Igalia is excited to announce a new commission from the Sovereign Tech Fund to advance the Servo web engine. As stewards of Servo, Igalia is honored to receive support for a multi-pronged effort focused on public interest, developer usability, and long-term sustainability.
Servo is a modern, parallelized web engine written in Rust, a Linux Foundation Europe project which Igalia has been actively maintaining since 2023, Servo represents a bold rethinking of browser architecture. Its modular design has made it a valuable resource across the Rust ecosystem. But like many promising open source technologies, Servo needs sustained investment to reach its full potential.
Thanks to investment from the Sovereign Tech Fund, Igalia will focus some important work in the next year in three key areas:
🧠Initial Accessibility Support
As Servo adoption grows, so does the need for inclusive design. Today, Servo lacks the foundational accessibility features required to support screen readers and other assistive technologies. This limits its usability in many real-world scenarios, and doesn’t match our values. Despite its importance, accessibility is often one of a few things that is difficult to find funding for. We’re grateful that thanks to this investment, we’ll be able to implement initial accessibility support to ensure that Servo can serve all users. This work is essential to making Servo a viable engine for public-facing applications.
🧩 WebView API
Embedding Servo into applications requires a stable and complete WebView API. While early work exists, it’s not yet ready for general use. We’ll be finishing the WebView API to make Servo embeddable in desktop and mobile apps, unlocking new use cases and enabling broader adoption. A robust embedding layer is critical to Servo’s eventual success as a general-purpose engine.
🔧 Project Maintenance
Servo is more than a browser engine—it’s a collection of crates used widely across the Rust ecosystem. Maintaining these libraries benefits not just Servo, but the broader web platform. The project and the community have been growing a lot since we’ve taken over stewardship. This funding will allow our work will include more issue triage, pull request review, version releases, and governance support. All of this helps ensure that Servo remains active, responsive, and well-maintained for developers and users alike.
Igalia has long championed open source innovation in the browser space, from our work on Chromium, WebKit, and Gecko to our leadership in standards bodies and developer tooling. We believe Servo has a unique role to play in the future of web engines, and we’re thrilled to help guide its next chapter.
Many thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund for recognizing the importance of this work. We look forward to sharing progress as we go.