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.
Ladybird is C++ and that still has the same issues as every other engine.
I suspect Ladybird will/has already leapfrogged Servo in performance and usage due to the Ladybird team and its momentum. Mozilla isn't doing anything with Servo anymore.
But I also don't really see a compelling reason for Ladybird's existence - we already have Chromium, Blink, Gecko, etc. It's hard for me to imagine a world where Ladybird is a healthy contender for marketshare.
The only real novel thing to do in this space is "rewrite it in Rust".
I think that was being blocked by Swift features/libraries not being consistent across platforms, in that Swift for Linux/etc is missing stuff you'd get in macOS.
I don't see that changing any time soon. If Apple truly wanted Swift adoption to be cross platform, they have the resources to do it, but they didn't do it.
No, pretty sure that's all basically fixed in Swift 6 (Sep 2024), I think it's more just the immaturity of the C++ interop in being able to bridge Swift to complex C++ code.
That's a key feature of what Apple want Swift for (to gradually replace their C++ projects with Swift) but it's still pretty new. It'll take a while to mature.
That feels like the wrong language to bet the farm on.
Swift is horrible to develop in cross-platform. The language ergonomics are great, but the support just isn't there.
Also - swift is great for lots of applications, but a browser? Why use a garbage collected language for something that needs to be smooth? Unpredictable GC pause jitter is not something you want when smooth scrolling and rendering. Granted Javascript already negates that experience a little bit, but why introduce even more unpredictability?
I get the feeling the leadership loves Mac/Apple, which makes sense in light of their recent iOS announcement. Maybe they're prioritizing that world.
