Blink, Servo And Rust: A Good Week For Browsers

It’s sure been an interesting week for people who cover browsers. Last weekend, we heard that Internet Explorer 11 will probably support WebGL and SPDY. Then, on Tuesday Frederick Lardinois got an email from Mozilla, asking if he had time to get on the phone with Mozilla’s CTO Brendan Eich to talk about the organization’s next generation browser engine Servo and the Rust language it is written in. Turns out, Mozilla Research wasn’t just going to work on this alone, but managed to get Samsung to help out with bringing this new engine that’s optimized for multicore and heterogeneous computing architectures to Android and ARM. Given that Mozilla had remained relatively quiet about Servo until now, it was a bit of a surprise that it was now ready to put it into the spotlight.

Interestingly, he had heard from Google’s Chrome team earlier in the week and they, too, wanted to talk on Tuesday. Oddly, the PR team was unusually wary about giving him any details before the call (often they’ll give you some background to make sure you can prepare for the call). When Linus Upson, Google’s VP of Engineering, and Alex Komoroske, the product Manager for the Open Web Platform team, told him that Google was going to fork WebKit and launch its own rendering engine Blink based on WebKit, he had to backtrack a few times to make sure he had really heard this right. Outside of a few WebKit insiders, few people expected Google to do this. WebKit is generally seen as a major success and given its dominance on the desktop (thanks to Chrome) and mobile (thanks to Safari), few would call it anything but a massive success.