This morning Mozilla announced Project Quantum (http://bit.ly/2dLTOv7 ), a coordinated effort to dramatically improve the user experience of the web engine inside of Firefox. A key part of Quantum (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum ) is the work to include two Servo subsystems in Gecko:
# Servo’s style system The style system determines which CSS styles apply to HTML elements. In Servo, we have a fast, parallel implementation, and the performance scales linearly with the available hardware. The Stylo effort (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Stylo) replaces the style system in Firefox with Servo’s. # WebRender WebRender (https://github.com/servo/webrender/wiki) restructures how painting is done in the web engine and offloads the work to the GPU, making painting itself much faster, but also freeing up the CPU to run more JavaScript. More information on its design is available in a talk (https://air.mozilla.org/bay-area-rust-meetup-february-2016/#@01m24s ). This is a huge milestone for us. It puts important parts of Servo in the hands of Firefox’s hundreds of millions of users, and it shows that the work we’ve all done over the years has significant impact on the user experience of the browser. We also expect it to increase the number of contributors to Servo. We have already seen an increase in community contributions to our style system and are hoping to see both community and other corporate partners get further involved. This is only the beginning! We are also looking into how we can further develop and potentially share other Servo subsystems: parallel layout, increased concurrency and parallelism between JavaScript and the engine itself, parsers, and a number of other features. Servo’s 2017 roadmap (https://github.com/servo/servo/wiki/Roadmap) is also full of experiments we planning to make sure that we keep raising the performance bar for web engines. We’re sure this will bring its own challenges (real users!), but we’re looking forward to growing the community contributing to and using Servo. - Lars and Jack _______________________________________________ dev-servo mailing list dev-servo@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-servo
