miles
9446a7d0ab
- Added Cargo.toml with dependencies for egui, wgpu, and other libraries. - Implemented main application logic in src/app.rs, including window management, rendering, and tab handling. - Created a new module src/servo_host.rs to manage interactions with the Servo engine and webview. - Established event handling for user inputs, including keyboard and mouse events. - Integrated a basic UI layout with a tab strip, toolbar, and status bar. - Implemented functionality for navigating URLs and managing multiple tabs.
3.7 KiB
browser
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
servocrates.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 (
localhosthandled 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.