Show HN: An interactive guide to how browsers work
howbrowserswork.com
Show HN: An interactive guide to how browsers work
1–10 of 40 posts
Re: Show HN: An interactive guide to how browsers work
#2Neat, it's like an exciting way to dive into https://browser.engineering without having anything to install.
I'm wondering if examples with Browser/Server could benefit from a small visual, e.g. a desktop/laptop icon on one side and a server on the other.
Re: Show HN: An interactive guide to how browsers work
#3Neat, it's like an exciting way to dive into https://browser.engineering without having anything to install. I'm wondering if examples with Browser/Server could benefit from a small visual, e.g. a desktop/laptop icon on one side and a server on the other.
I am planning to add more sections with more details. But decided first to collect some feedback.
Thank you! It is a good suggestion. Let me think about it.
Re: Show HN: An interactive guide to how browsers work
#4For a narrow browser window (< 1170) the contents section floats over the contents which is distracting
Re: Show HN: An interactive guide to how browsers work
#5Cool project, thanks for sharing. HN readers should also check out https://hpbn.co (High-Performance Browser Networking) and https://every-layout.dev (amazing CSS resource; the paid content is worth it, but the free parts are excellent on their own).
Re: Show HN: An interactive guide to how browsers work
#6For a narrow browser window (< 1170) the contents section floats over the contents which is distracting
Thank you! Fixing it...
Re: Show HN: An interactive guide to how browsers work
#7I like it very much --> bookmarked :-)
The step I am missing is how other resources (images, style sheets, scripts) are being loaded based on the HTML/DOM. I find that crucial for understanding why images sometimes go missing or why pages sometimes appear without styling.
Re: Show HN: An interactive guide to how browsers work
#8This is pretty relelevant to a project I'm working on - a new web browser not based on Chromium or Firefox.
Web browsers are extremely complex, requiring millions of lines of code in order to deal with a huge variety of Internet standards (and not just the basic ones such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS).
A while ago I wanted to see how much of this AI could get done autonomously (or with a human in the loop), you can see a ten-minute demo I posted a couple of days ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xdIMmrLMLo&t=42s
The source code for this is available here right now:
http://taonexus.com/publicfiles/jan2026/160toy-browser.py.tx...
It's only around 2,000 LOC so it doesn't have a lot of functionality, but it is able to make POST requests and can read some Wikipedia articles, for example. Try it out. It's very slow, unfortunately.
Let me know if you have anything you'd like to improve about it. There's also a feature requests page here: https://pollunit.com/en/polls/ahysed74t8gaktvqno100g
Re: Show HN: An interactive guide to how browsers work
#9Cool project, thanks for sharing. HN readers should also check out https://hpbn.co (High-Performance Browser Networking) and https://every-layout.dev (amazing CSS resource; the paid content is worth it, but the free parts are excellent on their own).
HPBN is really well written, chapter 4 helped me understand TLS enough to debug a high latency issue at a previous job. There was an issue where a particularly incomplete TLS frame received and no subsequent bits for it led to a server waiting 30 min for the rest of the bits to arrive. HPBN was a huge help. I haven’t finished reading it but I remember there’s part of it that goes over the trade offs of increasing vs decreasing TLS frame sizes which is a low level knob I now know exists because of HPBN. Not sure if I’ll ever use it but it’s fascinating.
Re: Show HN: An interactive guide to how browsers work
#10Not all browsers had or have a DOM, and some didn’t until later versions.
Early browsers without DOMs (with initial release date): WorldWideWeb (Nexus) (Dec 1990), Erwise (Apr 1992), ViolaWWW (May 1992), Lynx (1992), NCSA Mosaic 1.0 (Apr 1993), Netscape 1.0 (Dec 1994), and IE 1.0 (Aug 1995).
Note: Lynx remains a non-DOM browser by design.
AOL 1.0–2.0 (1994–1995) used the AOLPress engine which was static with no programmable objects.
The ability to interact with the DOM began with "Legacy DOM" (Level 0) in Netscape 2.0 (Sept 1995), IE 3.0 (Aug 1996), AOL 3.0 (1996, via integrated IE engine), and Opera 3.0 (1997). Then there was an intermediate phase in 1997 where Netscape 4.0 (document.layers) and IE 4.0 (document.all) each used their own model.
The first universal standard was the W3C DOM Level 1 Recommendation (Oct 1998). Major browsers adopted this slowly: IE 5.0 (Mar 1999) offered partial support, while Konqueror 2.0 (Oct 2000) and Netscape 6.0 (Nov 2000) were the first W3C-compliant engines (KHTML and Gecko).
Safari 1.0 (2003), Firefox 1.0 (2004), and Chrome 1.0 (2008) launched with native standard DOM support from version 1.0.
Currently most major browser engines follow the WHATWG DOM Living Standard to supports real-time feature implementation.