A minimal Firefox-style web browser built on Servo, the Rust web engine — the newest actively maintained browser built on Servo, written against the servo crate embedding API (v0.1+, released April 2026).

Context: Verso, the pioneering third-party Servo browser, was archived in October 2025 and is no longer maintained. Servo's own servoshell remains a demo mini-browser for testing the engine. This project picks up the embedder-side baton on the new public servo crates.io API — no engine fork required.

What works

Tab strip with create/close/switch
Back / forward / reload navigation with real history state
URL bar with address parsing and DuckDuckGo search fallback (localhost handled too)
Pages render via Servo into offscreen surfaces and composite under the native chrome
Mouse, scroll wheel, and keyboard input forwarded to the page
Live page titles, loading spinners, and hover status bar
window.open() / target=_blank opens a new tab

Architecture

┌──────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Chrome UI: egui 0.36 + wgpu              │  tabs · toolbar · status bar
├──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Frame bridge                             │  WebView::paint() → read_to_image()
├──────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ Engine: servo 0.5 crate                  │  Stylo · SpiderMonkey · WebRender
│   one WebView per tab, each with its own │
│   OffscreenRenderingContext              │
└──────────────────────────────────────────┘
        windowing: winit · rendering: wgpu (Metal/Vulkan/DX12)

The embedder owns everything above the engine: windowing, chrome, input routing, and history UI. Servo owns layout, JS, networking, and painting. The two talk through WebView::notify_input_event (down) and a WebViewDelegate message queue (up).

Building

Requires a stable Rust toolchain (1.85+ recommended):

cargo build --release
cargo run --release

First build takes a while — the servo crate compiles SpiderMonkey (C++) and the full WebRender pipeline. Incremental rebuilds after that are fast.

Tested on macOS (Apple Silicon). Windows and Linux should work in principle since all dependencies are cross-platform, but they haven't been exercised yet.

Known limitations

This is an early-days project on top of an engine that is itself pre-1.0:

No DRM video (Widevine), and some sites will simply not render correctly yet — that's Servo's web-compat surface area, not something the embedder can fix
Frames are composited through CPU readback, so heavy pages cost more than a zero-copy GPU path would (fine for basic browsing)
No bookmarks/history persistence, downloads, devtools, or preferences UI yet

Roadmap

Zero-copy frame path (share GL textures instead of readback)
Bookmarks and browsing history
Page context menus
Dark mode following system theme
Linux CI builds

Credits

Built on the shoulders of the Servo project (Linux Foundation Europe), with the chrome rendered by egui. Design cues from Firefox. See also Verso (archived) — the pioneering Servo embedder whose contributions live on upstream.

License

See LICENSE.