Chapter 12

Happy 2022 everyone! Chapter 12, Scheduling Tasks and Threads, is here! It continues the theme of Modern Browsers: browser features necessary to support the interactive and app-like web of today, just like the high-performance and featureful rastering library introduced in Chapter 11. In this chapter, we say goodbye to the simplicity of a single-threaded browser and hello to the brave new world of a multithreaded, task-based architecture. This allows us to introduce one of the most important modern browser features of all: threaded scrolling that is isolated from layout and JavaScript.

I’ve been working on this chapter off and on for quite a while. It continues on themes that I know well from my experience on the Chrome team. And once again, I had to work really hard to boil it down to the most important points and tell the story in a clear and compelling way. I think I might have deleted more code than I included. (But never fear: an upcoming chapter, tentatively titled Compositing and Animation, will bring some of that text back!)

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