The modern Web browser is most likely powered by one of three engines – WebKit, Trident or Gecko. The latter is currently developed by Mozilla, and is used in its popular Firefox Web browser. One Web browser engine is apparently not enough for the non-profit, though, as it’s now working on another.
Mozilla and Samsung jointly announced today that they have begun work on an advanced Web browser engine called Servo. The engine will be built in Rust, a new programming language in development at Mozilla that the non-profit hopes will “fill many of the same niches that C++ has over the past decades.”
A new Web browser engine is already pretty big news, but that’s only half of the story. Mozilla and Samsung are also bringing Rust and Servo to Android and ARM devices. It seems its both parties’ intention to make a next generation Web browser engine for mobile devices that “can fully utilize the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web.”
At the moment, there isn’t much to show for Servo, but Mozilla says it’s now putting more resources into the project to prove that it can “build a fast Web browser with pervasive parallelism, and in a safe, fun language.” At the same time, the non-profit will also be working on completing the first major revision of the Rust language.
Like most Mozilla projects, the non-profit is inviting the community to help them develop Rust and Servo. If you would like nothing more to poke and prod untested code, you can grab the source code for Rust and Servo at their respective GitHub repositories.
