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I am actually surprise this pieces was written by Brendan, given the way Mozilla has been moving lately with asm.js, PDF.js and Shumway which is like Flash.js; It wouldn't be surprise if their Next Goal were to built the Entire ( or Most of ) Browser with Javascript.

I am surprised that Samsung decide to help. Which basically reads to me as relationship with Google is going pretty bad or they are simply hedging their bet.

It was only earlier today I posted that Yahoo should also have a few engineers helping Mozilla to develop Servo.

And i really really hope Servo is licensed like Rust, Dual MIT + Apache 2.0

4 comments

Google pays Mozilla to push Google Search, not to develop a browser (which Google can do just fine on their own). It doesn't really mean much that they're teaming with Samsung for Servo, other than Samsung's taken an interest in using Servo for their own products.

Note it's not mentioned exactly which division of Samsung they're working with; they may want Servo for Tizen, their Smart TVs, to ensure it plays nice with Exynos, or none of the above.

[EDIT: the post explicitly mentions porting Rust and Servo to Android and ARM; which rather strongly suggests the mobile group. Interesting, as FirefoxOS and Tizen are more or less aimed at the same markets]

I think it is "none of the above". Servo, right now, is cloudcuckooland stuff; this suggests it is a long bet research, not tied to any particular product division. Samsung probably has Tizen, Smart TV, Exynos in mind, so you could equall say "all of the above", but I think "none of the above" is more accurate description.

But it does say that Samsung is responsible for Servo for Android.

> It wouldn't be surprise if their Next Goal were to built the Entire ( or Most of ) Browser with Javascript.

Firefox is that already, the UI is XUL (that's one of the reasons why things like Firebug could exist as a plugin, when Chrome and Safari plugins are essentially glorified greasemonkey scripts). But you still need the core engine to run that javascript (and a bunch of other stuff) somehow, and one of the ideas behind Servo is that you could do so with much more concurrency and reactivity than is currently done.

Also, the browser app on Firefox OS is entirely javascript/html/css. No XUL in sight.

Yes, the UI is using web technologies, but core components are not. I would steer far away from writing a JavaScript interpreter in JavaScript... no.

Here's the ticket regarding Servo's license, be sure to weigh in if you feel strongly about it:

https://github.com/mozilla/servo/issues/45

The first paragraph is hilarious!