Web Browser Engineering (2021)

It 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 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 ladybird would be fun - but it doesn't contribute to breaking the moat. I'd love to know what would.

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.

> 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 :)

Same here. I have Safari and Chrome only for cross browser testing.

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

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.

Can confirm, am incredibly excited to talk browsers and discuss how they work!

(Hi Pavel, love the book!)

Sorry to say but I've never seen that bug

Firefox is great. I use Nightly. Sync bookmarks and everything. Chrome completely unnecessary.

I use Firefox too, and I agree it is great - which goes to show that having a great browser engine is not enough to break the moat.

Did you happen to have used uBlock Origin during your stay?

It's the most common source of browser-load latency, as it by default blocks the main page request until it is able to load its blocklists, so when you open the browser afresh, or reopen a window, it takes a while until the browser gets to continue loading the thing you asked.

I think by default it comes as enabled in Firefox, go to the "uBlock settings > Filter Lists > Suspend network activity until all filter lists are loaded", though of course it is a tradeoff.

From the Wiki: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dashboard:-Filter-lis...

> In Firefox-based browsers, this setting is enabled by default. Disabling it gives the option to potentially speed up page load at browser launch, at the cost of possibly not properly filtering network requests as per filter lists or rules.

> In Chromium-based browsers, this setting is disabled by default, since Chromium-based browsers do not support natively suspending network requests.2 Enabling this setting in Chromium-based browsers may lead to negative side-effects at browser launch.