|| I'm also a little surprised there hasn't been an attempt to launch a completely new Firefox from the ground up.
I (hopefully) think this is what Servo is and will end up being.
Has no legacy code, and is tiny in comparison to Gecko. It's OS support is fairly modern, and has no interest in supporting Windows XP.
It's also written in such a way that allows them to be more multi-threaded and more concurrent than traditional rendering engines.
At some point you have to draw a line in the sand and start again, and I hope Servo is that.
> I (hopefully) think this is what Servo is and will end up being.
Not really the plan. Servo may eventually become a product, but that would be in the very far future. But Gecko can use lessons learned from Servo, and try to share code with it, so you can incrementally replace parts of Gecko.
> and has no interest in supporting Windows XP.
I don't think that's the case? We don't have users on XP so we may not support it right now, but that's just an issue of priorities and not having the resources to fix all the things at once.
There are more XP users of Firefox than there are on Linux (probably for other browsers too). If Servo was a product it would probably care about XP.
Yup, hence my "hopefully", I'm aware small parts of servo may go into Gecko incrementally, however im still routing for something like browserhtml to be at a usable state, and for servo to run on its own.
Well, that was 2014. And yes, there's not much interest in putting the effort to support XP now.
That is because Servo is currently not a product. You said "I (hopefully) think this is what Servo is and will end up being.", which talks of a future where Servo is a product (which can happen, though it would be in the far future). In such a case Servo would reevaluate supporting XP (unless it is so far in the future that XP support is no longer important, in which case most probably other browsers will drop XP support too). I say it in that comment too, "we're currently a research project" and "If/when we stop being a research project, maybe, but I doubt it". I'm less doubtful now, but yes, it's possible that Servo would continue not supporting XP as a product if there was a good enough reason for it.
The reason Servo doesn't support XP is not because Servo is Servo, it's because Servo is not a product.
I (hopefully) think this is what Servo is and will end up being. Has no legacy code, and is tiny in comparison to Gecko. It's OS support is fairly modern, and has no interest in supporting Windows XP. It's also written in such a way that allows them to be more multi-threaded and more concurrent than traditional rendering engines.
At some point you have to draw a line in the sand and start again, and I hope Servo is that.
You can check out https://github.com/browserhtml/browserhtml which is servo running standalone