Hello all!

I hope you’re enjoying Web Browser Engineering and maybe even considering gifting a copy to a friend for the coming holidays. We have a new Korean edition out in case you’d like one, and there’s more translations in the works.

Meanwhile, I did want to mention a few changes we made to the book to keep up with some of our dependencies changing or going obsolete.

First, Skia. Chapter 11 (on visual effects) and every later chapter uses the Skia 2D graphics library for drawing page content and the browser UI. Until now, we’ve specifically required Skia version 87, which is very, very old; the most recent release is milestone 144. So we’ve updated the text to work with more recent versions.

The main change is in Chapter 15 in the implementation of the CSS image-rendering property. Basically, in Skia 87, this used an API called FilterQuality, but more recent Skia versions instead use an API called SamplingOptions. It’s not a big change, and we have porting notes in case you want to keep using Skia 87, but the big benefit is that while FilterQuality was an unstable API, SamplingOptions is stable so it’s guaranteed to work in future Skia versions as well. This means we can now recommend readers install the current Skia version instead of asking you to install an old, obsolete version.

Second, playsound. This was a simple Python library to play audio, which we used in Chapter 14 (on accessibility) to implement a really simple screen reader. But unfortunately, it looks like playsound doesn’t work on some combination of recent Python versions and recent macOS releases, and we’ve heard some complaints from users on other OSes as well.

Since browsers don’t typically include their own screen readers, and since playing audio is actually totally secondary to the main point of the chapter, we’ve decided to remove playsound from the main chapter text, and just recommend users print the screen reader text to the console. There’s a new exercise that describes how to build a somewhat more sophisticated screen reader, including support for polite and assertive interruptions for live content.

As always, thank you all for reading, and do consider gifting Web Browser Engineering this holiday season. The book should be available on all of the typical sites like Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon (referral link). And if you’ve got some free time over the holidays, consider hacking a bit on your favorite open source web browser!

Hello all!

Web Browser Engineering, our book about how web browsers work (and how to write your own, from scratch) has been out for about half a year now, and we’ve just got the first number from the publisher on how many we’ve sold.

The initial print run for the book was 75 hardback books and 305 paperbacks. We’ve now busted through both, having sold 76 hardbacks and 518 paperbacks (and hopefully a few more by the time you get this!), so we’re now on our second printing!

As always, thank you all for reading and buying the book. If you’ve been holding off, or if you have a friend you think would like it, now’s a good time! The book should be available on all of the typical sites like Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon (referral link).

I’d like to take a little break from advertising Web Browser Engineering (which is now available for purchase from most retailers) to thank the people who made the book possible: the maintainers of the languages and libraries we use in the book, a number of whom have graciously accepted patches, followed up on bug reports, or made releases to make Web Browser Engineering better.

Alessandro Molina is the main developer behind DukPy, the Python bindings for the JavaScript interpreter we use in the book. Besides putting out new releases and making sure DukPy is available for modern Python versions, Alessandro very kindly accepted a patch improving one of the error messages we saw readers hitting. The underlying DukTape engine itself is maintained by Sami Vaarala.

Kota Yamaguchi and Hin-Tak Leung are the maintainers of skia-python, which the book uses for advanced graphics starting in Chapter 11. Maintaining skia-python is especially challenging, because Skia is a fast-moving project with a lot of breaking changes. Both helped determine which Skia version to target in WBE, and Hin-Tak made several special-purpose releases of the chosen version, m87, for newer Python versions. M87 is quite old and just building on modern Python and C++ needs patches, so I’m especially thankful for his expertise.

Austin Hurst seems to be the current maintainer of PySDL2, which the book uses as the base GUI library from Chapter 11 on. Mike C. Fletcher maintains the PyOpenGL library, which WBE uses in Chapter 13 to do GPU-accelerated rendering. Both libraries have vast APIs and yet Chris and I had no troubles with either libraries, nor have any of our readers reported issues, which really speaks to their stewardship.

The playsound and gTTS libraries are used in Chapter 14 to demonstrate a basic screen reader. Taylor S. Marks wrote playsound, though I don’t know if he still maintains it. Pierre Nicolas Durette maintains gTTS, quite actively in fact, as new languages are added to Google’s TTS service.

And of course, the Python language and standard library, maintained by the Python Software Foundation, is what makes WBE possible at all. In particular it is extremely helpful that Python comes with a large and stable standard library, especially the ssl, tkinter, socket, and threading packages. Of course, those packages are in turn built on open-source libraries like Tcl/Tk and OpenSSL.

So, again, a thank you to all of you!

The story of the web and the story of open source technology are fundamentally intertwined, as we discuss in the History chapter. All browsers today are open source, and part of the reason for this is that they rely on a vast ecosystem of other open source projects: graphics packages, networking code, cryptography libraries, image and video formats, user interfaces libraries, and so so much more.

Moreover, it’s the availability of open-source servers (Apache, NGINX), programming languages (Perl, PHP, Python), and operating systems (Linux, BSD) that have enabled the web to grow so large, diverse, and widely used. And these open source projects are often organized using the web! So, to open source in general, without which not only would WBE not be possible, it would not even be worth writing: thank you!

Web Browser Engineering is officially available for purchase! Our publisher, of course, would most prefer you buy it on their website, here:

Buy from Oxford University Press

That said, the book is also available from plenty of other resellers. In the US, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon all sell the book, and popular bookstores in other countries likely carry it as well. We’ve confirmed that some readers have been able to purchase the book (through Amazon) in Canada, for example, and Amazon currently advertises delivery in about a week.

If you’re new to the book, you can preview the full book on our website and, if you like what you see, please order a copy. Or, if you’re already a fan, maybe forward this email to a friend who you think will like the book.

Hello all! Web Browser Engineering is out in US stores in a week! (At least I think so.) So if you’ve already pre-ordered, your copy should ship out soon.

But if you haven’t ordered a copy, now’s a good time. The best place to order one is directly from the publisher; the paperback is $50 in the US (plus shipping; £28 in the UK).

Web Browser Engineering teaches you how web browsers work, in the best way possible: by building your own. Some of my personal favorite bits are:

• Implementing error-correct HTML parsing in Chapter 4

• Adding link navigation and multiple tabs in Chapter 7

• Implementing JavaScript click and submit callbacks in Chapter 9

• Adding a separate browser and main thread in Chapter 11

• Using transforms for iframe rendering and hit-testing in Chapter 15

We’ve written the book to make the code as transparent and simple as possible, and then we’ve listed fun exercises implementing real web browser features (like custom fonts, CORS, z-index, and :hover) that you’ll be able to do after reading the book.

Check out the Web Browser Engineering website to read it online and, if you like what you see, please do order a copy.