Web: Rust browser engine Servo gives water level report

The team behind the browser engine Servo has published a water level report about what’s new in the project. The developers have to report changes mainly under the hood. Servo is an open source, Rust-based web rendering engine and is currently being developed under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation.

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TLS: Rustls statt OpenSSL

Instead of OpenSSL, Rustls written in Rust, like the engine itself, will provide Transport Layer Security (TLS). The WebGPU graphics interface in Servo is still “very experimental”, but after an update to wgpu version 0.16 it now passes over 5000 additional tests in the WebGPU Conformance Test Suite. In the future, servo builds will no longer only be possible on ARM-64, but also on 32-bit ARM systems.

There are also innovations in the presentation of content. In the future, Servo will once again be able to dynamically position elements via CSS floats and combine white spaces via white-space: nowrap. Both functions were already present in the legacy layout engine, but there were many bugs that “were practically impossible to fix due to the old layout architecture.”

Error page is more informative

If the servo engine crashes, it now also displays a revised crash error page that provides more information about the cause of the crash with the panic message and the stack trace.

The developers have also updated the user interface of the example browser from Servo. The innovation, called minibrowser, is an address bar that is activated by default, but can be switched off with –no-minibrowser if problems arise.

The new mini browser in Servo – including the address bar

(Image: Servo)

Mozilla initiated the development of the Rust browser engine in 2012. However, in the wake of layoffs at the browser developer, the project moved to the Linux Foundation in 2020. Afterwards, the project became quiet. At the beginning of 2023, the developers announced that they had received new personnel and financial resources from the open source consultant Igalia. Since then, the development of the engine has been intensified again, as the current blog post makes clear.

(jvo)

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