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June in Servo: real world compat, media queries, SharedWorker, and more

Servo 0.4.0 contains all of the changes we landed in June, which came out to yet another record 558 commits (April: 534, May: 391). For security fixes, see § Security.

servoshell 0.4.0 showing several new features: the ‘width’, ‘height’, ‘device-width’, ‘device-height’, and ‘aspect-ratio’ media query features, plus the upgraded ‘attr()’ function, with a box whose ‘background-color’ and ‘width’ are controlled by data attributes that are in turn set by range inputs

We’ve shipped several new web platform features:

Plus a bunch of new DOM APIs:

This is another big update, so here’s an outline:

You can help!

Servo is steadily becoming a bigger and busier project every month, and by June 2026, we’ve been reading through over four times the commits as we did when we started in September 2023.

line chart showing how many commits landed in Servo’s main repo each month from September 2023 to June 2026 inclusive. there’s a clear linear trend, from 130 commits up to 551 commits

This is hard work, particularly since there are things we need to know that are often difficult to answer just by reading the changes:

Thanks to an initiative by @jdm, it’s now easier than ever for you to help us answer those questions, using the Servo Highfive bot! If you’re working on a pull request that you think might be interesting for the next monthly update, even if you’re not 100% sure, tell us about it by following the steps below:

  1. You add the monthly update label to your pull request, or comment @servo-highfive monthly update

  2. Highfive posts a comment asking you some questions

  3. You answer those questions in a comment containing @servo-highfive monthly update answer

Security

Servo’s JS runtime, SpiderMonkey 140.10.1, had several security bugs that have been fixed in Servo 0.4.0 with the update to SpiderMonkey 140.11.0 (@jschwe, #45584). For more details, see CVE-2026-8388, CVE-2026-8391, CVE-2026-8974, CVE-2026-8975, and MFSA 2026-48.

Several more security bugs in Servo’s JS runtime have been fixed in Servo 0.4.0 with the update to SpiderMonkey 140.12.0 (@jschwe, #45766). The exact CVEs that apply to us are not yet known, but for more details, see MFSA 2026-58.

RSA operations in Subtle­Crypto now do modular exponentiation in constant time (@kkoyung, #45631). Please note that our RSA implementation is currently vulnerable to the Marvin Attack – for more details, see RUSTSEC-2023-0071.

ML-DSA operations in Subtle­Crypto now do the Decompose step in constant time, fixing RUSTSEC-2025-0144 (@kkoyung, #45294).

We’ve fixed an HTML injection bug (XSS) in file:/// directory listings, which affected file names containing </script> (@sahvx655-wq, #45510).

Real world compat

Layout correctness has significantly improved on lichess.org, and many websites have become a lot more readable thanks to our improved handling of variable fonts (@simonwuelker, #45768), including Zulip (servo.zulipchat.com) and Speedtest (speedtest.net).

v0.3.0

v0.4.0

lichess.org

v0.3.0

v0.4.0

Zulip (servo.zulipchat.com)

v0.3.0

v0.4.0

Speedtest (speedtest.net)

Many websites worked in Servo even before version 0.4.0, including Google Photos (photos.google.com) and Cash Converters (cashconverters.com.au), and continue to work in version 0.4.0. Other websites, like Google Maps (maps.google.com) and OpenStreetMap (www.openstreetmap.org), render well but have some issues with interactivity.

Google Photos (photos.google.com)
Cash Converters (cashconverters.com.au)
Google Maps (maps.google.com)
OpenStreetMap (www.openstreetmap.org)

We’re interested to hear how well your favourite websites run in Servo! Report successes in this Zulip thread, and failures in our GitHub issues.

Work in progress

We’re implementing the more powerful version of ‘attr()’ that can be used anywhere, not just in ‘content’, under --pref layout­_css­_attr­_enabled (@Loirooriol, #45041, #45421, #45495, #45752).

WebGPU support has improved, under --pref dom­_webgpu­_enabled:

All of the features above are enabled in servoshell’s experimental mode.

We’ve made more progress towards accessibility support, under --pref accessibility_enabled (@alice, @delan, #45555, #45554, #44949).

We’ve started implementing visible and interactive text selection (@mrobinson, @SimonSapin, #46107), one of the most long-awaited features of any web browser. Stay tuned!

We’ve also started working on Web Animations, under --pref dom­_web­_animations­_enabled (@simonwuelker, #45522, #45983), as well as webkit­Relative­Path on File, under --pref dom­_entries­_api­_enabled (@yezhizhen, #45666).

Rust doesn’t have a stable ABI, so it has generally not been possible to embed Servo in another application without building Servo from source. To make it possible, we’ve started designing a wrapper C API that will let you consume Servo as a prebuilt shared library using the stable and ubiquitous C ABI (@mukilan, #44984). Eventually the idea is that we’ll create a wrapper Rust API around that wrapper C API, so you can have both the ergonomics of Rust and the build simplicity of C.

Embedding API

New in the Servo API:

Breaking changes:

We’ve improved the docs for Web­View, Web­View­Delegate, JS­Value, Alert­Dialog, Allow­Or­Deny­Request, Authentication­Response, Bluetooth­Device­Description, Confirm­Dialog, Console­Log­Level, Create­New­Web­View­Request, Embedder­Control, Embedder­Control­Response, File­Picker, Image, Java­Script­Error­Info, Navigation­Request, Permission­Request, Pixel­Format, Prompt­Dialog, Protocol­Handler­Registration, Protocol­Handler­Update­Registration, Scroll, Select­Element, Select­Element­Request, and Web­View­Vector (@mukilan, #45282, #45467).

For users and developers

In servoshell:

When using the Firefox DevTools:

We’ve fixed some build issues on riscv32, riscv64, and arm64 (@fxzjshm, @saschanaz, #45285, #45731), and modernised servoshell for Android to use Compose UI and Kotlin (@veyndan, #45923, #45932, #45941, #45982, #45985, #46015, #46035, #46037, #46046, #46053, #46061, #46071, #45641, #45643, #45650, #45665, #45671, #45676, #45679, #45683, #45712, #45713, #45734, #45738).

For developers of Servo itself:

More on the web platform

To allow for more performant scrolling, ‘wheel’ events are no longer .cancelable unless there are one or more non-passive event listeners (@kunalmohan, #45667). Note that like in Firefox, ‘wheel’ events are passive by default.

‘dotted’, ‘dashed’, and ‘wavy’ text decorations are now continuous across element boundaries (@mrobinson, #45726).

We’ve improved the conformance of <dialog> (@skyz1, @mrobinson, #45825, #45761), <iframe sandbox> (@cychronex-labs, #45880), <input minlength> and <input maxlength> (@skyz1, #45705), CSS gradients (@mrobinson, #43945), ‘font-style’ and ‘unicode-range’ in ‘@font-face’ (@Loirooriol, #45821), FontFaceSet (@mrobinson, #45390, #45382), HTML­Input­Element (@steigeo, #45416), Intersection­Observer (@jdm, #45655, #45659, #45680), new Response() (@yezhizhen, #45953), URL.create­Object­URL() and URL.revoke­Object­URL() (@yezhizhen, #45182, #45417), and ECDSA and Ed25519 in Subtle­Crypto (@kkoyung, #45833, #46017).

We’ve fixed bugs related to <input hidden> (@mrobinson, #45750), ‘animation-delay’ (@yezhizhen, #45013), ‘clip-path’ (@Loirooriol, #45468, #45373), ‘tab-size’ (@SimonSapin, @mrobinson, #45309), ‘width’ and ‘height’ (@RichardTjokroutomo, #44627), ‘box-shadow: inset’ (@Loirooriol, #45620), ‘animation­iteration’ events (@Loirooriol, #45990), ‘click’ events (@mrobinson, #45751), ‘load’ events (@jdm, #45883), ‘error’ events in Worker global scopes (@Gae24, #45829), and document­.get­Element­By­Id() (@mrobinson, #45433).

Garbage collection safety

We use a RefCell-based mechanism to store many of our DOM types in other DOM types, enforcing Rust’s “aliasing xor mutability” rule at runtime by panicking if the rule is violated. But when garbage collection happens, we need to borrow() each DomRefCell to trace the references, and this is the source of many panic bugs. To fix that whole class of bugs, we initially created CanGc, a marker type that would annotate the code paths where GC can occur, in conjunction with custom static analysis (@jdm, #33140).

With the Rust type system we can do even better, if we flip that around and require any borrow_mut() call to prove that GC can not occur by passing a NoGC marker value. We can then require that a &NoGC must be borrowed from a &JSContext (which blocks GC) and not a &mut JSContext (which allows GC), taking advantage of how Rust references work without needing any custom static analysis.

We have a large codebase that needs to be migrated in parts, so for now we’ve created the new method safe­_borrow­_mut() (@sagudev, #46050). We also need to update all of our script-related code to borrow our safe JSContext wrapper, rather than creating an owned JSContext on the spot.

This continues our long-running effort to use the Rust type system to make Servo’s integration with SpiderMonkey safer and more reliable (@Gae24, @Keerti707, @Narfinger, @TimvdLippe, @sagudev, @guptapiyush16, @ivomurrell, @kunalmohan, @skyz1, #45230, #45436, #45503, #45617, #45711, #45797, #45800, #45858, #45884, #45937, #45902, #45968, #45977, #45991, #46003, #46005, #46084, #45548, #45552, #45590, #45909, #45912, #45943, #46089, #46117, #46114, #45320, #45324, #45328, #45340, #45381, #45385, #45410, #45392, #45409, #45604, #45616, #45618, #45627, #45636, #45662, #45663, #45675, #45674, #45677, #45684, #45735, #45807, #45810, #45816, #45818, #45828, #45838, #45836, #45837, #45840, #45841, #45857, #45859, #45862, #45875, #45887, #45931, #45964, #45935, #45987, #45988, #46001, #46040, #46051, #46057, #46106, #46125, #45678, #46002, #45845, #45645, #45673, #45259, #45817, #45822, #45876, #45877, #45891).

Performance and stability

NoGC was designed to prevent dynamic borrow failures, but it also enables some performance optimisations! If we can prove that garbage collection is impossible in some part of Servo, we can often avoid rooting JavaScript objects when interacting with them within that region of code. This has allowed us to reduce overheads by over 1% in the layout process and in HTML­Collection (@Narfinger, #46092, #45582).

Our memory usage has improved, with BoxFragment now 17% smaller (288 → 240 bytes on amd64) and ShapeCacheEntry now smaller too (@SimonSapin, @mrobinson, @simonwuelker, #45183, #45496).

We’ve fixed some nasty memory leaks when reloading and in 2D canvases (@Taym95, @sagudev, @jschwe, #45455, #45261, #45414).

Speaking of which, 2D canvases now use up to 23% less power (@yezhizhen, #45301), and we now avoid rasterising the same SVG more than once (@Narfinger, @jschwe, #44805).

Servo now decodes all images asynchronously and fills image caches asynchronously, leaving script threads (web content processes) more time for other work (@Narfinger, #45542, #44483). On top of that, we’ve improved incremental layout (@mrobinson, @Loirooriol, #45411) and reduced reflows in IntersectionObserver (@jschwe, #45986).

We’ve started working on incremental updates for the stacking context tree, and as a side effect, we’ve made some layout-bound microbenchmarks up to 10% faster (@mrobinson, @Loirooriol, #45208).

We’ve also reduced allocations, copies, GC rooting steps, and other operations in many parts of Servo (@Narfinger, @SimonSapin, @mrobinson, @Loirooriol, #45506, #45969, #45940, #45760, #46090, #45335, #45413, #45511).

For several months, Frédéric (@fred-wang) has been fuzzing for Servo bugs, and thanks to his work we’ve fixed sixteen (16) crash bugs in June, affecting <iframe>, <slot>, <link onerror>, ‘animation’, ‘clip-path’, ‘content’, ‘rotate’, ‘transition’, ‘transform-style’, ‘display: contents’, ‘overflow: clip’, CSS­Keyframes­Rule, Font­Face, stop() on Window, document­.element­From­Point(), and the DOM tree (@mrobinson, @Loirooriol, @fred-wang, #46031, #46027, #46054, #46058, #46016, #46028, #46033, #45287, #45951, #45634, #45629, #46110, #46094, #45799, #45611, #45682, #45788, #45612, #45834).

We’ve also fixed crash bugs related to IPC failures, HTML­Input­Element, Range, the DevTools Debugger tab, and when servoshell is built with --features native-bluetooth (@jschwe, @Taym95, @mrobinson, @atbrakhi, @mukilan, #45311, #45619, #45765, #45513, #45702).

New contributors

A special thanks to the following people for landing their first patch in Servo:

Interested in helping build a web browser? Take a look at our curated list of issues that are good for new contributors!

Donations

Thanks again for your generous support! We are now receiving 7681 USD/month (+0.2% from May) in recurring donations. This helps us cover the cost of our speedy CI and benchmarking servers, one of our latest Outreachy interns, and funding maintainer work that helps more people contribute to Servo.

Servo is also on thanks.dev, and already 35 GitHub users (same as May) that depend on Servo are sponsoring us there. If you use Servo libraries like url, html5ever, selectors, or cssparser, signing up for thanks.dev could be a good way for you (or your employer) to give back to the community.

We now have sponsorship tiers that allow you or your organisation to donate to the Servo project with public acknowlegement of your support. If you’re interested in this kind of sponsorship, please contact us at [email protected].

7681 USD/month

10000

Use of donations is decided transparently via the Technical Steering Committee’s public funding request process, and active proposals are tracked in servo/project#187. For more details, head to our Sponsorship page.