Servo is really great: Rust seems like a no brainer choice for a modern web engine, and its clean, performance-focused design from the ground up is wonderful.
But it seems really hard for it to get anywhere just based on occasional contributions from volunteers. I was actually quite surprised that basic functionality like <progress> and the :checked attribute were not even supported prior to this release.
Servo got 527 commits, while Chromium has over 20,000 commits.
> Can I submit a PR that includes code generated by AI tools?
> No. This includes (but is not limited to) all generative AI tools like Claude, Codex, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, and Windsurf.
For something like a browser, this de facto limits the set of people who can contribute to something that touches the layout engine (e.g. the ineffable but brilliant https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/main/components/layout/f...) to just those already familiar with the code.
A much better middle ground IMO would be to quarantine first-time committers behind an AI-generated-PRs-will-not-be-reviewed policy, but to allow those who understand and respect the cycle enough to get PRs accepted, to begin using AI to give the team leverage. Without some kind of policy like that, Servo's sadly going to fall behind literally any other open-source project that people could dedicate their time towards.
fabrice_d 2 hours ago [-]
Servo is already lacking reviewers. How would accepting AI contributions help?
darkamaul 2 hours ago [-]
> > No. This includes (but is not limited to) all generative AI tools like Claude, Codex, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, and Windsurf
Based on the tool listed here, you can probably know when this policy was first written. For instance, Windsurf is long gone and Cursor is not tier 1 anymore.
Crazy to think how much the space of AI coding agent has evolved in less than 2 years.
porphyra 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it's a fun time capsule. The policy was written in July 2024 [1]. There's a contentious discussion in 2025 [2] where they discussed it and reaffirmed the ban. Then in June 2026 they reiterated the ban and added CI checks to reject AI coauthors [3]
There are not just volunteer contributions, but also people working full time on Servo: some at Igalia, and some at Huawei at least.
jeffbee 39 minutes ago [-]
Language choice has next to nothing to do with browser performance. Servo's "performance-focused" design currently suffers from a 10x gap between it and Chrome on the same platform.
shakna 5 hours ago [-]
Progress got my attention.
As an on-again off-again project, I've been building an incremental game that is pretty much just hundreds of progress bars - a little bit out of the norm for the browser.
Firefox everything renders smoothly and gently.
Chrome chugs, skips paints, delays animation frames, skips some events, and batches others.
Game uses a few features that aren't in Servo yet... But maybe I can tweak it...
ericyd 8 hours ago [-]
It's heartening to see a large group of people working (mostly) for free on a passion project. Makes me optimistic about the resilience of intrinsic human drive.
caminanteblanco 9 hours ago [-]
One of the things I find really helpful about servo (as a casual user) is the breadth of pre-built releases they have. It makes it much more feasible to actually use on a day-to-day basis, especially on android
npodbielski 9 hours ago [-]
wow! they already have android apk? Awesome!
npodbielski 9 hours ago [-]
login form on HN does not work, but servo is working! :D
caminanteblanco 9 hours ago [-]
It was working a second ago (I made the parent comment from servo) but it looks like you get logged out pretty quickly. YMMV, plus probably best not to log into anything too important yet
npodbielski 5 hours ago [-]
I do not think HN is important :)
But thanks for warning.
moderation 9 hours ago [-]
The progress on Servo is impressive. UI polish is required in order to be more usable. Things like keyboard shortcuts to focus the address bar are required to make it feasible for more daily driving use
jszymborski 8 hours ago [-]
My understanding is that the main focus is on the engine and building a good embedding API so that folks can build browsers (and apps and web drivers etc...) with it.
moderation 8 hours ago [-]
That is my understanding too. In contrast Ladybird has really improved in the UI area and the recent addition of session restore, content blocking and performance makes it a very capable daily driver browser
nerdypepper 7 hours ago [-]
i've been hacking on my own browser using servo as a library! its lovely to interface with.
Feels like a missed opportunity where we could take a giant leap forward.
porphyra 3 hours ago [-]
The AI policy for Servo, which prohibits AI contributed code (but allows you to use AI to inspect and learn about the codebase), was written in mid-2024, which seems like an eternity ago.
But even in June 2026 they reiterated this ban and added CI checks to automatically reject AI-coauthored patches [1].
> For developers of Servo itself, please note that per project policy, you must not use the output of large language models or other generative AI tools in your contributions. To help us enforce that, we now have CI checks that reject AI agents as coauthors (@SimonSapin, @delan, #44723).
Giant leaps aren't typically the way to steady progress
nerdypepper 7 hours ago [-]
my read is that with the right guidance, implementing the vast amount of the CSS spec for example, could be done easily with some AI assistance, the spec is incredibly well defined. just comparing the layouting and styling in blitz[0] (which does use agents), servo is lacking quite a bit, and the implementation of various features don't follow the spec exactly.
that being said, i entirely respect their decision of course, perhaps they will revisit at a later point in time!
My experience is that it varies greatly by feature.
Something like border styles, the agent was able to do pretty effectively. Although it still took a few hours iterating on it to get the performance characteristics and edge cases right.
More complex features like hoisting position absolute nodes and other layout features still take days to weeks of iterating to get something usable that isn't so fragile it'll blow up the next time you touch something.
fschuett 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, this was how I did it in Azul[1], which is „reverse engineered from the W3C spec“. But it still took a lot of „agentic debugging“ to get the same visual layout as Chrome[2]. It wasn‘t „easily“ done however and it‘s not yet stable.
CSS isn't super well defined actually, at least not compared with HTML or JavaScript.
matkoniecz 8 hours ago [-]
> For now, we’re taking a cautious approach to these tools due to their effects — both unknown and observed — on project health and maintenance burden. This field is evolving quickly, so we are open to revising this policy at a later date, given proposals for particular tools that mitigate these effects.
seems entirely reasonable reason and approach, and I see no reason to force everyone approach LLM in the same way
iknowstuff 6 hours ago [-]
It’s kind of a wink wink situation. Language like this simply encourages developers to vet code written by AI thoroughly to avoid being caught with obvious slop.
But as maintainers we (I don’t work on servo, but other projects) know that obviously people use AI anyway.
samus 49 minutes ago [-]
That's good enough and would prove that one put effort into the PR. Which is exactly what that policy actually wants to achieve.
lanyard-textile 3 hours ago [-]
+1. If you submit code that was drafted by AI but vetted well by a human to not be obvious... Good :)
ravenstine 7 hours ago [-]
If you believe AI isn't still involved in contributions to Servo, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
> Contributions must not include content generated by large language models or other probabilistic tools, including but not limited to Copilot or ChatGPT. This policy covers code, documentation, pull requests, issues, comments, and any other contributions to the Servo project.
> For now, we’re taking a cautious approach to these tools due to their effects — both unknown and observed — on project health and maintenance burden. This field is evolving quickly, so we are open to revising this policy at a later date, given proposals for particular tools that mitigate these effects.
The references to ChatGPT and Copilot suggest it was authored before the Codex and Claude Code revolution. I wonder if they'll revise it at some point soon.
Ladybird seems to be embracing vibe coding, so I think there's a great opportunity to compare them. After a couple of months of vibe coding what do you people here think about Ladybird's progress?
tcdent 9 hours ago [-]
About ready to switch to Servo as my daily driver on desktop.
Have been using it as the render backend on an experimental tablet OS and its quite capable once you fix the font rendering.
Would gladly upstream contributions but I dont type anymore.
phkahler 7 hours ago [-]
>> With the advances in AI, I'd expect the Servo project to go a lot faster ...
>> Do they allow vibe-coded contributions?
With an official automated test suite that they aim to pass, someone could probably set Claude loose on closing out those bugs and feature gaps. Assuming AI can figure out why tests fail (it probably can) I'd give it about a day to finish. Actually maybe a week since it'd be compiling RUST. Would the resulting code be of the same quality? Probably not. Would it be good? Maybe.
nicoburns 7 hours ago [-]
IME, agents are generally capable of passing the tests autonomously. But not with code you'd actually ever want to use. Both because of the quality, and because it will have awful performance/memory/security issues.
pkulak 8 hours ago [-]
I think the sweet spot is not allowing vibe-coded contributions past a certain line count. At least, that's my policy. If you use an LLM to track down some bug that's a few lines to fix; that's fine. But if it's a new feature that needs 100s of lines; just make a feature request and if I agree, I can spin up my own clanker.
matkoniecz 8 hours ago [-]
> Do they allow vibe-coded contributions?
are there serious projects welcoming vibe-coded PRs?
tormeh 8 hours ago [-]
That was my thought as well. You'd imagine a known quantity like a browser should be easy to make now. I know it sounds ridiculous to anyone who hasn't tried the new models, but idk what to tell you. Photoshop used to be impossible to clone, too. I asked Opus 5.5 to add SSGI to an open source game and it did it in an afternoon. I don't know anything about graphics programming. This is nuts.
samus 45 minutes ago [-]
Photoshop was never impossible to clone, and people have written browser engines before. The issue was never implementation complexity, but rather the things that are actually hard: going past the 99% of required features, hunting down corner cases, and at the same time ensuring high test coverage and maintainability.
Rendered at 00:48:45 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
But it seems really hard for it to get anywhere just based on occasional contributions from volunteers. I was actually quite surprised that basic functionality like <progress> and the :checked attribute were not even supported prior to this release.
Servo got 527 commits, while Chromium has over 20,000 commits.
> Can I submit a PR that includes code generated by AI tools?
> No. This includes (but is not limited to) all generative AI tools like Claude, Codex, ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, and Windsurf.
For something like a browser, this de facto limits the set of people who can contribute to something that touches the layout engine (e.g. the ineffable but brilliant https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/main/components/layout/f...) to just those already familiar with the code.
A much better middle ground IMO would be to quarantine first-time committers behind an AI-generated-PRs-will-not-be-reviewed policy, but to allow those who understand and respect the cycle enough to get PRs accepted, to begin using AI to give the team leverage. Without some kind of policy like that, Servo's sadly going to fall behind literally any other open-source project that people could dedicate their time towards.
Based on the tool listed here, you can probably know when this policy was first written. For instance, Windsurf is long gone and Cursor is not tier 1 anymore.
Crazy to think how much the space of AI coding agent has evolved in less than 2 years.
[1] https://github.com/servo/book/commit/5afb80d5b08b259ca359cfe...
[2] https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/36379
[3] https://servo.org/blog/2026/06/30/may-in-servo/
As an on-again off-again project, I've been building an incremental game that is pretty much just hundreds of progress bars - a little bit out of the norm for the browser.
Firefox everything renders smoothly and gently.
Chrome chugs, skips paints, delays animation frames, skips some events, and batches others.
Game uses a few features that aren't in Servo yet... But maybe I can tweak it...
Feels like a missed opportunity where we could take a giant leap forward.
But even in June 2026 they reiterated this ban and added CI checks to automatically reject AI-coauthored patches [1].
> For developers of Servo itself, please note that per project policy, you must not use the output of large language models or other generative AI tools in your contributions. To help us enforce that, we now have CI checks that reject AI agents as coauthors (@SimonSapin, @delan, #44723).
[1] https://servo.org/blog/2026/06/30/may-in-servo/
that being said, i entirely respect their decision of course, perhaps they will revisit at a later point in time!
[0]: https://github.com/dioxuslabs/blitz
My experience is that it varies greatly by feature.
Something like border styles, the agent was able to do pretty effectively. Although it still took a few hours iterating on it to get the performance characteristics and edge cases right.
More complex features like hoisting position absolute nodes and other layout features still take days to weeks of iterating to get something usable that isn't so fragile it'll blow up the next time you touch something.
[1] https://azul.rs/ui
[2] https://azul.rs/ui/reftest
seems entirely reasonable reason and approach, and I see no reason to force everyone approach LLM in the same way
But as maintainers we (I don’t work on servo, but other projects) know that obviously people use AI anyway.
how sad.
Do they allow vibe-coded contributions?
> Contributions must not include content generated by large language models or other probabilistic tools, including but not limited to Copilot or ChatGPT. This policy covers code, documentation, pull requests, issues, comments, and any other contributions to the Servo project.
> For now, we’re taking a cautious approach to these tools due to their effects — both unknown and observed — on project health and maintenance burden. This field is evolving quickly, so we are open to revising this policy at a later date, given proposals for particular tools that mitigate these effects.
The references to ChatGPT and Copilot suggest it was authored before the Codex and Claude Code revolution. I wonder if they'll revise it at some point soon.
Update: looks like that language was originally added in July 2024: https://github.com/servo/book/commit/5afb80d5b08b259ca359cfe...
I found a discussion about changing it in April 2025, but they decided to keep it the same at that point: https://github.com/servo/servo/discussions/36379
Have been using it as the render backend on an experimental tablet OS and its quite capable once you fix the font rendering.
Would gladly upstream contributions but I dont type anymore.
With an official automated test suite that they aim to pass, someone could probably set Claude loose on closing out those bugs and feature gaps. Assuming AI can figure out why tests fail (it probably can) I'd give it about a day to finish. Actually maybe a week since it'd be compiling RUST. Would the resulting code be of the same quality? Probably not. Would it be good? Maybe.
are there serious projects welcoming vibe-coded PRs?