Servo is an experimental

browser engine A browser engine (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 into an interacti ...

designed to take advantage of the

memory safety Memory safety is the state of being protected from various software bugs and security vulnerabilities when dealing with memory access, such as buffer overflows and dangling pointers. For example, Java is said to be memory-safe because its ru ...

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 may refer to: Mathematics * Parallel (geometry), two lines in the Euclidean plane which never intersect * Parallel (operator), mathematical operation named after the composition of electrical resistance in parallel circuits Science a ...

environment, in which rendering, layout,

HTML Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It defines the content and structure of web content. It is often assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets ( ...

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 for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

acceleration to render

web page A web page (or webpage) is a World Wide Web, Web document that is accessed in a web browser. A website typically consists of many web pages hyperlink, linked together under a common domain name. The term "web page" is therefore a metaphor of pap ...

s quickly and smoothly. Servo has always been a research project. It began at the

Mozilla Corporation The Mozilla Corporation 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 open-source developers, s ...

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. They range from . Geckos are unique among lizards ...

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 curr ...

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

Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit organization established in 2000 to support Linux development and open-source software projects. Background The Linux Foundation started as Open Source Development Labs in 2000 to standardize and prom ...

Europe. Development work officially continues at the same

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

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 c ...

, a robot from the television show ''

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

''. In 2013, Mozilla announced that

Samsung Samsung Group (; stylised as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational manufacturing Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in the Samsung Town office complex in Seoul. The group consists of numerous a ...

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 desig ...

Servo to Android and

ARM processors In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between t ...

. A Samsung developer also attempted to re-implement the

Chromium Embedded Framework The Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) is an open-source software framework for embedding a Chromium web browser within another application. This enables developers to add web browsing functionality to their application, as well as the ability t ...

API in Servo, but it never reached fruition and the code was eventually removed. The

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

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), also known as mixed reality (MR), is a technology that overlays real-time 3D computer graphics, 3D-rendered computer graphics onto a portion of the real world through a display, such as a handheld device or head-mounted ...

browsers. The first was for a

Magic Leap Magic Leap, Inc. is an American technology company that released a head-mounted augmented reality display, called ''Magic Leap One'', which superimposes 3D computer-generated imagery over real world objects. It is attempting to construct a lig ...

headset in 2018. Then the Firefox Reality browser was released in 2020. In August 2020, Mozilla

laid off A layoff or downsizing is the temporary suspension or permanent termination of employment of an employee or, more commonly, a group of employees (collective layoff) for business reasons, such as personnel management or downsizing an organization ...

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 the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. In January 2020, the disease spread worldwide, resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic. The symptoms of COVID‑19 can vary but often include fever ...

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

Europe. In October 2021,

Eclipse Foundation The Eclipse Foundation AISBL is an independent, Europe-based not-for-profit organization that acts as a steward of the Eclipse open source software development community, with legal jurisdiction in the European Union. It is an organization supp ...

launched Oniro vendor neutral open-source

distributed operating system A distributed operating system is system software over a collection of independent software, networked, communicating, and physically separate computational nodes. They handle jobs which are serviced by multiple CPUs. Each individual node holds a ...

in Europe for

Internet of things Internet of things (IoT) describes devices with sensors, processing ability, software and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other communication networks. The IoT encompasse ...

and embedded devices with various partners such as

Huawei Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. ("Huawei" sometimes stylized as "HUAWEI"; ; zh, c=华为, p= ) is a Chinese multinational corporationtechnology company in Longgang, Shenzhen, Longgang, Shenzhen, Guangdong. Its main product lines include teleco ...

and

Linaro Linaro Limited is an engineering organization that works on free and open-source software such as the Linux kernel, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), QEMU, power management, graphics and multimedia interfaces for the ARM family of instruction se ...

among others, based on OpenAtom Foundation's

OpenHarmony OpenHarmony (OHOS, OH) is a family of open-source distributed operating systems based on HarmonyOS derived from LiteOS, donated the L0-L2 branch source code by Huawei to the OpenAtom Foundation. Similar to HarmonyOS, the open-source distrib ...

for software development with Servo web engine as part of the open source project built on

Rust language Rust is a general-purpose programming language emphasizing performance, type safety, and concurrency. It enforces memory safety, meaning that all references point to valid memory. It does so without a conventional garbage collector; instead, ...

. In January 2023, the Servo project announced that new external funding had enabled a team of developers to reactivate the project. The initial roadmap focused on selecting one of the two existing layout engines for further development, followed by working towards basic CSS2 conformance. In February 2024, at

FOSDEM Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) is an annual software engineering conference. It is non-commercial and volunteer-organized with a focus on free and open-source software. Initiated in 2000, it is usually held d ...

2024, the Servo Project team outlined their plans for a 'reboot' of Servo.

References

External links

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