Fast and parallel webpage layout

The web browser is a CPU-intensive program. Especially on mobile devices, webpages load too slowly, expending significant time in processing a document’s appearance. Due to power constraints, most hardware-driven speedups will come in the form of parallel architectures. This is also true of mobile devices such as phones. Current browsers, however, barely exploit hardware parallelism, so we are designing a parallel mobile browser. In this paper, we introduce new algorithms for CSS selector matching, layout solving, and font rendering, which represent key components for a fast layout engine. Evaluation on popular sites shows speedups as high as 80x. We also formulate layout solving with attribute grammars, enabling us to not only parallelize our algorithm but prove that it computes in O(log) time and without reflow. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces—Benchmarking, graphical user interfaces (GUI), theory and methods; I...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Leo A. Meyerovich, Rastislav Bodík
• Keywords: Attribute Grammar, Internet Technology, Mobile Devices, Parallel Mobile Browser, WWW 2010