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Web Browser Engineering (2021)
21–30 of 138 posts
Re: Web Browser Engineering (2021)
#22It is so exciting to see material like this being made! Browsers seem like mysterious, undecipherable black boxes, which is very likely how G wants them to be perceived, but that is cracking by seeing the efforts/results of such projects like ladybird and others! I hope to one day be able to jump in and contribute to break that moat! And this books looks like an amazing start!
> which is very likely how G wants them to be perceived
One of the authors of the book is Chris, who leads the Blink rendering team at G :)
Re: Web Browser Engineering (2021)
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I hope to one day be able to jump in and contribute to break that moat! The moat isn't caused by a lack of non-chrome browser engines, it's because so few people use a non-chrome browser engine. Firefox already exists - it's just that ~no-one uses it and for websites that don't work with it those users have learnt to just open up chrome. I'd love for the moat to be broken, and contributing to a browser engine like…
I'm one of those ~nobodies. Firefox is actually quite good these days, I use it at home and at work, 100% of the time - i.e. no Chrome or Safari fallback needed. If anyone's looking for a reason to try a switch again, consider this your sign.
Same here.
I have Safari and Chrome only for cross browser testing.
Re: Web Browser Engineering (2021)
#24It's refreshing that browser engineering seems to become a "trend" now. The ecosystem is quite sparse with basically only Google, Apple and Mozilla defining it. I'd like to see forward into a future with more independent browser engines.
Re: Web Browser Engineering (2021)
#25One of the authors here—thank you all for the nice words. Happy to answer questions!
Re: Web Browser Engineering (2021)
#26This looks awesome. About 15 years ago, I started working on a headless browser and maintained it for several years. It used SpiderMonkey as the js interpreter and had a custom DOM implementation. It ran all the modern js from the time, AJAX, etc. Later, I added a custom Flash runtime. It basically did everything but draw to the screen. That project was a lot of fun. I'm definitely interested in going through this bo…
Umm, if you wanted/want to draw to the screen, what library will you use?
The book uses Tk (via Python's tkinter library) for the first 10 chapters and then switches to Skia, which is used by maybe all of the browsers now (I believe Webkit on Linux just switched to it from Cairo). It seems to be by far the most common high-performance 2D graphics library.
Re: Web Browser Engineering (2021)
#27Nice book. I would recommend splitting chapter 9 into two separate chapters where executing JavaScript via Duktape is one chapter and then interacting with the DOM and events are a separate later chapter.
It might be best read in two sittings! The chapters get longer as the book goes on and tackles more advanced topics, and I do recommend following along in code as you progress through the book.
Re: Web Browser Engineering (2021)
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I hope to one day be able to jump in and contribute to break that moat! The moat isn't caused by a lack of non-chrome browser engines, it's because so few people use a non-chrome browser engine. Firefox already exists - it's just that ~no-one uses it and for websites that don't work with it those users have learnt to just open up chrome. I'd love for the moat to be broken, and contributing to a browser engine like…
I'm one of those ~nobodies. Firefox is actually quite good these days, I use it at home and at work, 100% of the time - i.e. no Chrome or Safari fallback needed. If anyone's looking for a reason to try a switch again, consider this your sign.
Is the performance hit sorted yet when opening a page? For me Firefox used to hang for a second or two doing something? Just a blank screen with the progress bar paused around 20% or so and apparently nothing happening...(DNS? HTTPS handshake?) and then it would kick off and load normally. Happened on mobile(android) and desktop(windows, Linux, macros).
On chrome-based browsers the same pages on the same computers on the same network would load in within the blink of an eye, with no pause.
I eventually gave up and went back to chrome after Firefox being my daily for years. I prefer the dev tools in chrome anyway TBH
Re: Web Browser Engineering (2021)
#29It is so exciting to see material like this being made! Browsers seem like mysterious, undecipherable black boxes, which is very likely how G wants them to be perceived, but that is cracking by seeing the efforts/results of such projects like ladybird and others! I hope to one day be able to jump in and contribute to break that moat! And this books looks like an amazing start!
I'm one of the book's two authors (the other is the head of Blink Rendering!) and I've talked to a number of people on the Chrome team. None of them have struck me as trying to keep browsers mysterious! On the contrary, folks who work on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Ladybird all seem incredibly excited to talk browsers and discuss how they work. The world of browser development is surprisingly small, the engineers often move between companies, and I think it'd be tough to keep a "conspiracy" going.
But I do think there's a real lack of teaching material (why I wrote the book) and even "common vocabulary" to discuss browser internals, especially for the core phases like layout and raster, which is something Chris and I are hoping to create with the book.
Re: Web Browser Engineering (2021)
#30It is so exciting to see material like this being made! Browsers seem like mysterious, undecipherable black boxes, which is very likely how G wants them to be perceived, but that is cracking by seeing the efforts/results of such projects like ladybird and others! I hope to one day be able to jump in and contribute to break that moat! And this books looks like an amazing start!
I'm one of the book's two authors (the other is the head of Blink Rendering!) and I've talked to a number of people on the Chrome team. None of them have struck me as trying to keep browsers mysterious! On the contrary, folks who work on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Ladybird all seem incredibly excited to talk browsers and discuss how they work. The world of browser development is surprisingly small, the engineers of…
Can confirm, am incredibly excited to talk browsers and discuss how they work!
(Hi Pavel, love the book!)