The Mozilla Foundation is reportedly currently developing a new browser engine called Quantum. The new browser engine will take parts of the Servo project to create a new core for the Firefox browser, as revealed yesterday by David Bryant, head of Mozilla's Platform Engineering.
The new engine will replace the ancient Gecko, which is the engine that Firefox has used for many years. Bryant said that Mozilla hopes to complete the transition to Quantum by the end of 2017.
The first versions of Quantum will rely heavily on components from Servo, a browser engine that Mozilla has been developing for the past few years.
The Servo browser engine is written in Rust, a programming language that Mozilla also created in recent years. Bryant said Quantum will heavily use Rust as its code base.
So in the coming year, Mozilla will slowly start adding components from the Servo project to Gecko in each new release, while removing the ancient Gecko code, leaving the Quantum engine in place.
The reason why the change is now necessary is that Gecko was developed at a time when computers ran on single-core processors.
Meanwhile, most computers and mobile phones now run on multi-core architectures, and use powerful GPU cards that allow for better performance and better graphics.
Bryant said that Quantum will be developed with these developments in mind, and will bring better performance when browsing the web, and real-time interactions.
He also says that a change to the Rust code will also improve the overall security of the browser. The Mozilla Foundation began using the first components written in Rust starting with Firefox 48.
