Independent of Google: Free browser engine Servo renders Gmail and Google Chat

The open-source browser engine Servo can now display complex websites such as Gmail and Google Chat. There are also new features for handling stylesheets and the web API. Servo is written in Rust and is designed to parallelize the various tasks involved in displaying web content. In future, the developers want to make Servo usable as a webview library that can be embedded in various projects with a modular structure. The engine currently only supports its own web browser servoshell.

2FA from Google still causes problems

Servo also has a new option that can be used to activate the browser engine's experimental functions, which are not yet ready or do not allow stable operation. The option must be activated for Gmail and Google Chat to be displayed correctly, and there are still problems when logging in to accounts with two-factor authentication. As development progresses, the team will incorporate stable functions into the main version and release new features for testing.

Furthermore, Servo now recognizes CSS nesting so that the browser engine can now correctly display rules in nested selectors. It can also now handle the basic CSS properties rotate, scale and translate, which can be used to influence the alignment, size and position of elements. Servo also supports the display of drop-down menus for selecting individual elements and the disabled attribute in the link element, so that the integration of stylesheets in the HTML code can be prevented.

Servo has recently made the greatest progress in supporting web APIs with Shadow DOM and now manages 97 percent of the subtests in the web platform tests. Two months previously, the figure was just under eight percent. Shadow DOM is therefore now active by default. The Trusted Types API and the Content Security Policy have also made significant improvements, each successfully completing over 55% of the sub-tests. Two months previously, they each achieved less than one percent. The Streams API currently passes 69 percent of the sub-tests.

Servo team continues to reject AI code

Following a discussion with the community, the Servo team also decided to continue rejecting AI-generated code. The project managers also reject submissions of documentation, pull requests and bug reports if they originate from AI chatbots. In this way, they want to ensure that developers only contribute correct, secure and tested code. They also want to avoid copyright and ethical problems arising from the use of artificial intelligence.

All new features can be found in the project's blog. Servo is currently available for the x64 versions of Windows, macOS and Linux. There is also a version for Android. Mozilla President Mark Surman recently warned that the further development of the Gecko browser engine was at risk and that Google's Blink could remain the only cross-platform engine. Mozilla started the development of Servo, but handed the project over to the Linux Foundation in 2020. Previously, Mozilla incorporated parts of Servo into the Gecko engine in Project Quantum.

(sfe)