The Servo Browser Engine Has Been Making Great Progress In 2023

The Servo browser engine has been seeing renewed development activity and interest since it was transferred to the Linux Foundation Europe and has attracted contributions from the likes of the Igalia consulting firm. Last week at the Open Source Summit Europe, an update on Servo was presented.

Manuel Rego of Igalia presented on this former Mozilla Research project for a new browser/layout engine that is now a Linux Foundation project. It's acknowledged that Servo development slowed down but over the course of 2023 development has been picking back up with new interest and progress on making this a capable browser engine.

Rego describes the renewed project activity around Servo as having been "successful" and does show with increased Git activity this year. He noted during the European conference that there's been "great progress" and the new layout engine is preparing for more features and support to come.

Servo very much remains experimental but they continue making progress on new CSS support, exploring possible Android support, and coming up with an embeddable API for allowing Servo to be embedded within other software -- likely one of the main paths forward for Servo adoption. With the use of the Rust programming language for memory safety and focusing development on modern web standards, Servo has a lot of potential in the future for use within embedded contexts. For those interested in toying with Servo, they recently pushed out a new default UI for Servo.

Those interested in learning more about the progress of Servo in 2023 can find the Igalia presentation on the OSS EU program page.