Concurrency in Mobile Browser Engines

Web browsers are one of the most pervasive applications for an entire range of personal computing platforms--from mobile devices to desktops. Using Web technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) to build "Web apps" has the promise of creating portable applications for all platforms. Thus browsers become application containers, requiring increased performance from browser engines. Here, the authors discuss advances in browser technologies that exploit multicore processing. They use the Zoomm browser and the MuscalietJS JavaScript engine as running examples of highly concurrent Web browser and JavaScript engines. They show how concurrency is effectively exploited at different levels: to speed up computation performance, preload network resources, and preprocess resources outside the critical path to speed up page loading and Web workloads.