Simplified Approach for Optimizing HTML5 Rendering Pipeline without Compromizes

Every now and then I keep having conversations about challenges of writing good rendering engines for HTML5 content. Quite recently I had a chat with my brother about their plans and goals at Nomovok related to this topic.

It seems that often goals for optimizing these rendering pipelines get divided in two: optimize for textual content or optimize app behaviour. Most often it is that goal is simply to make text scrolling as smooth as possible, but not always. These two optimization targets are very different in nature and it is quite challenging to optimize both at the same time.

Some years ago, when was playing with iPhone, I got an idea related to this problem. Apple has a special meta tags in HTML head to indicate that page is designed as an app and when seeing this meta tag, browser asks user if that app should be installed on launcher as a web app (meaning it will have own launcher and browser will be launched without chrome). This gave me an idea for reusing this same approach of changed behaviour guided by meta tags. What if we add a meta tag to indicate what kind of web content we have: textual or app? Then according to this we select between two separate rendering pipelines, one optimized for textual content and the other optimized for apps.

Allowing us to have separated pipelines for textual content and apps would allow us to optimize our rendering pipeline without compromises. As far as I know this should be doable in Webkit. When it comes to Mozilla and Gecko engine, I just don't know.

In the end spark for writing this post came after reading about Mozilla's plans for using different Javascript engines for different kind of Javascript tasks. It would be quite cool if you could do the same thing with rendering pipelines, but that might be a bit more challenging task. The comment about using IonMonkey for long lasting Javascript tasks and JägerMonkey for others, can be found from David Andersons blog post: https://blog.mozilla.org/javascript/2012/09/12/ionmonkey-in-firefox-18/

I hope someone tests this approach and it would be awesome if it also works. I know that at least Nomovok is working on this one so maybe we will see something coming from them.