The 2012 Mozilla launched Servo project is moving to the Linux Foundation. It is time to “leave the nest”, writes the development team of the experimental browser engine Servo in the project’s blog. The move brings with it some organizational changes: Among other things, Servo will have its own project board and a technical steering committee. The developers apparently perceive the new structures as an opportunity to shape the future of the collaborative project in a more targeted manner and to make it even easier for the community to get involved.

According to the Servo blog entry, nothing changes in the goals of the project. The aim is to continue to provide a fast and secure browser engine with a highly modular structure that can be flexibly embedded in a large number of projects. The project has already achieved some successes in recent years: For example, the framework of Mozilla’s “Project Quantum” 2017 components of the servo engine flowed into the heavily rebuilt Firefox web browser – including the CSS engine “Stylo”. More recently, Firefox has also taken over the “WebRender” rendering engine from Servo in favor of better performance.

Optimism for the future Servo’s move to the Linux Foundation follows very closely after numerous layoffs at Mozilla. The difficulty for Mozilla is currently, among other things, to reconcile more mundane things like product development and profitability with a pronounced progressive value system and a strong community. The company must therefore inevitably concentrate more on products and profitability. As Alan Jeffrey from the Servo project told ITPro Today, this refocusing also gave the impetus to the (joint) decision to bring Servo to the Linux Foundation.

Despite these somewhat difficult framework conditions, the Those involved seem to be consistently positive about the servo future: Mozilla couldn’t be more proud and enthusiastic, according to a post in Mozilla’s Hacks blog. The Linux Foundation offers optimal framework conditions for the project to develop its full potential. The Senior Vice President of the Linux Foundation, Mike Dolan, described Servo in a statement from the LF as the “most promising, modern and open web engine” (currently), which has a lot to do with the use of the Rust programming language. The Foundation is very much looking forward to supporting and maintaining the work on this important project in the coming decades.

The servo project at GitHub (“Contributing to Servo”) . (ovw)