Mozilla partners with Samsung on new web browser as Google and Opera dump WebKit

In a big week in the browser market, Mozilla has announced that it is joining Samsung in developing a new web browser and systems language, as Google and Opera announced they are forking the WebKit rendering engine.

Changes in web browser rendering engines have a potential impact on SMEs as changes to web browser rendering engines will mean websites might begin behaving differently in different web browsers.

In a statement, Firefox developer Mozilla announced that it is working with Samsung on developing both a next generation browser engine, called Servo, which will be built in an experimental programming language called Rust.

“Servo is an attempt to rebuild the Web browser from the ground up on modern hardware, rethinking old assumptions along the way. This means addressing the causes of security vulnerabilities while designing a platform that can fully utilize the performance of tomorrow’s massively parallel hardware to enable new and richer experiences on the Web,” Mozilla states.

“We are now pleased to announce with Samsung that together we are bringing both the Rust programming language and Servo, the experimental web browser engine, to Android and ARM.”

Samsung’s apparent abandonment of Google’s Chrome web browser could see further tensions emerge between the Android partners, following Samsung’s recent announcement that it is planning on releasing smartphones running its own Tizen smartphone platform later this year.

For its part, Google has announced that it is forking the source code for the WebKit web browser rendering engine, creating its own version called Blink.

Currently, WebKit is the underlying code that powers Google Chrome, Apple Safari and some versions of the Opera web browser.

“Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects,” Google states.

“This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation – so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.”

Following Google’s announcement, Opera also announced that it is also switching its web browsers from WebKit to Blink.