Mozilla, a company that once upon a time made an amazing browser called Firefox, has just announced that they’re working together with Samsung on a new browser engine. Said engine is called “Servo” and it’s built using a new Mozilla developed programming language called “Rust”.
First question that springs to mind: Why? According to the company’s blog post, “Servo” is the engine that Mozilla would build today if it had to worry about issues such as security and multicore utilization. They’re not saying their current browsing engine, “Gecko”, is garbage, they’re just admitting that it was built during a time when a phone was considered advanced if it had a VGA camera. Now the second question: When? “Rust”, the previously mentioned programming language, isn’t expected to be done until the end of the year. That means “Servo” is quite a ways away. Should you care? Not really. Care when there’s something to download and try out. And don’t think this is Samsung’s attempt to piss off Google, because I’m pretty sure Samsung helps Google and Apple make WebKit a better browser engine all the time. All I want to know is why doesn’t Mozilla spend their resources making WebKit better instead of trying to reinvent the wheel? Opera decided to dump their browser engine and switch to WebKit. Maybe it’s time for Mozilla to do the same.
