Let's build another web browser based on Servo!

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At the moment, the world of Browsers is currently a big Monopoly favoring Google: Chrome is the most widely used Browser in the world (Some say, even 70% of all users use chrome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_tables).

Chrome has a so called Engine at its core. That is the thing which actually understands websites and can translate that to something you as a user can see and interact with. This engine is called Blink. Many other Browsers such as Opera, Internet Explorer, Brave, etc also use Blink.

That means, the developers of Chrome (=Google) have much power over websites, because they control how users see the websites.

The only other engines (and therefore truly independent browsers) are Gecko from Firefox and WebKit from Safari. Firefox however is also dependent on Google and is currently badly managed. (=The user share of firefox declines, the payment of the CEO is rising).

Furthermore, all these browser engines are written in insecure languages. (=Because when these were started, more secure languages didn't exist yet).

Servo is a browser engine, which started at mozilla (the company developing firefox), but it was discarded. Servo was then moved to the linux foundation and the open source consulting company iagalia (https://www.igalia.com/2023/09/07/The-Servo-project-is-joining-Linux-Foundation-Europe.html). So it is truly independent and its progress is promising!

 

Let's build another web browser based on Servo!

 

Let's build another web browser based on Servo!

 

As a web engine, Servo primarily handles everything around scripting and layout. For embedding use cases, the Tauri community experimented with adding a new Servo backend, but Servo can also be used to build a browser.

We have a reference browser in the form of servoshell, which has historically been used as a minimal example and as a test harness for the Web Platform Tests. Nevertheless, the Servo community has steadily worked towards making it a browser in its own right, starting with our new browser UI based on egui last year.

This year, @wusyong, a member of Servo TSC, created the Verso project as a way to explore the features Servo needs to power a robust web browser. In this post, we’ll explain what we tried to achieve, what we found, and what’s next for building a browser using Servo as a web engine.