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Brian Kardell
Betterifying the Web
  • Developer Advocate at Igalia
  • Original Co-author/Co-signer of The Extensible Web Manifesto
  • Co-Founder/Chair, W3C Extensible Web CG
  • Member, W3C (OpenJS Foundation)
  • Co-author of HitchJS
  • Blogger
  • Art, Science & History Lover
  • Standards Geek
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Posted on 09/06/2024

1.3 Million Subtests

Today the Servo project crossed a milestone.

If you're not aware, all of the mainstream browsers that exist today use one of three browser projects/engines (Chromium/Blink, Firefox/Gecko or WebKit). These in turn both have their roots in projects begun in the late 1990's (Gecko and KHTML). Further, they have only 1 funding model, and largely 1 funding source. Over the years, the projects have grown to tens of millions of lines of code and have now had tens of thousands of person years worth of investment.

All of this is just to underscore that getting a new one is incredibly challenging. Microsoft, a web giant, tried and eventually gave up and embraced Chromium.

But... If you haven't been paying attention, something very fun and exciting has been developing over the last couple of years. New life has been breathed into a movement for what we call "novel engines" - that is, engines that don't come from those initial two (khtml/Gecko).

What's more is that most of the life at least comes from 2 engines which are being developed and funded differently - and they're making rapid progress now.

As of today, one of those novel engines - Servo (stewarded by Igalia) passes 1.3 million subtests in Web Platform Tests! Specfically: 1,303,530 as of this writing! Congratulations Servo project!

For perspective, that's over 73% of the subtests that it's currently running. Of course, that's a totally arbitrary threshold, but it's nice to track progress and celebrate milestones and that's a big sounding round number to stop, raise a glass and say "well done!" and "keep up the good work".

Speaking of keeping up the good work: You can join a growing number of others in helping to support the work on Servo directly by donating through GitHub sponsors or our open collective. The Servo Technical Steering Committee collectively discusses how to prioritize the spending of available funds in the public monthly calls. You can also contribute code, reviews and other effort via the Servo GitHub repository. Let's see how quickly we can reach 1.4 million :)