Web Browser Engineering

Abstract

The web is at the center of modern computing. Every year the web expands its reach to more and more of what we do with computers. It now goes far beyond its original use for document-based information sharing: many people now spend their entire day in a browser, not using a single other application! So given this centrality, it's worth knowing how the web works. And in particular, it's worth focusing on the browser, which is the user agent and the mediator of the web's interactions, which ultimately is what makes the web's principles real. But web browsers are still opaque, not just to students but to faculty and industry programmers. This book dissipates this mystery by systematically explaining all the major components of a web browser.