Awesome to see this here! The course that accompanied this textbook was among my favorites
Web Browser Engineering
51–60 of 64 posts
Re: Web Browser Engineering
#52Love the bibliography section. I have always wanted to reinterpret HTML into other representations. These resources give me good reference
Re: Web Browser Engineering
#53This is awesome. I've always wanted to know how the actual layout portion works (or at least, can work in a simple way). I think these kinds of resources are really valuable and people should be empowered to make bespoke-ish web renderers as the need arises.
Author here. Layout is my favorite part of the browser—my dissertation is largely about formalizing browser layout—and so far the book only covers the basics, like the layout tree and how layout is computed with multiple tree traversals, but even understanding those basics I think gives you a huge advantage when thinking about web page layout tasks.
Re: Web Browser Engineering
#54Many years ago, probably 20, I went on a task of implementing a web browser. I remember I gave up at rendering tables. I couldn't wrap my head around on how to properly size them. It has become extremely complex quickly to address edge cases and I eventually gave up when I couldn't understand what's going after having a two weeks break. Probably if I had money and was able to commit full time I could eventually get i…
> Many years ago, probably 20, I went on a task of implementing a web browser. I remember I gave up at rendering tables. HTML 5 effort has cleaned up a lot of behaviors and specified how browser tags should behave. So it is, possibly, an approachable task now. Still daunting though.
Tables are still not that clean! But luckily tables are way way less important than they were in the past, so much so that browser differences in table rendering leaves most pages readable.
Re: Web Browser Engineering
#55There’s a 90’s style browser in Haskell here for demo purposes. Lacks JS.
Re: Web Browser Engineering
#56As a front end developer, I am really happy to see resources like this. Developing for the browser is a real challenge. I think working with html / css /js has been a neglected skill for a long time - most software engineers look down on that type of work and its rarely covered in comp sci course work. Still, its good to see a lot of progress has been made, this book included. My only critique - why use python instea…
Python seems like a good match since the tutorial seems to use what comes with a base python install. Python ships with Tk, for example, so the drawing section is cross-platform and not bogged down with a lot of instructions on adding new stuff with a package manager. That would detract from the lesson, IMO.
Re: Web Browser Engineering
#57There’s a 90’s style browser in Haskell here for demo purposes. Lacks JS. https://github.com/chrisdone/vado
This book's browser supports JavaScript but the book itself skips over it because the browser just uses DuckPy. Which is a reasonable pedagogical choice. Building even a moderately "realistic" JavaScript interpreter would be its own semester-length course.
(This is a really fantastic resource; I'll probably use it as the basis of course once I get around to semi-retiring and taking a teaching job. Thanks, OP!)
Re: Web Browser Engineering
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which part of OSs do you expect not to be covered? There's IPC. There's memory management. There's process management. There's network management. There's security. There's device management. They all happen at a slightly higher layer, but they all exist similar to an OS. (I'm not sure if the higher layer makes it easier or harder to understand - but in terms of what you need to know, an OS class or three is definite…
> IPC, memory management, process management, network management. I imagine the non-trivial parts of these are done for the JS VM (correct me if I'm wrong), and therefore a VM design course would have more intersection with Browsers with respect to these disciplines than an OS course. > security This one is everywhere, it has no special connection to OSes. > They all happen at a slightly higher layer Slightly?! That'…
The security problems of a browser are very similar to the security problems of a traditional mainframe OS.
You need to execute potentially malicious code in isolated containers (processes / pages). You need to protect the system from these processes, and protect these processes from one another. You need to run some code with elevated privileges / additional capabilities (setuid / permissioned APIs), including some with superuser privileges (root user processes / browser extensions).
Re: Web Browser Engineering
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Looking at the book's table of contents, I disagree. Browsers may resemble OSes by the size of the code base or by the amount of optimization involved, or by their importance for the modern world, but not by the types of technologies involved. I doubt the Browsers course will intersect a lot with OSes course. EDIT: Reading you comment again I suspect you might have been joking :)
Which part of OSs do you expect not to be covered? There's IPC. There's memory management. There's process management. There's network management. There's security. There's device management. They all happen at a slightly higher layer, but they all exist similar to an OS. (I'm not sure if the higher layer makes it easier or harder to understand - but in terms of what you need to know, an OS class or three is definite…
> There's IPC. There's memory management. There's process management. There's network management. There's security. There's device management.
OSs are built on hardware, browsers are built on OSs. Even though they "sort of" do the same types of things, the abstractions are very different.
- OS memory management is more about managing hardware page tables, copy-on-write, page sharing, page protections etc. Browser memory management is typically custom allocators optimizing for different types of structures.
- OS process management is about using CPU primitives to multitask segments of code, context switching, timers, wait queues, interrupt management etc. In the browser, it's more about managing webpage/process relationships, application threading, rendering pipelines, and the JS runtime.
- OS network management is all about interfaces, packet processing, buffer management, low level protocols (ethernet, IP, etc.) Browser network management is all about protocols, and not really much about the hardware.
Sure there's a lot of broad-stroke similarity between OSs and browsers, but for a university course, where one typically gets deep into the details, they're entirely different.
Re: Web Browser Engineering
#60As a front end developer, I am really happy to see resources like this. Developing for the browser is a real challenge. I think working with html / css /js has been a neglected skill for a long time - most software engineers look down on that type of work and its rarely covered in comp sci course work. Still, its good to see a lot of progress has been made, this book included. My only critique - why use python instea…
Author here. I wrote up my answer here: http://browser.engineering/blog/why-python.html Basically: server-side JavaScript is just not as widely known as Python, and it'd be additionally confusing when our browser starts running JavaScript. And in-browser JavaScript is a bit too restricted (by things like the same-origin policy) to do the whole thing inside a browser.
I can see that you'd want to pick a language that is good for teaching with, hence why you went with Python. It's probably too late, but I imagine Elixir would also be a great choice for this project.