We will see what happens when you type in the address bar until you see the Google page on the browser screen. In this primer, I will explain how they work behind the scenes. Web browsers are the most widely used software. Paul Irish, Chrome Developer Relations Introduction # While this is a rather lengthy document, we recommend you spend some time digging in we guarantee you'll be glad you did. Tali published her research on her site, but we knew it deserved a larger audience, so we've cleaned it up and republished it here.Īs a web developer, learning the internals of browser operations helps you make better decisions and know the justifications behind development best practices. Well, what's inside are millions of C++ lines… In the years of IE 90% dominance there was nothing much to do but regard the browser as a 'black box', but now, with open source browsers having more than half of the usage share, it's a good time to take a peek under the engine's hood and see what's inside a web browser. Over a few years, she reviewed all the published data about browser internals and spent a lot of time reading web browser source code. This comprehensive primer on the internal operations of WebKit and Gecko is the result of much research done by Israeli developer Tali Garsiel. Applying the rules in the correct cascade order.Manipulating the rules for an easy match.

Computing the style contexts using the rule tree.

The render tree relation to the DOM tree.

The order of processing scripts and style sheets.

Formal definitions for vocabulary and syntax.

Firefox css style