Short Bytes: Mozilla’s experimental browser engine project Servo will be a reality in June when the company will release its first Alpha. With a focus on security, performance, parallelism and modularity, Servo is built from the scratch using Rust programming language.
Mozilla launched the Servo browser engine as an experimental project. In an internal discussions group, Mozilla engineers have released that it’s nearing its Alpha release this June.
Servo has been built from scratch using Mozilla’s homegrown programming language Rust. Designed to be more modular, Servo comes with an option to only install the elements that you need, making it more secure and faster than C++ — a language that’s poorly suited to solve the problems like memory leaks and bug, according to Mozilla. It has been designed to treat tasks like HTML parsing, rendering etc. as separate jobs.
It’s being actively developed for Linux, OS X, Android, and Firefox OS. However, Mozilla hasn’t revealed any official date for the official release of the browser. The team is pushing the first Alpha release in June to gain feedback from the developers and make it better.
At the moment, the browser is still in very early days and Firefox users shouldn’t start packing their bags to make a shift. “To be clear, this will be a very early release (nightly builds) of Servo with HTML UI (browser.html). You won’t be able to replace your current browser with Servo just yet :) … there’s still a long way to go. The goal is to make it easier for people to test Servo and file bugs,” one engineer explained.
The current work on Servo is also accompanied by a research project called Browser.html for making an experimental Servo browser in HTML. This project has two major part:
- Graphene: a runtime for making native HTML apps, currently developed as a part of Servo.
- Browser.html: an experimental browser UI for desktop.
It’s expected that new technologies will be tested in Servo and they’ll be later implemented in Firefox. However, the users looking for bleeding edge and experimental features may one day be able to try this browser.
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Also read: How To Make Mozilla Firefox Faster For Web Browsing
