Mozilla has recently begun collaborating with Samsung on an advanced technology Web browser engine called Servo.
According to Mozilla’s CTO, Brendan Eich in a recent blog post, “Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way. This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that can fully utilize the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web. To those ends, Servo is written in Rust, a new, safe systems language developed by Mozilla along with a growing community of enthusiasts.”
“They are bringing both the Rust programming language and Servo, the experimental web browser engine, to Android and ARM. This is an exciting step in the evolution of both projects that will allow us to start deeper research with Servo on mobile. Samsung has already contributed an ARM backend to Rust and the build infrastructure necessary to cross-compile to Android, along with many other improvements.”
According to Techchrunch, Samsung is interested in this project because the company is “investigating various new technologies to innovate legacy products. This collaboration will bring an opportunity to open a new era of future web experience.”
To take a look at what is happening and contribute to the projects, you can download and try the recently-released Rust 0.6 or check out the source for Rust and Servo on GitHub. Then participate in the development process on the Rust (https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/rust-dev) and Servo (https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-servo) mailing lists.
