Mozilla has started experimenting with a new browser engine, Servo. It is only a research project, and according to the claims of Mozilla’s engineers, the Servo is not aimed to replace Gecko – the current browser rendering engine used in Firefox and other products.
For Servo, Mozilla will use Rust and not C++. Rust is an experimental programming language being developed by Mozilla and Servo would be the first major project using it. Mozilla’s Paul Rouget explains the reason for selecting Rust over the C++, “C++ is not very suitable for things that need to be parallelized and safe at the same time. However, Rust has been designed for that”.
Other feature of Servo are Modularity (similar to WebKit), DOM implementation mostly in JavaScript, stb_image library for image decoding, new graphic engine ‘Azure’ (Which is targeted to be integrated with Gecko as well). Servo will keep using SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine used in Gecko.
Further Reading and Links:
- Mozilla’s next-generation web browser Servo is making progress
- Servo Design
- Servo, a browser engine research project
- Servo on GitHub
- Servo mailing list
Related Post: Mozilla Should Move To WebKit And V8
