Mozilla and Samsung collaborate on new Servo browser engine for Android
Mozilla and Samsung have come together to take a shot at Google’s dominance of the Android web-browser space, announcing that they are together working on a browser built from ground up.
Mozilla and Samsung have announced today that they will be working together on developing a ‘next-generation web browser engine’ ground up for Android and ARM. The browser will be based on Mozilla’s Rust programming language, which itself saw a release today.
According to Mozilla, “Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way. This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that can fully utilize the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web. To those ends, Servo is written in Rust, a new, safe systems language developed by Mozilla along with a growing community of enthusiasts.”
As of now, all we know is that Mozilla and Samsung have come together to build the web browser for Android and ARM and possibly pose a big challenge to Google and its Chrome browser. This could be seen as a pot-shot Mozilla and Samsung are taking at Google, but at the end of the day, more options for secure and performance-optimized browsers will only spell good news for the consumer.
As of now, there is absolutely no word on any estimated time of release for the browser, as Rust itself is not yet complete as a programming language. Today, it got bumped up to revision 0.6 and the two companies hope that by the end of the year, they’d have Rust ready and work on Servo. We wouldn’t hold our breaths for the release of Servo, as it looks at least a year away from launch, but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t be excited about it.
Source: Mozilla Blog