Congrats on the new release. Anything that creates more competition in the browser space has my support. I was hyped about Ladybird but their recent adoption of LLMs and going source-available only has put a bit of a dent in it.
I think you mean that the Ladybird project doesn't accept outside contributions anymore but it's still open source (just checked it's under BSD 2-Clause License). Pretty important distinction I think.
Maybe give them a second? Yes, it's usable for applications web views if you're willing to restrict yourself but for general purpose web browsing there's still a lot that needs doing (but work is progressing). Under Google's management, web tech has grown fast. And it's an ever shifting living standard. There is a lot for any alternative browser engine to implement, let alone keep pace with the changes.
Servo is 14 years old, it's hardly a new project. Ladybird has come much farther in a shorter amount of time. The issue has always been Mozilla not being focused.
Ladybird has far more funding. The original blog post said Servo brought in $7k last month. Compare that to Ladybird and the first donation on this list already exceeds Servo’s total:
https://ladybird.org/newsletter/2026-06-30/
Servo was sparsely maintained for years after Mozilla abandoned the project. Just in the last year it has picked steam as an independent project with a range of third party sponsors. Work is now progressing apace and it's becoming increasingly compatible with real-world websites.
> Ladybird has come much farther in a shorter amount of time.
That's hardly a fair assessment when large parts of Servo were mainlined into Firefox years before Ladybird even existed. Stylo, their CSS engine, landed in Firefox 57 in 2017 replacing ~160k lines of C++ with ~85k lines of Rust.
Servo wasn't originally really intended as a browser competitor. It was the flagship experimental project of the Rust language to replace parts of Firefox with memory safe implementations, which it pulled off in style. It's only recently that people have picked it back up as a browser project, years after Mozilla killed the development.
I've got a stripped down installation of win11 in a vm that has Servo as its only browser if there's ever a need to open a website in it. It's something!
I played around with it as a replacement for embedded WebKit in a desktop app. It's getting there!
It's obviously not ready yet, but it's also not "infinitely far" anymore. I'm donating to them, because I think that they're the only realistic successor to the dying Firefox.
Not really. There's a parallel thread on the front page where everybody's talking about writing a browser engine in anything other than Rust is irresponsible, and ridiculous. And yet, no one's rushing to pick up Servo. There seem to be some projects in GTK and QT to embed it, but other than a handful of pretty niche browsers, doesn't seem like there's much use.
Nobody is using it because it's not ready to be used. Compatibility with web standards is nowhere near the level of browsers people actually want to use.
Writing a new browser engine at all is irresponsible and ridiculous. Doing it in anything other than Rust just makes it slightly more irresponsible than it already is.
I don't see how it is irresponsible or ridiculous. More browser engines is a good thing. It might be irresponsible to bet your company on it at this point, but on its own I think it is a worthy endeavor. Plus it looks like a lot of fun to work on! This is hacker news after all.
Mozilla Firefox merged Servo's Stylo CSS engine into Firefox 57 in 2017 and their WebRender renderer into Firefox 67 in 2019. I guess you could call that a "pretty niche browser" even then but that's a stretch.
No one's rushing to pick it up because Servo was originally an experimental Rust project meant to incrementally replace parts of Firefox. Then Mozilla stopped funding its development, and only recently have people picked it back up again as an independent browser implementation.
That kinda undersells it I think. It's really core components being ported: the JavaScript engine is already ported, with the style and layout systems underway.
Up until ~2015 one of the world's most deployed browser engines was Sciter. A work of _one_ person. A fast embedded browser engine, a binary about 4Mb in size.
It was used to render the UI in apps like our favorite McAfee antivirus.
This niche is still wide open. Electron apps are just terrible, and a focused fast embeddable browser engine would be very welcome.
Typical binary sizes are around 10-20mb, although you can go smaller by doing things like excluding features or compiling with `Os`/`Oz`.
There's no JavaScript yet (which can also be a benefit of course!), but people have recently started experimenting, and we may well start on this soon.
> This niche is still wide open. Electron apps are just terrible, and a focused fast embeddable browser engine would be very welcome.
I agree with you but throwing web standards out the window like Sciter is a non-starter. One of the benefits of Electron apps is still having the option to run it in your browser.
It doesn't have to implement _all_ the standards, just a subset that is compatible with the full set. So that if you can develop an app within that subset and have it working in other browsers. But not necessarily vice versa.
Congrats on the new release. Anything that creates more competition in the browser space has my support. I was hyped about Ladybird but their recent adoption of LLMs and going source-available only has put a bit of a dent in it.
I think you mean that the Ladybird project doesn't accept outside contributions anymore but it's still open source (just checked it's under BSD 2-Clause License). Pretty important distinction I think.
It's just a pause until they get to their alpha deadline. Hard to do that when you can't quickly validate all the drive by llm contributions
The last few times I've tried to build Servo it's failed for me. (It's also one the very few rust projects that have ever failed to build for me).
Does anyone actually use Servo for anything?
Maybe give them a second? Yes, it's usable for applications web views if you're willing to restrict yourself but for general purpose web browsing there's still a lot that needs doing (but work is progressing). Under Google's management, web tech has grown fast. And it's an ever shifting living standard. There is a lot for any alternative browser engine to implement, let alone keep pace with the changes.
Servo is 14 years old, it's hardly a new project. Ladybird has come much farther in a shorter amount of time. The issue has always been Mozilla not being focused.
Ladybird has far more funding. The original blog post said Servo brought in $7k last month. Compare that to Ladybird and the first donation on this list already exceeds Servo’s total: https://ladybird.org/newsletter/2026-06-30/
Servo was sparsely maintained for years after Mozilla abandoned the project. Just in the last year it has picked steam as an independent project with a range of third party sponsors. Work is now progressing apace and it's becoming increasingly compatible with real-world websites.
> Ladybird has come much farther in a shorter amount of time.
That's hardly a fair assessment when large parts of Servo were mainlined into Firefox years before Ladybird even existed. Stylo, their CSS engine, landed in Firefox 57 in 2017 replacing ~160k lines of C++ with ~85k lines of Rust.
Servo wasn't originally really intended as a browser competitor. It was the flagship experimental project of the Rust language to replace parts of Firefox with memory safe implementations, which it pulled off in style. It's only recently that people have picked it back up as a browser project, years after Mozilla killed the development.
It’s been around for 14 years but it wasn’t always developed during those 14 years.
It’s also no longer a Mozilla project.
I've got a stripped down installation of win11 in a vm that has Servo as its only browser if there's ever a need to open a website in it. It's something!
I played around with it as a replacement for embedded WebKit in a desktop app. It's getting there!
It's obviously not ready yet, but it's also not "infinitely far" anymore. I'm donating to them, because I think that they're the only realistic successor to the dying Firefox.
Not really. There's a parallel thread on the front page where everybody's talking about writing a browser engine in anything other than Rust is irresponsible, and ridiculous. And yet, no one's rushing to pick up Servo. There seem to be some projects in GTK and QT to embed it, but other than a handful of pretty niche browsers, doesn't seem like there's much use.
Nobody is using it because it's not ready to be used. Compatibility with web standards is nowhere near the level of browsers people actually want to use.
Writing a new browser engine at all is irresponsible and ridiculous. Doing it in anything other than Rust just makes it slightly more irresponsible than it already is.
I don't see how it is irresponsible or ridiculous. More browser engines is a good thing. It might be irresponsible to bet your company on it at this point, but on its own I think it is a worthy endeavor. Plus it looks like a lot of fun to work on! This is hacker news after all.
> And yet, no one's rushing to pick up Servo.
Mozilla Firefox merged Servo's Stylo CSS engine into Firefox 57 in 2017 and their WebRender renderer into Firefox 67 in 2019. I guess you could call that a "pretty niche browser" even then but that's a stretch.
No one's rushing to pick it up because Servo was originally an experimental Rust project meant to incrementally replace parts of Firefox. Then Mozilla stopped funding its development, and only recently have people picked it back up again as an independent browser implementation.
I believe Ladybird is being ported to Rust as we speak.
Nah, just individual components where memory haters
> just individual components
That kinda undersells it I think. It's really core components being ported: the JavaScript engine is already ported, with the style and layout systems underway.
Up until ~2015 one of the world's most deployed browser engines was Sciter. A work of _one_ person. A fast embedded browser engine, a binary about 4Mb in size.
It was used to render the UI in apps like our favorite McAfee antivirus.
This niche is still wide open. Electron apps are just terrible, and a focused fast embeddable browser engine would be very welcome.
I've been building for the fast/embeddable browser engine niche:
Source: https://github.com/dioxuslabs/blitz
Status: https://blitz.is/status/css
Typical binary sizes are around 10-20mb, although you can go smaller by doing things like excluding features or compiling with `Os`/`Oz`.
There's no JavaScript yet (which can also be a benefit of course!), but people have recently started experimenting, and we may well start on this soon.
This is awesome! Do you think you can host something like React Native if you add a JS engine?
> This niche is still wide open. Electron apps are just terrible, and a focused fast embeddable browser engine would be very welcome.
I agree with you but throwing web standards out the window like Sciter is a non-starter. One of the benefits of Electron apps is still having the option to run it in your browser.
Yes, that's why Servo is so exciting.
It doesn't have to implement _all_ the standards, just a subset that is compatible with the full set. So that if you can develop an app within that subset and have it working in other browsers. But not necessarily vice versa.
Servo has always been a purely reasearch project with no intention to be ever used in production.
I thought the original purpose was to rEwRiTe iT iN rUsT and replace gecko in Firefox?
From the presentation announcing Rust inside of Mozilla: https://venge.net/graydon/talks/intro-talk-2.pdf
> We are not “rewriting the browser”. That's impossible. Put down the gun.