How browsers work
My initial work on the Web was on the backend – C++, Java, databases, Apache, etc. In 2005, I started focusing on web performance. To get a better idea of what made them slow, I surfed numerous web sites with a packet sniffer open. That’s when I discovered that a bulk of the time spent loading a web site occurs on the frontend, after the HTML document arrives at the browser.
Not knowing much about how the frontend worked, I spent a week searching for anything that could explain what was going on in the browser. The gem that I found was David Hyatt’s blog post entitled Testing Page Load Speed. His article opened my eyes to the complexity of what the browser does, and launched my foray into finding ways to optimize page load times resulting in things like YSlow and High Performance Web Sites.
Today’s post on the Chromium Blog (Technically speaking, what makes Google Chrome fast?), contains a similar gem. Mike Belshe, Chrome developer and co-creator of SPDY, talks about the performance optimizations inside of Chrome. But in so doing, he also reveals insights into how all browsers work and the challenges they face. For example, until I saw this, I didn’t have a real appreciation for the performance impact of DOM bindings – the connections between the JavaScript that modifies web pages and the C++ that implements the browser. He also talks about garbage collection, concurrent connections, lookahead parsing and downloading, domain sharding, and multiple processes.
Take 16.5 minutes and watch Mike’s video. It’s well worth it.
netfreeman | 04-Dec-09 at 6:06 pm | Permalink |
Although I can see you use google translation of the article, but I also look forward to your video Feedback!
Erich Ocean | 04-Dec-09 at 6:38 pm | Permalink |
SproutCore’s view layer is heavily optimized around the reality of slow DOM manipulation, which is amazingly slow on IE and not what I would call “good” anywhere else. Great to see the Chrome team tackle it head on – loved the idea of moving DOM to JavaScript!