Servo (software)


Servo is an experimental browser engine developed to take advantage of the memory safety properties and concurrency features of the Rust programming language. The project was initiated by Mozilla Research with effort from Samsung to port it to Android and ARM processors. The prototype seeks to create a highly parallel environment, in which many components are handled by fine-grained, isolated tasks.
A part of the project, The Servo CSS style engine, has been incorporated into Firefox, Mozilla's open-source web browser.
JavaScript support is provided by the C++ SpiderMonkey engine that is also used by Firefox.
Servo is named after Tom Servo, a robot from the television show Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Features

As of 2015, 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 and smoothly. 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 2012. The first commit on did not contain any source code. The first rudimentary code commit occurred on.
On Mozilla announced that they and Samsung are collaborating on Servo.
As of 30 June 2016, a preview version has been available for download for macOS and Linux.
Since then, builds have also been made available for Windows, Android, and the Magic Leap One augmented reality headset.
In 2017 with the release of Firefox 54 the Servo CSS style engine was incorporated by Mozilla into their open-source web browser.
Firefox Reality AR, the first browser built entirely on Servo, was released in 2020.

Servo project

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, and using parallelism and code safety, to achieve greater security and performance versus contemporary browsers.

Relationship to Firefox

Servo developers have merged parts of Servo into Gecko, thus lending the Servo project's advancements to Firefox.

Chromium Embedded Framework

Servo intended to re-implement the Chromium Embedded Framework API. This would have allowed Servo to be used as a drop-in replacement for Chromium in applications using CEF, and would have positioned Servo as a competitor to Chromium in these cases.
CEF support never reached a usable state and support was removed from Servo in early 2018.

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.