A modern browser is a platform specifically designed for fast, efficient, and secure delivery of web applications. In fact, under the hood, a modern browser is an entire operating system with hundreds of components: process management, security sandboxes, layers of optimization caches, JavaScript VMs, graphics rendering and GPU pipelines, storage, sensors, audio and video, networking, and much more.
Not surprisingly, the overall performance of the browser, and any application that it runs, is determined by a number of components: parsing, layout, style calculation of HTML and CSS, JavaScript execution speed, rendering pipelines, and of course the networking stack. Each component plays a critical role, but networking often doubly so, since if the browser is blocked on the network, waiting for the resources to arrive, then all other steps are blocked!
As a result, it is not surprising to discover that the networking stack of a modern browser is much more than a simple socket manager. From the outside, it may present itself as a simple resource-fetching mechanism, but from the inside it is its own platform (Figure 14-1), with its own optimization criteria, APIs, and services.
Figure 14-1. High-level browser networking APIs, protocols, and services
When designing a web application, we don’t have to worry about the individual TCP or UDP sockets; ...
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