How Browsers Work: Behind the Scenes of Modern Web Browsers. Web browsers are the most widely used software. In this primer, I will explain how they work behind the scenes. We will see what happens when you type google.com in the address bar until you see the Google page on the browser screen.
The browsers we will talk about There are five major browsers used on desktop today: Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera. On mobile, the main browsers are Android Browser, iPhone, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, UC Browser, the Nokia S40/S60 browsers and Chrome–all of which, except for the Opera browsers, are based on WebKit. I will give examples from the open source browsers Firefox and Chrome, and Safari (which is partly open source). The browser's main functionality The main function of a browser is to present the web resource you choose, by requesting it from the server and displaying it in the browser window. The way the browser interprets and displays HTML files is specified in the HTML and CSS specifications. The rendering engine Grammars.
Speed Tracer - Google Web Toolkit - Google Code. Browser Detection and Cross Browser Support - MDN Docs. Gecko - MDN Docs. 6.0 Release Notes. Gecko (layout engine) Gecko is a web browser engine used in many applications developed by Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corporation (notably the Firefox web browser including its mobile version and their e-mail client Thunderbird), as well as in many other open source software projects. Gecko is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public License version 2. It is designed to support open Internet standards, and is used by different applications to display web pages and, in some cases, an application's user interface itself (by rendering XUL).
Gecko offers a rich programming API that makes it suitable for a wide variety of roles in Internet-enabled applications, such as web browsers, content presentation, and client/server.[6] Development of the layout engine now known as Gecko began at Netscape in 1997, following the company's purchase of DigitalStyle. As Gecko development continued, other applications and embedders began to make use of it.