As a front end developer, I am really happy to see resources like this.

Developing for the browser is a real challenge. I think working with html / css /js has been a neglected skill for a long time - most software engineers look down on that type of work and its rarely covered in comp sci course work.

Still, its good to see a lot of progress has been made, this book included.

My only critique - why use python instead of node.js?

I was interested to see that this uses the DukPy wrapper around Duktape for the JavaScript interpreter: https://browser.engineering/scripts.html

This made me start digging into whether this was considered a "safe" way of executing untrusted JavaScript in a sandbox.

It's not completely clear to me if DukPy currently attempts safe evaluation - it's missing options for setting time or memory limits on executed code for example: https://github.com/amol-/dukpy

There's a QuickJS Python wrapper here which offers those limits: https://github.com/PetterS/quickjs

I'm pretty paranoid though any time it comes to security and dependencies written in C, so I'd love to see a Python wrapper around a JavaScript engine that has safe sandbox execution as a key goal plus an extensive track record to back it up!

I can't wait for Browser Engineering to show up as a university course a la compilers, operating systems, networks, etc.

Building a browser as a desktop application would be quite hard, but I reckon I do it as a web application.

I recommend this:

https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowser...

Many years ago, probably 20, I went on a task of implementing a web browser. I remember I gave up at rendering tables. I couldn't wrap my head around on how to properly size them. It has become extremely complex quickly to address edge cases and I eventually gave up when I couldn't understand what's going after having a two weeks break. Probably if I had money and was able to commit full time I could eventually get it, but I had to focus on commercial work and putting food on my table.

edit: it's a great article! But nothing on rendering tables :-)

Is this written by actual web browser engineers? If so, what fields did they specialize in?

This is awesome. I've always wanted to know how the actual layout portion works (or at least, can work in a simple way). I think these kinds of resources are really valuable and people should be empowered to make bespoke-ish web renderers as the need arises.

This video is good background for khtml/webkit on which chrome was based https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tldf1rT0Rn0

Awesome to see this here! The course that accompanied this textbook was among my favorites

There’s a 90’s style browser in Haskell here for demo purposes. Lacks JS.

https://github.com/chrisdone/vado

Love the bibliography section. I have always wanted to reinterpret HTML into other representations. These resources give me good reference

It's now nearly impossible to build a web browser from scratch because of runaway explosion of web browser features, and proprietary API extensions.

W3C here is unfortunately a part to the problem.

Standardisation is good, but letting google pour streams halfassedly written RFCs onto other browsermakers is not good.

Non-enforcement of standards is also bad, and it's bad to extend W3C privileges to companies who themselves selectively implement their own proposals, so others' browsers can't match their behaviour.

Love first principles stuff. Great job.

this builds a web browser like the build-your-own-x movement?

Neat, but what about integrating widevine support?