A new browser built by Mozilla Research called Servo is close to becoming reality, with a post from one of the team’s developers on the organization’s forum confirming a first release should land in June.
Servo is a browser engine that was built from the ground up in the Rust language to specialize in performance, security, modularity and parallelism.
What parallelism means in a browser is that the browser’s independent components such as rendering, HTML parsing, layout and other jobs are handled by isolated tasks, which helps with both performance and stability.
It’s actively being developed for Linux, Android, OS X and Firefox OS, but Mozilla hasn’t publicly discussed its plans for the eventual official release of the browser.
The team hopes to have a functional alpha out in June so people can start testing it to provide feedback – but it won’t be for everyday use for months.
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To many the Servo project is more interesting than Mozilla’s primary project – Firefox – because it’s a brave new attempt at creating an entirely different type of browser.
Eventually bits from Servo will trickle into Firefox, but it’s not clear if the company intends on eventually merging the two projects, given the gains that could be realized.
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