# CN Research Evaluation ## Servo in 2023 Servo is a web engine built mostly in Rust. Despite it's the most wanted target in Tauri's watchlist for a long time, Servo got abandoned by Mozilla in 2020 and was being in an oblivions state for past few years which made us difficult to add it as another webview backend. However, at the start of this year, Igalia assembled a small group of people who worked in Servo before to attempt to revive the project. A lot of maintainence and dependency works have been done. And even the development of new layout implementation has been resumed. Recently, layout 2020 has surpassed old layout in WPT's CSS2 coverage. With these exciting news, Crabnebula has potential to collaborate again and form deeper bond with Servo team and wider OSS communities. This could strengthen our position in web ecosystem and open more oppertunities. NLNet is already interested in building a GDPR compliance Europe browser. Futurewei is interested in Android port for GUI usage. There are more potential organizations like these and we could make a long term research deals with them. ### Development Directions Right now we are using existing NLNet grat to work with Servo team. The goal of this grant is set to build a webview library based on Servo. This aligns to Tauri's initial purpose as well. While building a webview being an existing path, there are other routes to explore as well. Servo has a draft PR about building a mini browser recently. What's interesting is it evaluate egui as its UI frame. We already maintain an egui plugin. The same knowhow can be used to extend Servo's UI. What's even better is we understand egui well enough, we are confident to optimize it and support to many platforms, especially mobile platforms. The best advantage of this attempt is most team members won't be affected. Each one can still work on the existing tech stacks they are familiar with. For example, we have a menu crate called `muda` which can support other windowing crates. Many advanced feature can also be ported from `tao` and other plugin crates. Even new project like `confisis` can be used to extend browser's security stand. Team members are free to chooose more time on this research topic, or keep their usual Tauri development. ### Unresolved Problems With all these encouraging news, this doesn't mean Servo doesn't have blockers anymore. There are still a few big dependencies still waiting to be updated. `script` crate still has poor documentation which make add new web api difficult. And majority of wpt coverage is still empty. One of main goals for this research will be resolving these blockers, forming a reasonable roadmap with Servo community, and help the community to be stronger to outreach more developers and customers. ## Vision for Next Quater