Remember “Servo”, Mozilla’s “next generation browser engine” focused on performance and robustness?
“Servo developers start 2024 full force…” reports FOSS newscited a social media post from FOSDEM. ”[T]The servo project team was showing off their achievements so far. ”
For those unfamiliar, Servo is an experimental browser engine that leverages the power of Rust to provide an adaptive, memory-safe, and modular experience. After Mozilla created Servo as a research project in his 2012, it experienced ups and downs over the years and was revived in 2023. Thanks to the developer's fresh approach to how Servo should move forward.
There are plenty of open source Chrome alternatives out there, but this could give us a really cool Servo-based option that might give it a run for its money over Blink and Gecko. Just a few months ago, in September 2023, after The Servo Project officially joined Linux Foundation Europe, existing contributors from Igalia took over the maintenance of the project and ramped up the effort. To complement that, last year's Open Source Summit Europe: Manuel Rego The Igalian native shared some very useful insights during his presentation.
He introduced WebGL support, cross-platform support including mobile support for Android and Linux, and more. They are experimenting with Servo in embedded application use cases (such as running on a Raspberry Pi) and have plans to advance it. As far as I can see, Servo seems to be faster on the Raspberry Pi compared to Chromium. You can explore more demos like this on the Servo demo web page.
According to the article, the 2024 roadmap includes “initial Android support means that Servo will be built on the latest Android version” and that “in the future, developers will We will release the nightly APK on “.
One fun fact? “Despite Mozilla discontinuing the experimental project, Firefox still utilizes several servo components within the browser.”
Another FOSDOM update from social media: “Thunderbird is also powered by Rust.”