LinuxCon Europe + CloudOpen Europe

Web Browsers are quickly becoming the most frequently used individual application in any modern desktop, following the same trend in mobile devices. They are growing in capabilities and performance, enabling an era of new webapps ranging from email to vehicle navigation and games. Current browsers are powerful enough to run even the Linux kernel in a Javascript PC emulator. Browsers are enabled by web engines, but have you ever questioned how they work? The objective of this talk is to present how a modern web engine works, following the several steps from the first user input to access a webpage up to the moment where content is rendered in the screen. Topics like multiprocess browser architecture, process sandboxing, content parsing and rendering will be covered. The web engine used for the discussion will be WebKit, with some examples drawn from Blink and Gecko.