This is interesting. I've talked about this with several people in the past. For some, the people are more important (like with a singer), and for some the thing is more important (the song). I'm struggling with this for several decades now, because I never was a fan (the closest fan thing I did in 45 years, was reading a GnR biography, otherwise I was never interested in the life of a singer/band, Bowie was in Berlin, ah interesting, coming back to his songs...). Same for open source projects. Linus or Linux? Antirez or Redis?
(Not diminish the work of any open source contributor or creator, or the person)
A project lives and dies by the people actually doing the work, especially an open source one. That’s what is meant by the most important part is the people. That’s true independently of the quality of what is actually achieved (that being said great team tends to produce great products).
At least for servo, it started as a research project. I imagine a lot of time was spent trying out ideas for WebRender or parallel CSS (two parts that made it into Firefox).
I also assume starting a browser i easier than finishing a browser but I can't speak to where either is at on the difficut-to-finish spectrum.
Ladybird is a browser, servo is a rendering engine. They have different aims. Some of Servo's components are developed by Mozilla for the use in Firefox.
The first serious implementation of browser using Servo started very recently in the form of Verso.
Is ladybird not using a custom rendering engine too? Or you mean they're following existing techniques more whereas servo is focused on research over production?
One of Servo's aims is to make an embeddable rendering engine; an alternative to chromium. Chrome/ium is not just a browser it powers everything nowadays, apps, all major alternative browsers run chromium underneath. And that's a huge problem.
The ecosystem of Servo is very very different. It's very modular and many components are fast moving targets developed by multiple companies. While with ladybird it's a comparatively singular thing (developed mostly by a single guy).
The embedding is a serious and ambitious effort and possibly one of the reasons why Mozilla dropped it.
It has to support vast array of ecosystems and compete with a very mature and widespread electron/chromium to cover the same use cases.
It's a massive effort, but is already being experimentaly integrated by companies (like embedding into Qt toolkit).
And to simply put, Servo has a much larger scope, their aim is much wider than making a browser. The browser will be one of its use cases (It's already being developed intensely in the form of Verso by different team).
It's more interesting to expand client options for WebXR/Immersive which was narrowed down to Meta/Oculus browser untill A) Wolvic from Igalia who took over the abandoned Firefox Reality browser and B) Apple finally got it some of it into some Safari devices. If you believe the web and information consumption in general will become more 3D over time like me then it is a capacity building step in the right direction at least. Sorry for the late reply btw lol.
I think the big motivation is now "embedding", i.e. using servo as replacement for webview/cef/etc. So for example you could think Tauri+Servo as Rusts answer to Nodejs+Chromium in Electron.
Mozilla didn't "scrap" it (it was an open source project from the start, so they coulnd't have scrapped the project even if they wanted to), but they laid off the Servo developers in 2020. The project moved to the Linux Foundation and then apparently languished for several years, but at the end of 2022 (https://servo.org/blog/2023/01/16/servo-2023/) it was picked up by Igalia, and since then it has made considerable progress again. This presentation has a lot of details: https://servo.org/slides/2024-04-16-seattle-rust-user-group/
