Mozilla has announced that it and Samsung are teaming up to deliver a next-generation smartphone browser called "Servo." The new browser will be written in a new programming language called "Rust," which Mozilla has been working on for the past several years.
The new browser is designed to take advantage of multiple cores found in smartphones, and most browsers found in phones only access one. The result should be a smoother and safer process with less crashes and better ability to run multple tasks.
The objective of Servo is to "attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way," says CTO of Mozilla, Brendan Eich in an extended post on Mozilla's blog.
We need to be prepared to take advantage of tomorrow's faster, multi-core, heterogeneous computing architectures. 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."
As for Samsung's role in the development of Servo and Rust, Eich claims that they have already contributed heavily over the last few years.
"Samsung has already contributed an ARM backend to Rust and the build infrastructure necessary to cross-compile to Android, along with many other improvements," he said.
Along with the announcement, Mozilla has also released Rust 0.6, which will be stable very shortly. The source code for both Rust and Servo can be found in the included links. Mozilla has asked the community to join in the process of making this new browser a reality.
