Browsers: Rendering Engines & JS Engines

Rendering Engines & JS Engines for each major browser

As a prelude — all of the following JavaScript engines use JIT (Just-in-Time) compilation rather than traditional runtime interpretation.

This implies better performance. 🏎

Google Chrome

• Blink
  - Fork of WebKit
  - Developed in-house by Google as part of The Chromium Project, a project “to open-source the code for the Google Chrome browser”
• V8
  - Developed in-house by Google as part of The Chromium Project
  - Used in Node.js!

Mozilla Firefox

• Gecko
  - Developed in-house by Mozilla
  - Written in Rust!
• SpiderMonkey
  - The first JavaScript engine in history. Developed by Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript, while he was at Netscape.

Safari

• WebKit
  - Created by Apple as a fork of the KHTML and KJS engines from Konqueror, a web browser developed by KDE.
• Nitro (formerly SquirrelFish)

Edge

• EdgeHTML
  - A fork of Internet Explorer’s Trident that was made not-shitty.
• Chakra
  - Open-sourced as ChakraCore.
  - In 2016, Microsoft created a PR in the Node.js GitHub repo to use ChakraCore instead of V8. This PR was expanded out into its own project and now lives here as a project of the node organization.

Opera

• Blink
• V8
• If something works on Google Chrome, you can expect it to work on Opera due to the identical rendering engine + JavaScript engine used.

Internet Explorer

• Trident
• Chakra

Opinions expressed in these articles do not reflect those of my employer.