This is the source code to Web Browser Engineering, my book on how web browsers work. The best way to read the book is online.
If you want to build from source, run:
make book draft blog
The source code contains:
- The Markdown source for the book text, in
book/ - A template and code for converting the book to HTML, in
infra/ - Chapter-by-chapter implementations of the browser, in
src/ - Styling for the book's website, in
www/ - The book's built-in feedback system, in
www/, including JavaScript and the Python backend.
We prefer to receive typos and small comments on the text using the
book's built-in feedback tools, which you can enable with Ctrl+E.
You can run the book's built-in checks with:
make lint
We're always happy to hear from readers and from educators who want to use the book. Please email us!
Code for the browser developed in the book can be found in src/, in
files named lab1.py, lab2.py, and so on, corresponding to each
chapter.
To run it, you'll need to install:
- A recent Python 3; version 3.9.10is known to work, but older versions probably will too.
- The
tkinterpackage, part of the Python standard library but often isn't included in pre-installed Pythons on macOS and Linux. You can check by runningpython3 -m tkinter, which should open a test window. - For Chapter 9+, the
dukpypackage. Consult that chapter for installation instructions. - For Chapter 11+, the
skiaandpysdl2packages. Consult that chapter for installation instructions.
Once you have the above, you can run, say, the browser as of the end of Chapter 3 like so:
cd src/
PYTHONBREAKPOINT=0 python3 lab3.py https://browser.engineering
Every chapter can be run in a similar fashion.
For chapters 8 onward, there's also a "guest book" web application, which you can run with:
cd src/
PYTHONBREAKPOINT=0 python3 server8.py
Like the browser, there are different versions of the server for
different chapters, named server8.py, server9.py, and so on.
You can also run the book's unit tests with:
make test