It's heartening to see a large group of people working (mostly) for free on a passion project. Makes me optimistic about the resilience of intrinsic human drive.
The progress on Servo is impressive. UI polish is required in order to be more usable. Things like keyboard shortcuts to focus the address bar are required to make it feasible for more daily driving use
i've been hacking on my own browser using servo as a library! its lovely to interface with.
My understanding is that the main focus is on the engine and building a good embedding API so that folks can build browsers (and apps and web drivers etc...) with it.
That is my understanding too. In contrast Ladybird has really improved in the UI area and the recent addition of session restore, content blocking and performance makes it a very capable daily driver browser
I want servo the succeed
One of the things I find really helpful about servo (as a casual user) is the breadth of pre-built releases they have. It makes it much more feasible to actually use on a day-to-day basis, especially on android
wow! they already have android apk? Awesome!
login form on HN does not work, but servo is working! :D
It was working a second ago (I made the parent comment from servo) but it looks like you get logged out pretty quickly. YMMV, plus probably best not to log into anything too important yet
Sad to see Servo ban AI contributions.
Feels like a missed opportunity where we could take a giant leap forward.
my read is that with the right guidance, implementing the vast amount of the CSS spec for example, could be done easily with some AI assistance, the spec is incredibly well defined. just comparing the layouting and styling in blitz[0] (which does use agents), servo is lacking quite a bit, and the implementation of various features don't follow the spec exactly.
that being said, i entirely respect their decision of course, perhaps they will revisit at a later point in time!
(I'm the maintainer of Blitz)
My experience is that it varies greatly by feature.
Something like border styles, the agent was able to do pretty effectively. Although it still took a few hours iterating on it to get the performance characteristics and edge cases right.
More complex features like hoisting position absolute nodes and other layout features still take days to weeks of iterating to get something usable that isn't so fragile it'll blow up the next time you touch something.
Giant leaps aren't typically the way to steady progress
> For now, we’re taking a cautious approach to these tools due to their effects — both unknown and observed — on project health and maintenance burden. This field is evolving quickly, so we are open to revising this policy at a later date, given proposals for particular tools that mitigate these effects.
seems entirely reasonable reason and approach, and I see no reason to force everyone approach LLM in the same way
With the advances in AI, I'd expect the Servo project to go a lot faster ...
Do they allow vibe-coded contributions?
Currently they do not: https://book.servo.org/policy/ai-usage.html
> Contributions must not include content generated by large language models or other probabilistic tools, including but not limited to Copilot or ChatGPT. This policy covers code, documentation, pull requests, issues, comments, and any other contributions to the Servo project.
> For now, we’re taking a cautious approach to these tools due to their effects — both unknown and observed — on project health and maintenance burden. This field is evolving quickly, so we are open to revising this policy at a later date, given proposals for particular tools that mitigate these effects.
The references to ChatGPT and Copilot suggest it was authored before the Codex and Claude Code revolution. I wonder if they'll revise it at some point soon.
Update: looks like that language was originally added in July 2024: https://github.com/servo/book/commit/5afb80d5b08b259ca359cfe...
I found a discussion about changing it in April 2025, but they decided to keep it the same at that point: https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/36379
>> With the advances in AI, I'd expect the Servo project to go a lot faster ... >> Do they allow vibe-coded contributions?
With an official automated test suite that they aim to pass, someone could probably set Claude loose on closing out those bugs and feature gaps. Assuming AI can figure out why tests fail (it probably can) I'd give it about a day to finish. Actually maybe a week since it'd be compiling RUST. Would the resulting code be of the same quality? Probably not. Would it be good? Maybe.
IME, agents are generally capable of passing the tests autonomously. But not with code you'd actually ever want to use. Both because of the quality, and because it will have awful performance/memory/security issues.
About ready to switch to Servo as my daily driver on desktop.
Have been using it as the render backend on an experimental tablet OS and its quite capable once you fix the font rendering.
Would gladly upstream contributions but I dont type anymore.
Ladybird seems to be embracing vibe coding, so I think there's a great opportunity to compare them. After a couple of months of vibe coding what do you people here think about Ladybird's progress?
> Do they allow vibe-coded contributions?
are there serious projects welcoming vibe-coded PRs?
That was my thought as well. You'd imagine a known quantity like a browser should be easy to make now. I know it sounds ridiculous to anyone who hasn't tried the new models, but idk what to tell you. Photoshop used to be impossible to clone, too. I asked Opus 5.5 to add SSGI to an open source game and it did it in an afternoon. I don't know anything about graphics programming. This is nuts.
I think the sweet spot is not allowing vibe-coded contributions past a certain line count. At least, that's my policy. If you use an LLM to track down some bug that's a few lines to fix; that's fine. But if it's a new feature that needs 100s of lines; just make a feature request and if I agree, I can spin up my own clanker.