Comment by jm4

1 day ago

This looks awesome. About 15 years ago, I started working on a headless browser and maintained it for several years. It used SpiderMonkey as the js interpreter and had a custom DOM implementation. It ran all the modern js from the time, AJAX, etc. Later, I added a custom Flash runtime. It basically did everything but draw to the screen. That project was a lot of fun.

I'm definitely interested in going through this book.

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jm4

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aitchnyu  1 day ago

Umm, if you wanted/want to draw to the screen, what library will you use?

  • pavpanchekha  1 day ago

    The book uses Tk (via Python's tkinter library) for the first 10 chapters and then switches to Skia, which is used by maybe all of the browsers now (I believe Webkit on Linux just switched to it from Cairo). It seems to be by far the most common high-performance 2D graphics library.

  • jm4  18 hours ago

    I didn’t have a clue. That wasn’t part of my skillset. All we needed was a headless browser that was automated. It was crawling a few million pages a day. I had a debug console where I could see cached pages, headers, cookies, etc.

  • skeeterbug  1 day ago

    I believe Chrome uses Skia