Repository github.com/servo/servo Operating system | Written in Rust Type Layout engine | |
 | ||
Developer(s) Mozilla Research, Samsung and others Preview release Nightly build / July 1, 2016; 8 months ago (2016-07-01) | ||
Servo is an experimental web browser layout engine being developed by Mozilla Research, with Samsung porting it to Android and ARM processors. The prototype seeks to create a highly parallel environment, in which many components (such as rendering, layout, HTML parsing, image decoding, etc.) are handled by fine-grained, isolated tasks. Source code for the project is written in the Rust programming language.
Contents
- Features
- History
- Project Goals
- Relationship to Firefox
- Chromium Embedded Framework
- Project Structure
- References
Servo provides a consistent API for hosting the engine within other software. It is designed to be compatible with Chromium Embedded Framework, an API used by Adobe and Valve Corporation to incorporate the Blink rendering engine within their own products. Allowing Servo to be dropped in as a replacement engine simplifies real-world testing.
Two significant components used by Servo are based on pre-existing C++ code from Mozilla. JavaScript support is provided by SpiderMonkey, and the 2D graphics library Azure is used to interface to OpenGL and Direct3D.
Servo is named after Tom Servo, a robot from the television show Mystery Science Theater 3000.
Features
Development on Servo is still at an early stage, however it can already render Wikipedia and GitHub and successfully passes the Acid2 test. It features innovations like a parallel layout algorithm and its own CSS3 and HTML5 parser implemented in Rust.
Servo makes use of GPU acceleration to render web pages more quickly. Servo is significantly faster, in certain benchmarks, than Gecko, Mozilla's other layout and rendering engine, as of November 2014.
History
Development of Servo began in 2013. The very first commit on 8 February 2012 did not contain any source code. The first rudimentary code commit occurred on 27 March 2012.
On 3 April 2013 Mozilla announced that they and Samsung collaborate on Servo.
As of the 1st of July 2016, a preview version is available for download. This is marked as 0.0.1 and is available for Mac and Linux.
Project Goals
The Servo project itself is officially a research project. The goal is to create a new layout engine using a modern programming language (Rust), and using parallelism and code safety, to achieve greater security and performance versus contemporary browsers.
Using Browser.HTML as a GUI, Servo can act as a standalone browser. This configuration of the browser was originally intended as a research project and proof-of-concept.
Relationship to Firefox
Servo developers plan to merge parts of Servo into Gecko, thus lending the Servo project's advancements to Firefox.
Chromium Embedded Framework
Servo intends to re-implement the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) API. This would allow Servo to be used as a drop-in replacement for Chromium in applications using CEF, and positions Servo as a competitor to Chromium in these cases.
Project Structure
The Servo project is sponsored and maintained by Mozilla, with several Mozilla employees contributing a majority of code to the project. As an open-source, free software project, it is open to contributions from anyone. Servo, including all community contributions, is licensed under the Mozilla Public License version 2.0.