Consider switching from Chromium to Servo

[Croydon]

This might solve problems like #490, #371

Blocked by https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1386669 & https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1386674

On the downside:

• dependency on Rust
  • which we would somehow need to manage as well
  • which could make building Servo again impossible as it is the case with CEF right now
  • => no widespread OS has Rust dev support per default
• Servo is still immature
  • we might at least want to wait till WebRender is landed in Firefox (release 60 or a few releases later)

https://hackmd.io/BwJhEMQMwZgBgLQDYCsBTKCAsBjAjJsFgJxoLErEjAzF4gAmMaQA# https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1311790 https://github.com/servo/servo/tree/master/ports/cef https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/9147

[a-teammate]

1. installing the rust compiler could be done via conan. downloading Rust is only necessary if you build the "CEF-Servo" package from source otherwise we only link the prebuilts.
2. Yes true, we might want to switch later. The deadline for Firefox 60 is May 2018, see https://wiki.mozilla.org/RapidRelease/Calendar We will develop against the CEF API anyways till then.

[Croydon]

Servo removed the support for CEF for the moment. https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/9147#issuecomment-411944715

Waiting for it to (hopefully) come back...

[aschaeffer]

Hopefully.

[a-teammate]

The idea is that servo gets rid of the CEF API to improve the usability of servo in all kinds of applications. Servo is already aimed at being embeddable and in some way they established concepts superior to CEF's "you get chrome and some layer on top to disable features and make it embeddable". Instead you get "these are the bare components, use them to build a browser, or whatever"

[a-teammate]

Okay, I looked into servo some more regarding the issues:

Rust

1. Rust functions can be executed pretty easily from C -> This is not a problem
2. The rust toolchain needs to be installed. -> This needs an additional conan dependency

Dependencies

There are a lot less dependencies for Servo than for CEF, building should be much more straight-forward.

• Rust
• gstreamer
  • easily installable through package managers on all target OS
• openssl
• bz2
• harfbuzz

@Croydon: what do you mean by

Blocked by https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1386669 & https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1386674

Servo is used in firefox already, so why are these blocking?

[Croydon]

Servo is used in firefox already, so why are these blocking?

There is a huge difference between using parts of Servo in Firefox (this is the case) and having full Servo in Firefox, which will still take same time and maybe a long time.

These meta bugs I linked to can be a good indicator and how stable Servo as a whole is.

[Fohlen]

As far as we evaluated on the hackathon #608 Servo will remain unfit for our use in the realistic future.