Mozilla announced on its official blog this morning that it's teaming up with Samsung to create a brand-new mobile browser engine, dubbed Servo. Its aim is to power browsers for "tomorrow's faster, multi-core, heterogeneous computing architectures" - so the sell is that Servo will be built from the ground up to take advantage of increasingly capable mobile hardware.
Servo will be written in Rust, Mozilla's own programming language, which - surprise of surprises - has been designed to more readily take advantage of parallel computing. Rust also boasts more built-in security and memory stability compared to C++, according to Mozilla.
Servo's primary competitor, obviously, will be WebKit, the current mobile browser engine of choice for both Google and Apple. Samsung steps into the equation on the Android / ARM end, and has already helped Mozilla implement an ARM backend for Rust, and provided the necessary build infrastructure to cross-compile to Android.
So, what are they up to? Samsung is probably hoping to power its own mobile browser with Servo (eventually), and move away from its current WebKit solution, which is based on the stock Android browser app. Given that Google doesn't update the stock Android browser anymore, this makes a lot of sense. It's Chrome or go home in the long run for Android OEMs, and Samsung probably isn't very enthusiastic about that plan. I know I wouldn't be, given the rather slow and clunky state of Google's supposedly cutting-edge mobile browser at the moment.