A Quantum Leap for the Web

Quantum wiki page with info on how to get involved: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quantum

[disclaimer: I co-founded Mozilla Research, which sponsors Servo]

It's awesome to see the Gecko team continue to tackle big, ambitious projects now that electrolysis is rolling out. And I'm so excited that they're betting big on Servo and Rust. Servo has really been taking advantage of one of Rust's promises: that you can reach for more aggressive parallelism and actually maintain it. I believe recent numbers showed that effectively all of Firefox's users have at least two cores, and about half have at least 4. The more we fully utilize those cores, the smoother we should be able to make the whole web.

Over the last year, all three communities have been laying groundwork to be able to land Rust components in Firefox and share components between Gecko and Servo, and now it looks like that's teed the Gecko team up to commit to making use of some big pieces of Servo in the coming year. Some of the initial builds of Firefox with Stylo that Bobby Holley has showed me look really amazing, and WebRender could be a game-changer.

And the Servo project is just getting warmed up. ;) If you're interested in what they're up to next, check out Jack Moffitt's recent presentation from a browser developer workshop last month:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL4sEzdAGvRgCYXot-o5cVKOo...

It's about damn time!

I hope that low power usage remains a key priority. Surprisingly, I don't see any mention of it in this article.

Does anyone know how this compares to the current implementations of competing browsers? ie. is Firefox still playing catch up in some respects or is this leaps ahead of the competition too?