Mozilla Servo was launched as an experimental project but in a recent discussion, Mozilla’s engineers have revealed that it will be released in June this year. Mozilla has been seeking to provide an alternative to its default engine called Gecko.
Servo has been coded entirely in Rust, a programming language developed by Mozilla for its application. Rust is all about performance and stability, which is missing in current Firefox because Gecko is based entirely on C++ and has failed to update itself with the moving technology.
Servo has been coded in components with every component separated from the other so as to avoid any kind of friction and facilitate a smooth browsing experience. Mozilla is planning to launch Servo as a standalone browser with builds for Firefox OS, Windows, Android, Mac, Linux.
Servo will feature a new HTML-CSS-JS-based UI, commenting upon the same Mozilla’s Paul Rouget explained,”To be clear, this will be a very early release (nightly builds) of Servo with an HTML UI (browser.html)”. He further added,”You won’t be able to replace your current browser with Servo just yet 🙂 … there’s still a long way to go. The goal is to make it easier for people to test Servo and file bugs.”.
Here’s a look at the latest preview of the Mozilla’s servo from September 2014.
Also, a tweet from last August by Patrick Walton sure does affix that Servo will sport a Spartan look.
GitHub Issues looking near-perfect in Servo (only pixel snapping + vertical-align left) pic.twitter.com/5E34Ww9c4b
— Patrick Walton (@pcwalton) 17 August 2015
As we are all aware how Microsoft developed Edge to overcome the insecurities it had with the outdated Internet Explorer browser, in the same manner, Mozilla seems to be developing Servo. However, Mozilla has never publicly admitted that they are planning to replace good old Firefox.
Apart from Servo’s news, the upcoming version of Firefox will incorporate some major changes like support for the new Web Extensions, Mandatory signing for add-ons and e10s (multi-process support).
If Servo turns out to be a stable alternative to Gecko then it will be slowly merged into Firefox and may even replace the older C++ based Gecko engine.
Stay tuned for more news and info and do leave your comments below.