Web browsers play host to more and more of our programs and data, but their inner workings and the engineering challenges they face are not widely understood. Browsers are being used on resource-constrained devices: how can their performance be improved? They are under constant attack by malicious web content: what assurances do we have that they can resist those attacks? And while the common browsers appear to be converging on similar UIs, they all support extensions to varying degrees: what kinds of extension are possible, and how might these extensions subvert the performance and security properties we would like to preserve?
In this talk, I'll give a high-level overview of browser architecture, focusing on C3, an experimental browser I helped develop at Microsoft Research. I'll touch on each of the points above, and describe some of the related research questions I want to address in the future. I'd like this talk to be a free-form discussion on whichever facets of browser design people find most interesting.