how browsers work

the most fun way to know how browers work is to jump into some kind of terminal, walk around and discover the various parts of the broswer. or by reading its code & piecing together how it works. but that's not always what you want though. you might want a map. but a map is only fun when you can look at the map, then glance at look at what it maps to, and aha! the light-bulb moment. there's something thrilling and doing-centric about browsing the code to figure it out.

so. the browser is a big box, you can imagine that it's built up of subsystems that are each responsible for one or two things. how do you tell which susbsytems are in which? it is difficult scrolling to figure this out. it is probably best to read a design documemt for the system. this design document is the map of the territory. with the map now, you can narrow your search to a few questions like;

  • "what part of the browser is responsible for saving all the data for a fetched webpage?"

References

https://grosskurth.ca/papers/browser-refarch.pdf


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