LAB-01OPERATIONAL

Browser Lab

Department of Browser Behaviour

Everything between a URL and a lit pixel. We keep a full rendering pipeline mounted on the far wall and run bytes through it until somebody understands what compositing actually means.

MAIN THREAD MAY BE OCCUPIED

DOM constructionCSSOMstyle calculationlayoutpaintcompositingframe budget

HTML → DOM
CSS → CSSOM
 ↓ style
 ↓ layout
 ↓ paint
 ↓ composite
 SCREEN

LAB-01

Experiments

browserENGINEER
What happens when you load a URL?
The interview question, run as an actual experiment: every hop, with a stopwatch on it.
browser14 min
browserRESEARCHER
Rendering pipeline investigation
Change one property. Watch exactly which stages of the pipeline are invalidated, and which are not.
browser11 min

Dossiers

Browser RenderingACTIVE
Compositing and the Layer Economy
Compositor layers make animation cheap and memory expensive. This dossier documents what promotes an element to its own layer, what that buys, and where the practice of promoting everything goes wrong.
Field
Browser Rendering
Experiments
9
Observations
18

Experiments

What happens when you load a URL?

Rendering pipeline investigation

Dossiers

Compositing and the Layer Economy