Mozilla and Samsung team up to give life to Servo, a web engine “next generation”

By Namit - April, 4th 2013

The Mozilla Foundation, known for its web browser “open source” Firefox yesterday met twenty versions, and computer device maker Samsung have announced the creation of a partnership to build a “new generation” of web browser engine called Servo .

The ultimate goal is to implement this technology in Android devices and products with ARM Holdings architecture . And, even though neither company wanted to give clues about its launch, it is expected that the first major revision of the programming language that will serve as a ready basis “over the next year.”

Such language is nothing more and nothing less than Rust , a creation of the Foundation who has spent several years developing but still is on version 0.6.

“The intention is to attack many of the same niches to which C + + has been directed in recent decades, with abstractions multiparadigm, efficient, high-level, offering precise control over hardware resources,” explains its leaders .

“But beyond that, it s ECURITY default , preventing entire classes of memory management errors that lead to crashes and security vulnerabilities “and allowing it to take advantage of” the power of multi-core CPU in the computing platforms and future, “they say.

In fact, Mozilla and Samsung want to work with architectures “Faster, heterogeneous and multi-core” and “massively parallel hardware.” Servo is, therefore, an attempt to reconstruct the navigation from scratch in modern hardware, leaving behind “old assumptions” about how it should work a rendering engine .

Right now, this pair of partners is refining, expanding and document libraries, building new tools to improve the user experience and performance enhancing opportunities. Among the contributions of Samsung, for example, has a backend for ARM Rust and infrastructure for cross compiling android.

Instead of designing a new web browser to challenge the complete alternatives like Chrome, Servo seems to be more of a rival to WebKit , the engine used by Apple Safari and Opera recently . It would be logical that the future would feed servo terminal with Firefox OS.