Mozilla and Samsung Partner to Build ‘Servo’

Mozilla and Samsung have announced a partnership today to build a next-generation web browser engine for Android and ARM devices called “Servo”.

Google executives allegedly worried earlier this year over Samsung possibly using its dominance in the handset space to renegotiate revenue cuts from mobile ads and search, but now it seems Google should really have fretted over Samsung joining forces with the competition to create a new Android web browser engine.

Mozilla says the new engine will take advantage of “tomorrow’s faster, multi-core” computing architectures, casting aside “old assumptions” about how a browser engine should work. Servo is being built using Mozilla’s Rust programming language, which Samsung has helped with in recent months. Mozilla is making the Rust programming language available in experimental form to Android developers today, but there’s no word on when the Servo engine will make an appearance.

Prior to Samsung’s involvement, Mozilla clearly stated that Servo was not intended as a replacement for Gecko.

Rather than designing a mobile web browser to challenge Google’s Chrome, Servo appears to be more of a challenge to WebKit, the browser engine used by Apple and Google in their browsers. Mozilla is encouraging developers to get involved with Rust and help improve the language, and says that it’s looking with Samsung at more “opportunities on mobile platforms.”

Source: 9to5google.com, theverge.com