Web Browser Engineering

A working or budding software engineer always benefits from deeply understanding the platform their code runs on, and web browsers are the most common and widely-used platform there is. This book is the essential description of how they work and how that impacts web developers and other software engineers whose work touches the web.

Readers of Web Browser Engineering will join the authors in building their own web browser, including rich visual effects, multithreaded architecture, JavaScript APIs, and comprehensive security policies. Web browser engines are filled with unique challenges, interesting algorithms, and clever optimizations. Building a browser is both easy and incredibly hard, both intentional and accidental, and everywhere you look, you see the evolution and history of the web wrapped up in one codebase. It’s both fun, and endlessly interesting.

This interactive and engaging book will be a unique source for any software engineer, computer scientist, web developer, or simply anyone with an interest in web browsers and how they work.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Table of Contents

PA RT 1: INTRODUCTION

i. Browsers and the Web

ii. History of the Web

PA RT 2: LOADING PAGES

1. Downloading Web Pages

2. Drawing to the Screen

3. Formatting Text

PA RT 3: V IEWING DOCUMENTS

4. Constructing an HTML Tree

5. Laying Out Pages

6. Applying Author Styles

7. Handling Buttons and Links

PA RT 4: RUNNING APPLICATIONS

8. Sending Information to Servers

9. Running Interactive Scripts

10. Keeping Data Private

PA RT 5: MODER N BROWSERS

11. Adding Visual Effects

12. Scheduling Tasks and Threads

13. Animating and Compositing

14. Making Content Accessible

15. Supporting Embedded Content

16. Reusing Previous Computations

PA RT 6: CONCLUSION

A. What Wasn’t Covered

B. A Changing Landscape

About the Authors

Pavel Panchekha, Assistant Professor, University of Utah, Chris Harrelson, Chrome, Principal Software Engineer

Pavel Panchekha is a Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. His research focuses on web page layout and web browsers more generally. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington in 2019.

Chris Harrelson is a Principal Software Engineer at Google, where he leads the Blink Rendering team. Previously, he was a lead engineer for Google Maps, including founding Google Transit. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2004.