Fast and parallel webpage layout

Abstract

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 and e-books. 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 the layout problem with attribute grammars, enabling us to not only parallelize our algorithm but prove that it computes in O(log) time and without reflow.