> Firefox and Chrome also use C++, and each of them has 3-4 critical vulnerabilities related to memory safety per year, despite the massive resources Mozilla and Google have invested in security.

And part of Firefox/Chromes security effort has been to use memory safe languages in critical sections like file format decoders. They're far too deeply invested in C++ to move away entirely in our lifetimes, but they are taking advantage of other languages where they feasibly can, so to write a new browser in pure C++ is a regression from what the big players are already doing.

Ladybird is going to use Swift.

I just checked out Servo, and like all browsers it has a VERY large footprint of dependencies (notably GStreamer/GOject, libpng/jpeg, PCRE). Considering browsers have quite the decent process isolation (the whole browser process vs heavily sandboxed renderer processes), I wonder how tangible the Rust advantage turns out to be.

> But the question still remains, why did Igalia pick up a dead project?

> I doubt you'd invest that kind of money/time into a project without a good reason.

Igalia is a very peculiar company. I would not rule out "it's a good thing for the commons and we bet we'll get some upside eventually" as the reason.

> But the question still remains, why did Igalia pick up a dead project?

Igalia is generally pro open-source, and Servo certainly aligns with their ethos, but a lot of the money came from Futurewei / Huawei who are interested in Servo because it's not US based, and therefore they are actually able to contribute to it (they are effectively banned from contributing to Chrome/Firefox/Safari due to US sanctions). There is now also funding from the Sovereign Tech Fund who are also interested in a "European browser" (and NLnet, but they fund all sorts of things)

As I understand it, funding was provided by NLnet[1], a longstanding Dutch non-profit that focuses on supporting open internet technologies. The funding was provided specifically for reviving Servo. By the looks of it, the money itself mostly comes from the EU, which has various grant programmes to fund open access technology, digital sovereignty, etc. Given several Servo contributors worked for Igalia, I expect they submitted a proposal to NLnet for them to fund Servo development, and it was successful.

[1] https://nlnet.nl/project/Servo/