Servo is an experimental browser engine designed to take advantage of the memory safety properties and concurrency features of the Rust programming language. It seeks to create a highly parallel environment, in which rendering, layout, HTML parsing, image decoding, and other engine components are handled by fine-grained, isolated tasks. It also makes use of GPU acceleration to render web pages quickly and smoothly.
Servo has always been a research project. It began at the Mozilla Corporation 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 engine of Firefox.
After Mozilla laid off all Servo developers in 2020, governance of the project was transferred to the Linux Foundation. Development work officially continues at the same GitHub repository with the project itself entirely volunteer driven.
History
Development of Servo began at the Mozilla Corporation in 2012. The project was named after Tom Servo, a robot from the television show Mystery Science Theater 3000.
In 2013, Mozilla announced...