Mozilla And Samsung To Develop A New Rendering Engine

By | April 5, 2013


Mozilla And Samsung To Develop A New Rendering EngineHopefully, it’s not made out of cheap plastic.

It seems like a new generation of rendering engines are breeding, which means pretty exciting times ahead, at least for the web browser enthusiasts like ourselves. Developers on the other hand are likely to tremble in fear.

Earlier this week, Mozilla has officially announced a new rendering engine called “Servo”, which (as we wrote back in December) is built using Rust, Mozilla’s own programming language, targeting multi core hardware.

The good news? You can now participate in Rust’s development process and get Servo engine’s source code.

The bad news? There is no schedule and according to a blog post, both companies are currently targeting Android and ARM devices only.

Update: Servo builds are also available on Mac and Linux machines.

[Thanks, Blake]


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

Comments (8)

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  1. apád anyád says:

    “The bad news? There is no schedule and both companies are currently targeting mobile devices only (Android and ARM).”

    Please fix this, as Servo is a multi-platform engine, Samsung assists only in the ARM part of it, x86 and x64 parts are developed by Moz only.

    • Guest says:

      >We are now pleased to announce with Samsung that together we are bringing both the Rust programming language and Servo, the experimental web browser engine, to Android and ARM.

      It might be but Mozilla did not say anything about bringing it to x86 and x86-64. Mozilla is working on Android part while Samsung helps with ARM, that’s what it said in that post. Everything else is speculation.

      • apád anyád says:

        I think they meant “we are bringing the development of both the Rust programming language and Servo”

        ARM development started with this, but the project Servo was in move at least a year before, and it’s pretty sure they weren’t making it for a Cell-based machine.

    • FavBrowser says:

      Where did you get the x86-64 part from?

      • apád anyád says:

        Scuzi, maybe I mixed up things and remembered something about OdinMonkey, I’ll take a look at the things I have at hand to see it.

  2. Przemysław Lib says:

    Aren’t Mozilla targeting multiplatform? And only Samsung HELPS in targetting ARM?

    • FavBrowser says:

      I don’t think so, at least yet. According to last year’s info (since I can’t find anything new on this subject), Firefox won’t get Servo for quite some time (if ever) and there are no Windows builds.

      So it’s sort of multi platform, I guess?

      https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.servo/nJJxEy1ehpE/discussion

      > Currently what we have builds on Mac and Linux. There’s no fundamental
      reason why it won’t work on Windows, but none of us have put in the
      effort necessary to bring it up.

      Modified the article though, thanks guys.

  3. Mehran says:

    A beta engine, written in a beta language!

    Will I be breathing when it’s ready to use?