> Today, the Servo team has released new versions of the servoshell binaries for all our supported platforms, tagged v0.0.1. These binaries are essentially the same nightly builds that were already available from the download page with additional manual testing, now tagging them explicitly as releases for future reference.
> We plan to publish such a tagged release every month. For now, we are adopting a simple release process where we will use a recent nightly build and perform additional manual testing to identify issues and regressions before tagging and publishing the binaries.
> There are currently no plans to publish these releases on crates.io or platform-specific app stores. The goal is just to publish tagged releases on GitHub.
The release announcement doesn't contain much information, but Servo does publish regular "This month in Servo" updates on their blog which contain lots of details:
I have similar emotions about google.com no longer working in w3m and other no-JS browsers, something that happened this year seemingly to very little fanfare, or whatever the antonym to fanfare is.
(Oh! I wonder if Servo will bring about a new, JS enabled, TUI browser?)
Tried it out on Linux. Worked better than I expected. Sites that are text heavy render well, and quickly. Sites with more "customization" sometimes struggled with rendering; stuff all over the place. Memory usage seemed a bit higher than Firefox with the same tabs, but not out of this world higher.
It’s still a ways off, but I’m excited for the possibility of something like Tauri using Servo natively instead of needing host browsers. A pure Rust desktop app stack with only a single browser to target sounds fantastic.
Personally I'm more optimistic about Servo - because originating at Mozilla, I imagine more web browser experience and expertise went into its architecture, and also because Rust.
I don't know.. Servo has been in development for a decade and still has quite underwhelming performance and UX. The binary is 100MB+ on Mac, scrolling is janky, a google image search takes 10+ seconds to render and goes through very buggy states. Meanwhile Ladybird renders a legacy UI, but feels really fast and stable.
I think Ladybird will beat Servo at making an usable and good product, Mozilla might have more resources but that's not the only thing that you need if you want to build great software.
We are lucky it's even a duopoly. All it would take is the demise of Firefox, and the entire web would be defined entirely by the implementation of Chrome/Chromium.
Servo is very welcome; a third leg to the stool makes real diversity possible again.
Don't forget that pretty much 100% of iOS users and a nontrivial percentage of Mac users are on Webkit/Safari. That's not to say Safari is really leading the pack on anything at all, but Google also hasn't led Apple by the nose on pretty much anything on the web in recent years.
Ladybird seems to be progressing at an impressive pace also, time will tell however if their choice of C++ will be a big problem or if modern ways of doing things are safe enough.
I've seen a lot of criticism of Mozilla in these parts, some more fair than others. (Adtech = bad, regardless of whether you call it privacy preserving. CEO pay, not as bad as people say but don't love it.) But the notion that a trillion dollar platform company dictating web standards and Firefox are two sides of the same coin is, by my lights, the singularly most spectacular failure of comprehension that's been wrought by this era of Mozilla skepticism. It's not exactly a big lie because the people saying it seem to sincerely believe it but it's comparably disastrous as a test of information literacy.
Mozilla was sitting on a chest of cash that could have funded engineering efforts for decades. Instead they decided to inflate managers and marketers in an effort to expand market/mindshare and follow that with needs for ever increasing funding drives to fund lavish parties and events on the marketing side, while shuttering engineering efforts and even laying off swaths of engineering talent.
That doesn't even touch some of the more salient political movements or failure after failure to spin the brands off into something more/different for profit motives.
Mozilla needs to restructure as an engineering focused organization where business operations, marketting and brand management are not steering the ship.
There's some serious Mozilla Derangement Syndrome in online spaces, I see it on Reddit, too. A lot of people seem to want to hold them to standards they hold no other company to, some discontents seem to be driven into a frothing rage by some of CEOs uh.. traits? too.
Firefox isn't a part of any duopoly, with market share numbers as low as they are these days. Chrome + Safari, perhaps? (Or Chrome + Edge if you exclude mobile, though Edge of course uses the same rendering engine as Chome.)
I wonder if it is deliberate choice to not include scrollbar? Is it due to limitations of UI widgets, or nowadays scrollbars are part of website, as some websites are very happy to set scrollbar size to "too narrow for comfortable use" or even remove it altogether. To end on positive note: is there a way for an average developer to try and fix this issue, thus doing my own share of contributing? Where should one start?
Readit News
> Today, the Servo team has released new versions of the servoshell binaries for all our supported platforms, tagged v0.0.1. These binaries are essentially the same nightly builds that were already available from the download page with additional manual testing, now tagging them explicitly as releases for future reference.
> We plan to publish such a tagged release every month. For now, we are adopting a simple release process where we will use a recent nightly build and perform additional manual testing to identify issues and regressions before tagging and publishing the binaries.
> There are currently no plans to publish these releases on crates.io or platform-specific app stores. The goal is just to publish tagged releases on GitHub.
[1] https://ladybird.org/#about
- Blog: https://servo.org/blog/
- Most recent TMIS post https://servo.org/blog/2025/09/25/this-month-in-servo/
Check them out if you're interested in what's going on with Servo.
That said, I'm recently back on RSS and this is another good feed:
https://servo.org/blog/feed.xml
(Oh! I wonder if Servo will bring about a new, JS enabled, TUI browser?)
All in all, an impressive release.
Personally I'm more optimistic about Servo - because originating at Mozilla, I imagine more web browser experience and expertise went into its architecture, and also because Rust.
Andreas Kling who created Ladybird had prior experience working on KHTML/WebKit so there is expertise there too.
Servo is very welcome; a third leg to the stool makes real diversity possible again.
That doesn't even touch some of the more salient political movements or failure after failure to spin the brands off into something more/different for profit motives.
Mozilla needs to restructure as an engineering focused organization where business operations, marketting and brand management are not steering the ship.
Also, what's your issue with Firefox?
Dead Comment
You should likely join https://servo.zulipchat.com and ask questions to know where to start.