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Browser Structure

The browser's high level structure

  • The user interface
    • this includes the address bar, back/forward button, bookmarking menu etc.
    • Every part of the browser display except the main window where you see the requested page.
  • The browser engine
    • the interface for querying and manipulating the rendering engine.
  • The rendering engine
    • responsible for displaying the requested content.
    • For example if the requested content is HTML, it is responsible for parsing the HTML and CSS and displaying the parsed content on the screen.
  • Networking
    • used for network calls, like HTTP requests.
    • It has platform independent interface and underneath implementations for each platform.
  • UI backend
    • used for drawing basic widgets like combo boxes and windows.
    • It exposes a generic interface that is not platform specific.
    • Underneath it uses the operating system user interface methods.
  • JavaScript interpreter.
    • Used to parse and execute the JavaScript code.
  • Data storage.
    • This is a persistence layer.
    • The browser needs to save all sorts of data on the hard disk, for examples, cookies.
    • The new HTML specification (HTML5) defines 'web database' which is a complete (although light) database in the browser.

browser-components

Browser Engine (Layout Engines or Rendering Engine)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_engine

Primary job is to transform HTML documents and other resource of a web page into an interactive visual representation on a user'a device.