As a web engine, Servo primarily handles everything around scripting and layout. For embedding use cases, the Tauri community experimented with adding a new Servo backend, but Servo can also be used to build a browser.

We have a reference browser in the form of servoshell, which has historically been used as a minimal example and as a test harness for the Web Platform Tests. Nevertheless, the Servo community has steadily worked towards making it a browser in its own right, starting with our new browser UI based on egui last year.

This year, @wusyong, a member of Servo TSC, created the Verso project as a way to explore the features Servo needs to power a robust web browser. In this post, we’ll explain what we tried to achieve, what we found, and what’s next for building a browser using Servo as a web engine.