The full series will describe the code I’ve written, and show how you can make your own. But first, let me explain why.

You’re building a what?

Let’s talk terminology. A browser engine is the portion of a web browser that works “under the hood” to fetch a web page from the internet, and translate its contents into forms you can read, watch, hear, etc. Blink, Gecko, WebKit, and Trident are browser engines. In contrast, the browser’s own UI—tabs, toolbar, menu and such—is called the chrome. Firefox and SeaMonkey are two browsers with different chrome but the same Gecko engine.

A browser engine includes many sub-components: an HTTP client, an HTML parser, a CSS parser, a JavaScript engine (itself composed of parsers, interpreters, and compilers), and much more. Those components involved in parsing web formats like HTML and CSS and translating them into what you see on-screen are sometimes called the layout engine or rendering engine.