Mozilla, which is famous for its Firefox browser, has announced a partnership with Samsung to develop a new mobile Browser that can take advantage of multicore processors in the devices.
Strangely, Samsung is a rival of Firefox in the mobile operating system space with Samsung developing Tizen and also refusing to partner with Firefox for its operating system.
The new browser will be called, Servo and will be written in Rust, a relatively new programming language that is being developed by Mozilla Research which has also been working on the new browser since 2012. Together, Mozilla and Samsung are bringing both Rust and Servo to Android and the ARM architecture.
Mozilla’s chief technology officer, Brendan Eich announced on the Mozilla’s blog that it has teamed up with Samsung on an advanced technology based web browser engine called Servo. Eich calls Servo an attempt to build a browser for the new web from ground up. He added that the browser based on Servo will run “on modern hardware.”
“This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that can fully utilise the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web,” he further said on the post.
Current browsers are not optimised to use multi core processors and therefore can’t take advantage of advanced hardware that is available in today’s smartphones and tablets. This browser is all the more important as people are talking about HTML5 based web applications getting the same ability as native apps (that you download on your phone or is already present). And for that to happen, you need to take full advantage of the hardware of the phone which this new browser will bring.