Mozilla plans to roll out a new browser engine during the summer and it says that Firefox will benefit greatly from the development.
The upcoming research project from Mozilla will firstly land as an early preview. It is called Servo and developers should be able to test it in June.
Servo, which was crafted using Rust, promises to be increasingly modular, which should go a long way for a browser engine. Software engineers should find this quite useful when working on and with Servo, as they will be able to enjoy additional flexibility and make the code easier to grasp and work with.
To give it an increased stability factor, the developers programmed Servo to handle HTML parsing and rendering as distinct tasks.
"Along with the tech demo of Servo, we will be including a proof-of-concept browser UI, written entirely in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, called Browser.html," Mozilla says in a statement. "This new UI includes many rich animations and interactions that you would find in native applications but that don't always perform well in current browsers. Browser.html is a great test case for Servo's technology platform and a showpiece for what's possible with the new technology."
It should be noted that the new browser engine will not make Firefox obsolete, at least not from the get-go.
"To be clear, this will be a very early release (nightly builds) of Servo with [an] HTML UI (browser.html)," a member of the coding team explains. The engineer points out that there is still a lot of work to be done on Servo. Currently, the team is more preoccupied with early implementation and feedback.
It looks like Servo will be an inviting test bed for future Firefox technologies.
Mozilla is looking forward to receiving contributions from companies and individuals so that Servo improves quickly and firmly. One big name that works with Mozilla to perfect Servo is Samsung.
Mozilla's Paul Rouget points out that help is welcome "from the community [of developers]" to resolve a number of bugs.
"We would like Servo to be capable of running GitHub, DuckDuckGo, Hacker News and Reddit. We're close, but there are still several rendering and functional issue[s] for each of these websites," he notes.
Servo will play nice with Windows OS and 64-bit architectures such as Android, Gonk (Firefox OS) and OSX. Late last year, Mozilla announced that it will stop supporting Firefox OS for smartphones and focus on connected devices and the Internet of Things.
