SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 17, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- KubeCon -- The
Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass
innovation through open source, today announced it will host the
Servo web engine. Servo is an open source, high-performance
browser engine designed for both application and embedded use and
is written in the Rust programming language, bringing
lightning-fast performance and memory safety to browser internals.
Industry support for this move is coming from Futurewei, Let's
Encrypt, Mozilla, Samsung, and Three.js, among others.
"The Linux Foundation's track record for hosting and supporting
the world's most ubiquitous open source technologies makes it the
natural home for growing the Servo community and increasing its
platform support," said Alan
Jeffrey, Technical Chair of the Servo project. "There's a
lot of development work and opportunities for our Servo Technical
Steering Committee to consider, and we know this cross-industry
open source collaboration model will enable us to accelerate the
highest priorities for web developers."
Servo is an open source project that delivers components that
can load, run, and display web pages, applications, and immersive
WebXR experiences. Developers can integrate the Servo web engine --
including a parallelized CSS engine that speeds page load times and
improves stability and a rendering engine called WebRender -- into
their own user interfaces, 3D experiences, and other products.
Servo currently runs on Linux, macOS, and Windows, and has been
ported to devices such as Android phones, Oculus, Magic Leap, and
Microsoft's HoloLens. Servo was instrumental in building Mozilla's
Gecko browser engine that powered the launch of the Firefox Quantum
web browser in 2017, and is still core to Firefox's DNA today.
In 2012, Mozilla started the Servo project, a community
effort to create a new, open source browser engine that can take
advantage of multicore hardware to improve speed, stability, and
responsiveness. Today, Servo is more efficient than most web
engines because it takes advantage of low-power multi-core CPUs.
This is enabled by the open source Rust programming language that
focuses on speed, memory safety, and parallelism. Rust and Servo
co-evolved, and during their early days, Servo was the only
large-scale Rust program other than the Rust compiler itself.
Rust's memory safety guarantees mean that Servo presents a smaller
attack surface for security vulnerabilities such as buffer overflow
attacks. Rust and Servo were both incubated by Mozilla, and the
next step for Servo is through the Linux Foundation.
"Mozilla is a champion of the open source movement, working to
unite passionate communities to build software that keeps the
internet open and accessible to all," said Adam Seligman, Chief Operating Officer at
Mozilla. "We're pleased to see Servo graduate from Mozilla and move
on to the Linux Foundation where we know this technology will
continue to thrive and power web-based innovation in the
future."
"Servo is the most promising, modern, and open web engine for
building applications and immersive experiences using web
technologies, and that has a lot to do with the Rust programming
language," said Mike Dolan, senior
vice president, and general manager of projects at the Linux
Foundation. "We're excited to support and sustain this important
work for decades to come."
For more information about the Servo project and to contribute,
please visit servo.org.
About the Linux Foundation
Founded in 2000, the Linux
Foundation is supported by more than 1,500 members and is the
world's leading home for collaboration on open source software,
open standards, open data, and open hardware. Linux Foundation's
projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including
Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, and more. The Linux Foundation's
methodology focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the
needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create
sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information,
please visit us at linuxfoundation.org.
The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses
trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation,
please see its trademark usage
page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is
a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.
Media Contact
Jennifer Cloer
503-867-2304
pr@linuxfoundation.org
Comments from Developer Community
"For me, Servo has been the most exciting project on the web for
many years now. I eagerly await any announcement from the
development of this web browser. As a new browser engine, it has
the potential for a huge impact on the browser ecosystem, the likes
of which have not been seen for years. Having multiple, successful,
and actively developed browser engine implementations are
incredibly important to the health of the Web. It ensures that the
web platform acts as a robust foundation for all the websites and
software built on web technologies. By having many different
browsers participating in the web standards efforts it ensures that
the web platform is one that is designed for everyone.
The web is evolving rapidly at the moment with new APIs like
WebXR, and I am really happy that Servo has been involved in these
APIs which are bringing the web into the future to ensure that the
web is a valuable medium on new hardware platforms for years to
come. I am extremely excited about the future of Servo to see the
speed and stability of a new browser built-in Rust and how it will
impact the browser ecosystem.
Ada Rose Cannon, Developer
Advocate for the web browser Samsung Internet and co-chair of the
W3C Immersive Web Working Group
Servo, a browser engine built using Rust, is a keystone project
for bringing the performance and security necessary for web
technologies to go beyond interlinked pages of text and media to
serve a new generation of use cases where immersive reality is the
platform for computing and real-time collaboration between people,
places and things can improve the lives of billions. It is exciting
that this important project will be taken forward by the Linux
Foundation's international open source community.
Tish Shute, Dir. AR/VR,
Futurewei Technologies, Inc., Co-Founder of Augmented World Expo
and Augmented Reality.org
The security of the internet increasingly relies on moving away
from error-prone languages like C and C++ and towards languages
like Rust which provide safety and security without sacrificing
performance. The Servo web engine has co-evolved with Rust and
brings its benefits to the web.
It's exciting to see what's possible if we re-imagine how we
build critical software with modern tools that address safety
issues without sacrificing performance. Servo gives us a sneak peek
at a safer and more secure future for critical and complex software
systems.
The Servo project helps us to understand the extent of what's
possible in a world where we have tools like Rust available to us.
The complexity of Web rendering engines pushes software engineering
systems to their limits, which is why it's so important that we
invest in understanding how we can make generational improvements
to such critical systems.
Josh Aas, Executive Director,
Internet Security Research Group and Let's Encrypt
Servo has been a crucial part of the development of the
immersive web. With it, Mozilla was able to help stabilize the
WebVR and WebXR APIs by quickly bringing a browser alternative to
emerging platforms such as Microsoft HoloLens, Oculus Quest, and
Magic Leap. It's important for the well-being of the internet that
independent implementations of web APIs exist and I am excited to
see Servo grow and continue to be on the leading edge of the
web.
Ricardo Cabello (@mrdoob),
Three.js Project Lead
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SOURCE The Linux Foundation