@serrebi @joepie91 librewolf and other Firefox forks are a band aid. None of Firefox forks has a capacity to continue developing Gecko if Mozilla goes full evil.

Of course, no one claims that Servo is ready, far from it, and Firefox forks are currently the best thing available. I use Zen for the past few months. But this post was about investing to the future. Mozilla and Google need a competition, we need a browser engine that isn't tied to a corporation.

@shine @joepie91 Of course I agree. Hopefully it can be accessible too.

@serrebi @shine @joepie91 I dk how well that works for webviews, but perhaps accesskit can make it work somewhat?

@esoteric_programmer @serrebi @shine AccessKit did come up in one of the open issues regarding accessibility, but the provisional conclusion was that it would not (yet) have the necessary functionality to handle everything a browser needs

@joepie91 @serrebi @shine well, everything is one thing, the basic things are another. And I dk what those may be, but perhaps open an issue against the project? I'm sure @matt would look into it, if nothing else

@esoteric_programmer @joepie91 @serrebi @matt Matt is already a part of that debate :) https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/31321#issuecomment-1992524824

@shine @joepie91 @serrebi @matt oho, awesome! will go look at the issue asap then

@serrebi By this point Servo is not even a usable feature-complete browser yet; a lot of stuff is missing, so I'm not at all surprised that accessibility would be one of those things.

I don't know what their exact plans on accessibility are, but based on the general community around it, I would expect it to be considered, but for it to take some time because it's essentially a from-scratch implementation of a lot of things including UI integrations.

(The 'actionable' part right now is mainly for developers who can contribute towards making it a usable browser engine, less so for end users)

@serrebi (The background for my original post is mostly that a lot of people don't know that Servo is alive again, and "them contributing to Servo" probably gets us to a viable alternative faster than "everybody building their own incomplete alternative browser" would)

@serrebi A little further investigation turned up these two threads:

https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/4344
https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/31321

It seems that the situation can be summarized as "screenreader integration is wanted but going to be a lot of work and nobody has really gotten around to it yet; and the off-the-shelf library for it isn't feature-complete enough yet to support the complexity of a browser".

@joepie91 I'm glad it's being talked about, beyond we don't really want to do this haha.

@frumble It's not that simple. A big part of how the situation ended up where it did, is precisely the complexity of the project - and the history of Firefox means that it has not only accumulated a lot of technical debt over the years, but also that the design choices made in its development process were often optimized for short-term results over long-term maintainability and sustainability.

Or to put it differently: if you try to take over a project that was developed to corporate standards, you will need to emulate all of the same corporate dynamics to be able to do that, because those are the assumptions about the environment that will have been encoded in the design. That just sets us up for the same kind of failure again, 10 years from now.

There is therefore a significant benefit to developing a new browser engine from a different set of principles; those of a community-led project where you cannot assume the existence of funding, which recognizes that sustainable maintainability by a potentially small set of maintainers is the most important metric.

(Also, the oft-repeated "don't rewrite your software" advice is related to rewriting for *technical* reasons. That is not the context here, and so you cannot just port over the rationale 1:1 and assume it to hold true.)

@frumble Also, more directly pertinent to the situation: why argue against people doing a helpful thing they are already doing, in the first place?

@mjdxp Yes and no; there's a very basic example browser shell that comes with Servo itself, but to my knowledge nobody has built an "end-user browser" yet.

Servo has very recently improved its embeddability, which from what I understand makes it easier to start building such a browser for end users.