Why is the Rust-based rendering engine 'Servo' important to the future of the web?
I tried Servo, the undercover web browser engine made with Rust
https://www.spacebar.news/servo-undercover-web-browser-engine/
At the time of writing, Google's Chromium has the overwhelming majority of web browser code bases, including Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi, Opera, Brave, and Arc.
Chromium's rendering engine is Blink , developed by Google, so naturally most browsers also use Blink. At the time of writing, the only other rendering engine options were WebKit , used by Safari, and Gecko, used by Firefox.
'This is dangerous for the open web in several ways,' Davenport said. 'If only one implementation of a standard works, that implementation becomes the standard. As a result, the web becomes to Google what Java is to Oracle. It also means that Chromium's limitations and security flaws affect most browsers.'
Servo, developed in Rust, is gaining attention as a new rendering engine option. Rust is a programming language designed to ensure memory safety , protecting against bugs and security holes during memory access, as well as parallel processing.
Servo is also designed with memory safety and processing concurrency in mind, which are becoming increasingly important in today's world where CPUs are designed to split processing across multiple cores and threads. The more parallel rendering can be performed, the better the rendering engine's performance will be. Furthermore, as Chromium developers have stated , 'Approximately 70% of serious security bugs are memory safety issues,' memory safety is important for mitigating security issues.
Another unique feature of Servo is that it is not managed by a major technology company, but by the non-profit technology consortium, the Linux Foundation .
Servo was originally announced as Mozilla's mobile rendering engine. In fact, Firefox Quantum, released in 2017, also featured a rendering engine that incorporated Servo's work. However, Mozilla laid off many employees, including the Servo development team, in 2020, and the Linux Foundation took over.
Linux Foundation to take over Mozilla's rendering engine 'Servo' - GIGAZINE
'It remains difficult to understand why Mozilla abandoned the technical future of Firefox, let alone the employees affected by the layoffs,' Davenport said. 'Five years later, Mozilla's side projects are still struggling, and the company is making more layoffs.'
At the time of writing, there are no fully functional web browsers with Servo, but you can try out Servo in development with the following test builds for Windows, macOS, Android, and Linux.
Download - Servo aims to empower developers with a lightweight, high-performance alternative for embedding web technologies in applications.
https://servo.org/download/
Davenport actually tried out Servo, which is currently under development, and found that most websites had several rendering bugs, and some crashed completely. While there's still a long way to go before it can provide general browsing functionality, Davenport was impressed with Servo's progress.
'Servo has new life and is under very active development,' Davenport said. 'Whatever happens with Firefox and Gecko, I'm excited for what's to come for Servo.'
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in Web Service, Posted by log1h_ik