March in Servo: keyboard navigation, better debugging, FreeBSD support, and more

Servo is meant to be a general purpose browser written entirely in rust. Originally it was a Mozilla project to experiment with rust and (allegedly) was going to ship in the Microsoft Holo lens and ultimately died with it. Ignalia ended up picking up the torch again and is the stewards behind it.

Interesting facts:

It still uses spidermonkey for javascript, same as firefox. This is mostly a function of a JS engine written in rust not being all that pressing since most bugs are going to be JIT related and it also being really hard. Remember they wanted to ship with the Holo lens.

The multi threaded CSS parser from servo is also used in firefox as the firefox team struggled to write a C++ one.

Reading between the lines of who is working on it these days, it seems like the developers are working on it to have a browser that can be embedded into devices. Cars, TVs, kiosks, etc.

Unfortunately as an open source project with no clear single owner setting up an Apple Developer account is a non-trivial exercise (but one that we are looking into).

https://github.com/servo/servo/issues/40031

Thank you on all the work you'd put in there! Getting it running again, it was mostly just a work of adding target_os = "freebsd" to the Linux codepaths.