Servo started as a project under Mozilla to create a next-generation browser engine, but now it's an independent project. Today marks the release of Servo 0.0.1, and you can try it out on your computer.
Servo is an experimental browser engine written in the Rust programming language, intended as an alternative to Chrome's Blink, Apple's WebKit, and Mozilla's Gecko. There was already a basic web browser shell you could download to try out the engine, but only with nightly builds that were fully automated and not tested at all.
The first versioned release, Sero v0.0.1, is now available on the GitHub releases page . The Servo team hopes to publish a new release each month, which should be (somewhat) more stable than the previous experience with nightly builds. The Servo website downloads page still only links to the nightly builds.
A blog post explained, "We plan to publish such a tagged release every month. For now, we are adopting a simple release process where we will use a recent nightly build and perform additional manual testing to identify issues and regressions before tagging and publishing the binaries."
The team also noted that there are "currently no plans" to publish these new builds to any app stores or software repositories, including the Crates.io platform used by many Rust language projects. Servo is still unstable at times, and the shell lacks support for most expected browser features, so it's not a surprise that the team is holding off on wider availability.
Servo v0.0.1 also marks the first release of an ARM macOS version, so you can try out Servo natively on Apple Silicon Mac computers without building from source code. There were already downloads available for x64 Windows, x64 macOS, x64 Linux, 64-bit ARM Android, and 64-bit ARM OpenHarmony. There are no native builds for ARM Windows or ARM Linux yet.
The Mac builds still aren't signed properly, so there are a few more steps to try the engine on a Mac. First, you have to hold down Control while opening the application (or right-click) and select Open. After you see a warning, you have to open your Mac's System Settings, navigate to the Privacy & Security section, and then click 'Open Anyway' on the Servo app. You'll get one more prompt to click the 'Open Anyway' button, and then it will finally work.
Servo is still a long away from replacing the engines used in Chromium, Safari, Firefox, and other web browsers, but it's exciting to see the team taking another step in that direction.
Source: Servo Blog
