The development project of the browser engine service officially moved to the control of the non-profit organization Linux Foundation Europe. The project, called Servo, will now be developed as an independent browser engine on a neutral platform with the involvement of a community from interested developers and companies.
Servo was created in 2012 by Mozilla as part of an experiment to increase safety and strengthen the multi-seating Firefox. In 2013, Samsung joined the development efforts. However, in 2020, Mozilla fired the team behind Servo and handed over the project to the Linux Foundation. As a result, the development of the engine came to a halt for about two years.
Fortunately, in 2023, Igalia, a member of the Linux Foundation Europe, stepped in and connected to the development of Servo. Under the leadership of the Linux Foundation Europe, Igalia managed to assemble a new team of engineers who are dedicated to the development of Servo.
Servo is written in Rust and stands out for its support of multi-flow rendering of web pages, as well as parallelizing operations with the Document Object Model (DOM). By leveraging effective parallelization and safe programming technologies in Rust, Servo is able to enhance the safety of its code base. Initially, the Firefox browser engine struggled to fully utilize the potential of modern multi-core systems due to its reliance on single-flow content processing schemes. With Servo, the DOM and rendering code can be divided into smaller subtasks that can be executed in parallel, thereby optimizing the utilization of multi-core CPUs. Firefox has already incorporated certain parts of Servo, including a multi-threaded CSS engine and the Webrender drawing system.