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Mozilla and Samsung partner to build ‘Servo’, a next-gen web browser engine

Mozilla and Samsung announced a partnership today to build a next-generation web browser engine for Android and ARM devices called “Servo”.

Google executives allegedly worried earlier this year over Samsung possibly using its dominance in the handset space to renegotiate revenue cuts from mobile ads and search, but now it seems Google should really have fretted over Samsung joining forces with the competition to create a new Android web browser engine.

Mozilla explained in a blog post what the new engine will do:

Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way. This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that can fully utilize the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web.

As mentioned by The Verge, Servo will rival WebKit, Google’s browser engine, rather than Google’s Chrome browser.

Servo is built with Mozilla’s Rust programming language, and Mozilla said Samsung has already “contributed an ARM backend to Rust and the build infrastructure necessary to cross-compile to Android.”

Rust, which has been in development for years, opened to Android developers today, but the first major revision of its programming language will end in the coming year.

Folks can try Rust 0.6 or even go to GitHub to check out the source for Rust and Servo now.

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