Servo Browser Engine Seeing Many Performance Optimizations & SubtleCrypto API

The Rust-written Servo browser web layout engine project is out with its October 2024 status update that provides insight to their development activities the past several weeks.

October was another busy month for the open-source developers involved in this former Mozilla project. The Servo browser engine continues advancing nicely with a number of performance optimizations and other features being wired up. The Servo shell demo web browser also continues becoming more featureful. Some of the Servo highlights for the past month of development include:

- Partial support for the CSS size keywords of min-content, max-content, fit-content, and stretch.

- Work on implementing the SubtleCrypto API that provides a number of low-level cryptographic functions. The "subtle" name of SubtleCrypto is intended to convey that many algorithms have subtle usage requirements and must be used carefully for security guarantees.

- Servo is gaining a new cross-process compositor API that reduces memory copy overhead for video handling.

- The Servo font system is now faster and with reduced latency for loading system fonts.

- Servo now has a dedicated fetch thread to reduce the number of IPC channels created on individual requests.

- The Flexbox layout now makes use of caching to avoid unnecessary work.

- The Servo shell demo browser now avoids unnecessary redraws and enjoys much lower CPU usage.

More details on all of the exciting Servo changes for the month of October can be found via the Servo.org blog.