{
  "id": 15513343,
  "title": "August in Servo: CSS Grid, text selection, and more",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/10/18/august-in-servo-css-grid-text-selection-and-more",
  "topic": "tech",
  "section": "Tech",
  "published": "2026-10-18T23:05:13.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "Lobsters",
    "slug": "lobsters",
    "url": "https://servo.org/blog/2026/10/09/august-in-servo/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "Servo 0.6.0 was released in August, comprising 417 commits. The most notable update is the default enabling of CSS Grid, which has had a substantial positive impact on many websites' visual appearance. Other web platform features included in this release are navigational, document loading, and session history improvements.\n\nIn terms of navigation, the update addresses complexities in loading about:blank and enhances the reliability of pages that open additional windows or include iframes. The upgrade to SpiderMonkey v153 brings numerous security and crash fixes to Servo's JavaScript engine integration.\n\nFull-screen mode navigation has been improved by exiting fullscreen mode when navigating away from a document that activated it. A bug affecting gumroad.com.au has been fixed, and a crash affecting this site has also been resolved.\n\nA pan gesture initiated by touch inputs now locks to the dominant axis, leading to more predictable panning when interacting with pages in Servo. A crash affecting about:blank has been fixed. Accessibility support in Servo has made significant strides, now allowing macOS VoiceOver to work more reliably.\n\nServo now reports positions and sizes for items in the content accessibility tree, enabling better accessibility toolkits, such as macOS VoiceOver. Servo's support for Document.execCommand() is improving, with the inserttext command now functioning correctly. Other improvements include computing contained nodes, adjusting selections in contenteditable, and implementing indent and insertLineBreak commands.\n\nThe LargestContentfulPaint performance metric has seen progress, implemented behind the --pref largest_contentful_paint_enabled argument. Servo now supports the element and loadTime attributes, URLs for video element posters, accurate size information, and painting text nodes.\n\nWork has been ongoing for a future AudioWorklet implementation, and the CookieStore interface has been added behind the --pref dom_cookiestore_enabled command line argument. Servo now supports a disk-backed HTTP cache that persists between runs but has no built-in clearing mechanism.\n\nNotable breaking changes in this release include the removal of WebView::toggle_sampling_profiler and the renaming of variants of MouseButton to Primary, Secondary, and Auxiliary. Several new Cargo features have been added, reflecting common usage patterns. Debug builds on Windows have been fixed, and Linux arm64 builds have been optimized for the Raspberry Pi 5.",
  "summary": null,
  "key_points": [],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 1,
    "also_reported_by": []
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}