Mozilla will ship Rust code and Servo components in Firefox in 2016

[Batu69]

2016 will be an important year for Mozilla, maker of the Firefox web browser and proponent of an open Web.

 

The organization announced plans this month to shift Firefox OS development away from smartphones to connected devices, and to drop the email client Thunderbird from its portfolio of applications.

 

As far as Firefox is concerned, 2016 will be a critical year for the browser. Mozilla plans to launch Electrolysis, the multi-process architecture in 2016 which will likely disrupt Firefox's add-on landscape significantly.

 

Add-on signing will be enforced in 2016 as well which will impact extensions as well.

 

Today, Mozilla announced that it would ship Rust code and Servo components in Firefox in 2016.

 

 

No timeframe was given in the brief announcement and it is unclear right now when first bits are integrated into the web browser.

 

Rust is a programming language that Mozilla built that it claims is both fast and safe. According to Mozilla, it would eliminate certain kinds of bugs completely by failing during compile.

Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety.

Servo on the other hand is a Parallel Browser Engine Project built using Rust.

Written in Mozilla's new systems programming language, Rust, the Servo project aims to achieve better parallelism, security, modularity, and performance.

Mozilla refers to the move as oxidation and you can check the main tracking bug for that on the Bugzilla website.

 

The first bits of Rust code to be integrated into the browser appear to be the Rust URL parsing code and Rust parser for getting MP4 file metadata.

 

It is unclear if those implementations will benefit Firefox users directly, for instance by improving parsing time, or only indirectly, by improving the quality of code.

 

It is possible that additional bits of code will find their way into the Firefox web browser in 2016.

 

What is clear however is that 2016 will be a deciding year for Mozilla and the Firefox web browser. It s difficult to predict whether the announced changes will impact the browser's userbase positively or negatively.

 

While most additions sound good on paper, they will likely render some add-ons incompatible with the new version of the browser and that may in turn convince some users to migrate to another browser.

 

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[TheRuan]

As long as they finish multi-thread support I will be very happy to come back to Firefox, cause right now it totally sucks if u usually load too many tabs.