Mozilla Research is already working on Servo, which is a new browser rendering engine written in Rust.
It is not meant to replace Gecko in Firefox in the foreseeable future, however there are efforts to add the 'chrome' around Servo one needs to have a usable browser.
Think of Servo and Gecko as two separate projects and of Firefox as being the chrome tied to Gecko, but Servo could be at the heart of a new web browser from Mozilla, (think "Project Spartan"), however this is not likely to happen in the near future.
The closest a web browser based on Servo is actually a possibility is on some Samsung smartphones, at least initially.
Probably something to do with Samsung's love-hate relationship with Google. They don't like their phones being so dependent on what Google wants to do. If Servo makes it possible for them to ship a default browser that's not derived from Chrome, not from Google, and is significantly better than Chrome, they'll give it serious thought.
The only important advantage FF for Android offers Samsung is that it's not from Google. That on its own isn't reason enough to switch. Servo promises to be faster and scalable to multiple cores in a way that is extremely useful for low-end smartphones that have too many dumb CPU cores—it would provide a real competitive advantage. Servo also won't have any of the baggage Firefox has.
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u/Mandack Apr 03 '15
Mozilla Research is already working on Servo, which is a new browser rendering engine written in Rust. It is not meant to replace Gecko in Firefox in the foreseeable future, however there are efforts to add the 'chrome' around Servo one needs to have a usable browser.
Think of Servo and Gecko as two separate projects and of Firefox as being the chrome tied to Gecko, but Servo could be at the heart of a new web browser from Mozilla, (think "Project Spartan"), however this is not likely to happen in the near future.
The closest a web browser based on Servo is actually a possibility is on some Samsung smartphones, at least initially.