A layout engine is a program that converts the web page code in a formatted image that we see in the end, when go to the website.
Popular browsers use different engines to render the web pages: Chrome and Opera prefer Blink, Safari uses WebKit.
“The Firefox engine, called Gecko, and he is quite old – it was developed back in 1997 for Netscape Navigator. Of course, Gecko since then, times have evolved, but his advanced age it does not change. Mozilla is constantly working to make your Firefox browser faster, and especially for the sake of achieving this goal was launched Project Quantum” – writes the portal.
This is an attempt to replace some components of the Gecko code from a much more recent engine Servo. The development of Servo sponsored by the company Mozilla, but due to the fact that the project Servo is still far from complete, Quantum will be limited to only borrowing from it some already finished developments.
As reported androidpolice.com in fact, this is a temporary alternative as long as the Servo will not bring to mind that he was able to completely replace Gecko within Firefox.
It should be noted that according to preliminary data, a layout engine Servo needs to be very fast. Mozilla expects to release a new version of the browser with the Quantum improvements in end of 2017.
