Servo: Mozilla and Samsung Work on Next Gen Web Browser Engine

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 05 Apr 2013

Mozilla announced that it is working alongside Samsung with the aim of rebuilding the web browser from the ground up. Mozilla and Samsung’s next gen web browser engine is called Servo.

It is obvious to the keen observer that fast, multi-core processors are going to define the future. Mozilla Research is well aware of this fact and is prepared to take advantage of tomorrow’s faster, multi-core, heterogeneous computing architectures. With the aim of experimenting with what’s next when it comes to the core technology powering the Web browser, Mozilla has entered a partnership with Samsung – and as part of that partnership, the two companies will work on an advanced technology web browser engine called Servo.

Brendan Eich, Chief Technology Officer with Mozilla, explains:
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.

Brendan Eich went on to say that the Rust programming language and the experimental Servo web browser engine will be released to Android and ARM. After this exciting step, the companies will be able o start deeper research with Servo on mobile.

In the coming year, we are racing to complete the first major revision of Rust – cleaning up, expanding and documenting the libraries, building out our tools to improve the user experience, and beefing up performance,” explained Brendan Eich. “At the same time, we will be putting more resources into Servo, trying to prove that we can build a fast web browser with pervasive parallelism, and in a safe, fun language. We, along with our friends at Samsung will be increasingly looking at opportunities on mobile platforms. Both of these efforts are still early stage projects and there’s a lot to do yet, so now is a good time to get involved.

Learn more about Mozilla’s collaboration with Samsung on developing the Servo browser engine here.



Latest News


Sony's 'Attack of the Blockbusters Sale' Slashes Prices in Half for a Ton of PS4 Games

17 Aug 2017

How Samsung's New T5 Compares to the Old T3 Portable SSD (Infographic)

17 Aug 2017

See all