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Samsung and Mozilla announce 'Servo', a new browser engine

Samsung and Mozilla announce 'Servo', a new browser engine

By Surbhi Chawla | Updated: 4 April 2013 13:55 IST

Samsung and Mozilla have announced that they have joined hands to build a brand new Web browser engine. This new Web browser engine, dubbed 'Servo', will take advantage of the ARM architecture.

In a blog post, Mozilla's Chief Technical Officer, Brendan Eichneed noted that both the companies feel the need "to be prepared to take advantage of tomorrow's faster, multi-core, heterogeneous computing architectures. That's why we've recently begun collaborating with Samsung on an advanced technology Web browser engine called Servo."

Mozilla and Samsung will be building the Servo from the ground up and this web browser will be written in Rust. Rust is Mozilla's new programming language. This language in itself is in early stages of development. Its version 0.6 was also released on Wednesday.

Commenting on Rust, Eichneed notes, "It is intended to fill many of the same niches that C++ has over the past decades, with efficient high-level, multi-paradigm abstractions, and offers precise control over hardware resources. But beyond that, it is *safe by default*, preventing entire classes of memory management errors that lead to crashes and security vulnerabilities. Rust also features lightweight concurrency primitives that make it easy for programmers to leverage the power of the many CPU cores available on current and future computing platforms."

With Servo, Mozilla and Samsung aim to create a web browser that addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities and offers new and richer experiences on the Web. As of now, Mozilla and Samsung have not spilled the beans regarding when this browser will see the light of the day.

Samsung has launched Chromebook based on ARM architecture in the past. There are a few known challenges for the ARM architecture; however browser has so far not been cited as a challenge so far. So it is really difficult to reason why Samsung has decided to partner with Mozilla for this project.

Mozilla also on its part is preparing to launch Firefox-based smartphones. Firefox OS-based ZTE Open was unveiled at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2013. Apart from ZTE, even LG, Huawei and Sony have expressed their interest in launching smartphones based on Firefox operating system. Therefore, we are curious to know why Mozilla in investing its resources in a second browser at this junction.

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