Servo is an experimental

browser engine A browser engine (#Name and scope, also known as a layout engine or rendering engine) is a core software component of every major web browser. The primary job of a browser engine is to transform HTML documents and other resources of a web page in ...

designed to take advantage of the

memory safety Memory safety is the state of being protected from various software bugs and Vulnerability (computing), security vulnerabilities when dealing with random-access memory, memory access, such as buffer overflows and dangling pointers. For example, J ...

properties and concurrency features of the

Rust Rust is an iron oxide, a usually reddish-brown oxide formed by the reaction of iron and oxygen in the catalytic presence of water or air moisture. Rust consists of hydrous iron(III) oxides (Fe2O3·nH2O) and iron(III) oxide-hydroxide (FeO(OH ...

programming language. It seeks to create a highly

parallel Parallel is a geometric term of location which may refer to: Computing * Parallel algorithm * Parallel computing * Parallel metaheuristic * Parallel (software), a UNIX utility for running programs in parallel * Parallel Sysplex, a cluster of ...

environment, in which rendering, layout,

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

parsing, image decoding, and other engine components are handled by fine-grained, isolated tasks. It also makes use of

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

acceleration to render web pages quickly and smoothly. Servo has always been a research project. It began at the

Mozilla Corporation The Mozilla Corporation (stylized as moz://a) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of ope ...

in 2012, and its employees did the bulk of the work until 2020. This included the Quantum project, when portions of Servo were incorporated into the

Gecko Geckos are small, mostly carnivorous lizards that have a wide distribution, found on every continent except Antarctica. Belonging to the infraorder Gekkota, geckos are found in warm climates throughout the world. They range from . Geckos ar ...

engine of

Firefox Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...

. After Mozilla laid off all Servo developers in 2020, governance of the project was transferred to the

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit technology consortium founded in 2000 as a merger between Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group to standardize Linux, support its growth, and promote its commercial adoption. Additi ...

. Development work officially continues at the same

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

repository with the project itself entirely volunteer driven.

History

Development of Servo began at the

in 2012. The project was named after

Tom Servo Tom Servo is a fictional character from the American science fiction comedy television show ''Mystery Science Theater 3000'' (''MST3K''). Tom is one of two wise-cracking, robotic main characters of the show, built by Joel Robinson to act as a com ...

, a robot from the television show ''

Mystery Science Theater 3000 ''Mystery Science Theater 3000'' (abbreviated as ''MST3K'') is an American science fiction comedy film review television series created by Joel Hodgson. The show premiered on KTMA-TV (now WUCW) in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on November 24, 1988. ...

''. In 2013, Mozilla announced that

Samsung The Samsung Group (or simply Samsung) ( ko, 삼성 ) is a South Korean multinational manufacturing conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea. It comprises numerous affiliated businesses, most of them united under the ...

was collaborating on the project. Samsung's main contribution was

porting In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desi ...

Servo to Android and

ARM processors ARM (stylised in lowercase as arm, formerly an acronym for Advanced RISC Machines and originally Acorn RISC Machine) is a family of reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architectures for computer processors, configured ...

. A Samsung developer also attempted to re-implement the Chromium Embedded Framework API in Servo, but it never reached fruition and the code was eventually removed. The

Acid2 Acid2 is a webpage that test web browsers' functionality in displaying aspects of HTML markup, CSS 2.1 styling, PNG images, and data URIs. The test page was released on 13 April 2005 by the Web Standards Project. The Acid2 test page will be ...

test was passed in 2014, and Servo could render some websites faster than the

engine of

. By 2016, the engine had been further optimized. The same year, Mozilla began the Quantum project, which incorporated stable portions of Servo into Gecko. Servo was the engine of two

augmented reality Augmented reality (AR) is an interactive experience that combines the real world and computer-generated content. The content can span multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory. AR can be de ...

browsers. The first was for a

Magic Leap Magic Leap, Inc. is an American technology company that released a head-mounted virtual retinal display, called ''Magic Leap One'', which superimposes 3D computer-generated imagery over real world objects, by "projecting a digital light field ...

headset in 2018. Then the Firefox Reality browser was released in 2020. In August 2020, Mozilla laid off many employees, including the Servo team, to "adapt its finances to a post-

COVID-19 Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by a virus, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The first known case was COVID-19 pandemic in Hubei, identified in Wuhan, China, in December ...

world and re-focus the organization on new commercial services". Governance of the Servo project was thus transferred to the

References

External links

*
2016 podcast about Servo
{{Mozilla Free software programmed in Rust Layout engines Linux Foundation projects Mozilla