windows feature finally working. I have seen many projects fail because they could not handle the complexity of the modern web. This update shows that Servo is becoming a serious tool and not just an experiment. We need this to succeed to keep the internet healthy.
The EU should find a way to fund Firefox or another independant browser.
Independant from Safari's and Chrome's engines.
There has been some EU funding for Servo:
- The Sovereign Tech Agency (a branch of the German government) is funding Igalia ~€500,000 over two years to work on Servo (https://www.sovereign.tech/tech/servo).
- And there have been several NLnet grants (that are worth up to €50,000 each) to individuals working on Servo (NLnet gets there money from the EU).
Those aren't huge sums in the context of browser development, but they're not nothing either.