Mozilla And Samsung Team Up To Develop Servo, Mozilla's Next-Gen Browser Engine For Multicore Processors

At first glance, this looks like an odd partnership: Mozilla just announced that it has recently begun collaborating with Samsung on Servo, its next generation browser engine. Mozilla Research started working on Servo as a research project in 2012. The new browser engine, which is still far away from being available in any commercial project, is written in Rust, a relatively new programming language that is also being developed by Mozilla Research. Together, Mozilla and Samsung are bringing both Rust and Servo to Android and the ARM architecture. Samsung, a company spokesperson said, is interested in this project because the company is “investigating various new technologies to innovate legacy products. This collaboration will bring an opportunity to open a new era of future web experience.” Browser Engines In The Age Of Multicore Computing As Mozilla’s CTO Brendan Eich told me yesterday, he believes that the future of computing will inevitably involve parallel computing (and he’s obviously not the only one). Mozilla’s research group started looking at this from the perspective of the web and it’s clear that today’s browser don’t make use of even the basic multicore processors that most users now have in their computers, phones and tablets. Indeed, as Eich noted, today’s web standards themselves make it hard to move away from the sequential processing today’s browsers use to render pages to effectively rendering webpages on multiple cores. The exceptions right now are WebGL, which uses the graphics processor, and HTML5 Web Workers, which bring a multi-threading approach to JavaScript. As Eich stressed, however, just parallelizing one part of the browser and rendering pipeline isn’t good enough. Only a web engine “that’s parallelized deeply from end-to-end,” he told me, will be able to fully take advantage of tomorrow’s processors with 16, 32 or even more cores. Samsung, of course, is also working on bringing ever more powerful multicore processors to its mobile phones, so a partnership with Mozilla to make better use of these cores seems like a good fit. This collaboration, however, will also surely raise some questions about Samsung’s relationship with Google, given Chrome’s strong position as the leading mobile browser on Android today. Rust And Servo That’s where Rust comes in (and Mozilla is launching version 0.6 of the compiler and associated tools today). Rust, which shares similarities with C++, Lisp, Erlang and a number of other languages. The focus of Rust is on safety

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