Start Here: Background Reading
- Multi-process Architecture: Describes the high-level architecture of Chromium Note: Most of the rest of the design documents assume familiarity with the concepts explained in this document.
- How Blink works is a high-level overview of Blink architecture.
- The “Life of a Pixel” talk (slides / video) is an introduction to Chromium’s rendering pipeline, tracing the steps from web content to displayed pixels.
- [somewhat outdated] How Chromium Displays Web Pages: Bottom-to-top overview of how WebKit is embedded in Chromium
See Also
General Architecture
- Conventions and patterns for multi-platform development
- Extension Security Architecture: How the extension system helps reduce the severity of extension vulnerabilities
- HW Video Acceleration in Chrom{e,ium}{,OS}
- Inter-process Communication: How the browser, renderer, and plugin processes communicate
- Multi-process Resource Loading: How pages and images are loaded from the network into the renderer
- Plugin Architecture
- Process Models: Our strategies for creating new renderer processes
- Profile Architecture
- SafeBrowsing
- Sandbox
- Security Architecture: How Chromium’s sandboxed rendering engine helps protect against malware
- Startup
- Threading: How to use threads in Chromium
Also see the documentation for V8, which is the JavaScript engine used within Chromium.
UI Framework
- UI Development Practices: Best practices for UI development inside and outside of Chrome’s content areas.
- Views framework: Our UI layout layer used on Windows/Chrome OS.
- views Windowing system: How to build dialog boxes and other windowed UI using views.
- Aura: Chrome’s next generation hardware accelerated UI framework, and the new ChromeOS window manager built using it.
- NativeControls: using platform-native widgets in views.
- Focus and Activation with Views and Aura.
- Input Event Routing in Desktop UI.
Graphics
- Overview
- GPU Accelerated Compositing in Chrome
- GPU Feature Status Dashboard
- Rendering Architecture Diagrams
- Graphics and Skia
- RenderText and Chrome UI text drawing
- GPU Command Buffer
- GPU Program Caching
- Compositing in Blink/WebCore: from WebCore::RenderLayer to cc::Layer
- Compositor Thread Architecture
- Rendering Benchmarks
- Impl-side Painting
- Video Playback and Compositor
- ANGLE architecture presentation
Network stack
- Overview
- Network Stack Objectives
- Crypto
- Disk Cache
- HTTP Cache
- Out of Process Proxy Resolving Draft [unimplemented]
- Proxy Settings and Fallback
- Debugging network proxy problems
- HTTP Authentication
- View network internals tool
- Make the web faster with SPDY pages
- Make the web even faster with QUIC pages
- Cookie storage and retrieval
Security
- Security Overview
- Protecting Cached User Data
- System Hardening
- Chaps Technical Design
- TPM Usage
- Per-page Suborigins
- Encrypted Partition Recovery
- XSS Auditor
Input
- See chromium input for design docs and other resources.
Rendering
Building
See also the documentation for GYP, which is the build script generation tool.
Testing
Feature-Specific
- about:conflicts
- Accessibility: An outline of current (and coming) accessibility support.
- Auto-Throttled Screen Capture and Mirroring
- Browser Window
- Chromium Print Proxy: Enables a cloud print service for legacy printers and future cloud-aware printers.
- Constrained Popup Windows
- Desktop Notifications
- DirectWrite Font Cache for Chrome on Windows
- DNS Prefetching: Reducing perceived latency by resolving domain names before a user tries to follow a link
- Download Page (Material Design Refresh)
- Embedding Flash Fullscreen in the Browser Window
- Extensions: Design documents and proposed APIs.
- Find Bar
- Form Autofill: A feature to automatically fill out an html form with appropriate data.
- Geolocation: Adding support for W3C Geolocation API using native WebKit bindings.
- Generic-Sensor : Access sensor data
- IDN in Google Chrome
- IndexedDB (early draft)
- Info Bars
- Installer: Registry entries and shortcuts
- Instant
- Isolated Sites
- Linux Resources and Localized Strings: Loading data resources and localized strings on Linux.
- Media Router & Web Presentation API
- Memory Usage Backgrounder: Some information on how we measure memory in Chromium.
- Mouse Lock
- Omnibox Autocomplete: While typing into the omnibox, Chromium searches for and suggests possible completions.
- HistoryQuickProvider: Suggests completions from the user’s historical site visits.
- Omnibox/IME Coordination
- Omnibox Prefetch for Default Search Engines
- Ozone Porting Abstraction
- Password Form Styles that Chromium Understands
- Password Generation
- Pepper plugin implementation
- Plugin Power Saver
- Preferences
- Prerender
- Print Preview
- Printing
- Rect-based event targeting in views: Making it easier to target views elements with touch.
- Replace the modal cookie prompt
- SafeSearch
- Sane Time: Determining an accurate time in Chrome
- Secure Web Proxy
- Service Processes
- Site Engagement: Tracking user engagement with sites they use.
- Site Isolation: In-progress effort to improve Chromium’s process model for security between web sites.
- Software Updates: Courgette
- Sync
- Tab Helpers
- Tab to search: How to have the Omnibox automatically provide tab to search for your site.
- Tabtastic2 Requirements
- Temporary downloads
- TimeTicks: How our monotonic timer, TimeTicks, works on different OSes
- UI Mirroring Infrastructure: Describes the UI framework in ChromeViews that allows mirroring the browser UI in RTL locales such as Hebrew and Arabic.
- UI Localization: Describes how localized strings get added to Chromium.
- User scripts: Information on Chromium’s support for user scripts.
- Video
- WebSocket: A message-oriented protocol which provides bidirectional TCP/IP-like communication between browsers and servers.
- Design doc: mostly still relevant but some parts have been revised. In particular, mojo is used for the communication between Blink and //content now.
- WebSocket handshake: The HTTP-like exchange before switching to WebSocket-style framing in more detail.
- Obsolete design doc: WebSocket code has been drastically refactored. Most of the code described in this doc is gone. It is mostly only of historical interest.
- Web MIDI
- WebNavigation API internals
- Web NFC
OS-Specific
- Android
- Chrome OS
- See the Chrome OS design documents section.
- Mac OS X
- AppleScript Support
- BrowserWindowController Object Ownership
- Confirm to Quit
- Mac App Mode (Draft)
- Mac Fullscreen Mode (Draft)
- Mac NPAPI Plugin Hosting
- Mac specific notes on UI Localization
- Menus, Hotkeys, & Command Dispatch
- Notes from meeting on IOSurface usage and semantics
- OS X Interprocess Communication (Obsolete)
- Password Manager/Keychain Integration
- Sandboxing Design
- Tab Strip Design (Includes tab layout and tab dragging)
- Wrench Menu Buttons
- iOS