A brief introduction to the browser rendering engine situation

Many people will only use the browser, do not know the working principle of the browser or the core of the browser, the kernel of the browser is the core thing, also known as the rendering engine Well, what is the purpose of this thing? The following tutorial will introduce you to everyone:

l Introduction to the mainstream browser kernel

Mainstream browser kernel classification: a wide variety of browser kernels Commercial and non-commercial free cores, there are about 10 or more and more, but usually only the following four are more common, the following is a brief introduction.

(1)Trident

Trident (also known as MSHTML) is a web browser for Microsoft's Windows —— the kernel used by Internet Explorer (commonly known as IE kernel), The kernel was first adopted in IE 4 in 1997, and has since been added to new technologies and released with the new version of IE. Trident is actually an open kernel. The Trident engine is designed as a software component (module), making it easy for other software developers to add web browsing functionality to their own applications. The interface kernel design is quite mature. Therefore, many browsers that use the IE kernel instead of IE (such as Maxthon, Soft Media's Flash Browser, Tencent's TT, GreenBrowser, etc.) have emerged, but Trident can only be used on Windows platforms.

Because of IE's own "monopoly", the Trident kernel has been a big one for a long time, and Microsoft has not updated the Trident kernel for quite some time, which led to two The consequences —— First, the Trident kernel was almost out of line with the W3C standard; second, the security issues such as the large number of bugs in the Trident kernel were not resolved in time. At present, Microsoft has made major changes to the Trident layout engine. In addition to adding new technologies, it has also added support for web standards. Although these changes have lagged behind other typographic engines to a considerable extent, such as Gecko, WebCore, KHTML, and Presto.

(2) Gecko

Gecko is an open source, web page layout engine written in C++ that is currently used by the Mozilla family of web browsers and Netscape 6 and later browsers. Originally developed by Netscape Communications, the software is now maintained by the Mozilla Foundation. Because Gecko is characterized by complete disclosure of code, it is highly developable, and programmers around the world can write code and add functionality. Because this is an open source kernel, it is favored by many people. There are many browsers that use the Gecko kernel. This is also an important reason why the Gecko kernel is young but its market share can be increased rapidly.

The Gecko layout engine provides a rich program interface for Internet-related applications such as web browsers, HTML editors, clients/servers, and more. Although the original primary target was Mozilla's derivatives, such as Netscape and Mozilla Firefox, there are many other software that use this typesetting engine. In addition, Gecko is a cross-platform kernel that can be used in Windows, BSD, Linux and Mac OS X.