The Servo project and its impact on the web platform ecosystem

58 points by kana

FOSDEM Talk: https://fosdem.org/2026/schedule/event/LXFKS9-servo-project-impact/

xnacly

I love servo. Great talk, the slide navigation on mobile is a bit weird

kana

I think the left/right arrows navigate between different sections, while up/down arrows navigate between pages within that section and can be easily missed since they are not shown on the first few single-page sections.

By the way, the slides are also viewable using Servo (tested on my phone using their Android build) (despite missing emojis and videos).
- vulcan
  
  This looks like a reveal.js presentation; you can hit space on desktop to see all the slides (incl. descending through the vertical slides). From looking at the reveal.js docs it looks like on mobile there's no equivalent :/
- boehs
  
  while up/down arrows navigate between pages within that section
  
  Interesting, I've never seen this before. What is the point of two dimensional slideshows when time is one dimensional? Like, you progress to next slide, next slide, next slide sequentially in a predefined order, so the slides could just be arranged horizontally?
  - gnafuthegreat
    
    I don't know that it was the case for this particular presentation, but I can imagine situations where you might want to build slides for a talk that will fit into different time slots with different amounts of content. If you're giving a lightning talk, you just go to the right. If you have more time, you can go downward to get into more details. I haven't done anything like that, but this format has me thinking about how it could be applied. If you expect you may have opportunities to present the same topic in different time formats, this is a slick way to build one set of slides.
    
    Gaelan
    
    It's also not unheard of to have extra slides available to elaborate on certain areas based on audience interest, questions, etc.
  - hoistbypetard
    
    I found it odd on desktop, too. (And it looks the same on my phone as on desktop.)
    
    I want to know if servo could yet replace chromium in something akin to playwright. It looks maybe close?
    
    Psentee
    
    I want to know if servo could yet replace chromium in something akin to playwright. It looks maybe close?
    
    Isn't the webdriver API mentioned and demoed in the presentation exactly that?
    
    (The navigation is awkward indeed, on desktop space seems to proceed in the right way, no idea about mobile)
    
    hoistbypetard
    
    Yes. That's why I said it looks maybe close. I wasn't precise enough in my wondering: there was an implied "for much of the internet" at the end of it. I'm also wondering whether the webdriver pieces are complete enough to drop into a script that's using it through, say, the python bindings, extract things from pages, handle download files, etc.
    
    Because I'd really like to replace some automation that currently leans on playwright with it. I think it'd greatly reduce the impact of automation tasks on that system compared to headless chromium. And it's an appealing scenario because rendering glitches aren't important at all there.