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. Speed Tracer is a tool to help you identify and fix performance problems in your web applications. It visualizes metrics that are taken from low level instrumentation points inside of the browser and analyzes them as your application runs. Speed Tracer is available as a Chrome extension and works on all platforms where extensions are currently supported (Windows and Linux). Using Speed Tracer you are able to get a better picture of where time is being spent in your application. This includes problems caused by JavaScript parsing and execution, layout, CSS style recalculation and selector matching, DOM event handling, network resource loading, timer fires, XMLHttpRequest callbacks, painting, and more.
Ready to get started? For your convenience, here are some links to our documentation: Contribute! Speed Tracer is open source! Don't forget to join our google group! Browser Detection and Cross Browser Support - MDN Docs. You can have a look to the more current article Writing forward-compatible websites to find modern informations. Improper browser detection can lead to web maintenance nightmares. Rethinking the basics of when and how to detect user agents is crucial to creating maintainable, cross browser web content.
This article reviews several approaches to browser detection, their usefulness in specific circumstances to arrive at a common sense approach to browser detection. Quick Tip If you must determine if a visitor is using a Gecko-based browser, simply test navigator.product == 'Gecko' or look for the string 'Gecko/' in the navigator.userAgent. Introduction In an ideal world, we could author HTML, XML, CSS and JavaScript and only worry about the W3C and ECMA standards. Although browser detection is perhaps the most common scripting task that every web developer faces, it seems that the variety of different strategies in use for detecting browsers is unlimited. Gecko Browser Detection History Primer.
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.