Mozilla: New browser engine Servo passes Acid2 test successfully

Mozilla Labs reports that the under-construction Servo render engine successfully passed the Acid2 browser test. Servo can run its layout tasks in a parallel environment, making it better with multicore CPUs and GPUs.

The Acid tests have been used for years to check whether browsers adhere to web standards. The Acid2 test page came online in 2005 and included CSS and HTML tests. According to Mozilla Labs, its Servo render engine has now successfully passed this litmus test by rendering the page correctly. This is an important step in the development of the render engine, according to the browser builder. Incidentally, the Acid1 test was successfully completed by Servo in August last year.

Mozilla is collaborating with Samsung in the development of Servo. According to Mozilla, the render engine in its current state would also perform better in single-threaded mode than that of current browsers, while the performance in multi-threaded mode logically increases considerably.

Servo is written in Rust, a new programming language that Mozilla Research is working on. With a more modern architecture, Rust would not suffer from security problems such as buffer overflows and have more secure memory management. This would make bugs like Heartbleed impossible because they are automatically prevented by the Rust compiler.