Design Documents

Start Here: Background Reading

Multi-process Architecture: Describes the high-level architecture of Chromium Note: Most of the rest of the design documents assume familiarity with the concepts explained in this document.
How Blink works is a high-level overview of Blink architecture.
The "Life of a Pixel" talk (slides / video) is an introduction to Chromium's rendering pipeline, tracing the steps from web content to displayed pixels.
[somewhat outdated] How Chromium Displays Web Pages: Bottom-to-top overview of how WebKit is embedded in Chromium

General Architecture

Conventions and patterns for multi-platform development
Extension Security Architecture: How the extension system helps reduce the severity of extension vulnerabilities
HW Video Acceleration in Chrom{e,ium}{,OS}
Inter-process Communication: How the browser, renderer, and plugin processes communicate
Multi-process Resource Loading: How pages and images are loaded from the network into the renderer
Plugin Architecture
Process Models: Our strategies for creating new renderer processes
Profile Architecture
SafeBrowsing
Sandbox
Security Architecture: How Chromium's sandboxed rendering engine helps protect against malware
Startup
Threading: How to use threads in Chromium

Also see the documentation for V8, which is the JavaScript engine used within Chromium.

UI Framework

UI Development Practices: Best practices for UI development inside and outside of Chrome's content areas.
Views framework: Our UI layout layer used on Windows/Chrome OS.
views Windowing system: How to build dialog boxes and other windowed UI using views.
Aura: Chrome's next generation hardware accelerated UI framework, and the new ChromeOS window manager built using it.
NativeControls: using platform-native widgets in views.
Focus and Activation with Views and Aura.
Input Event Routing in Desktop UI.

Graphics

Network stack

Security

Input

See chromium input for design docs and other resources.

Rendering

Building

See also the documentation for GYP, which is the build script generation tool.

Testing

Feature-Specific

about:conflicts
Accessibility: An outline of current (and coming) accessibility support.
Auto-Throttled Screen Capture and Mirroring
Browser Window
Chromium Print Proxy: Enables a cloud print service for legacy printers and future cloud-aware printers.
Constrained Popup Windows
Desktop Notifications
DirectWrite Font Cache for Chrome on Windows
DNS Prefetching: Reducing perceived latency by resolving domain names before a user tries to follow a link
Download Page (Material Design Refresh)
Embedding Flash Fullscreen in the Browser Window
Extensions: Design documents and proposed APIs.
Find Bar
Form Autofill: A feature to automatically fill out an html form with appropriate data.
Geolocation: Adding support for W3C Geolocation API using native WebKit bindings.
Generic-Sensor : Access sensor data
IDN in Google Chrome
IndexedDB (early draft)
Info Bars
Installer: Registry entries and shortcuts
Instant
Isolated Sites
Linux Resources and Localized Strings: Loading data resources and localized strings on Linux.
Media Router & Web Presentation API
Memory Usage Backgrounder: Some information on how we measure memory in Chromium.
Mouse Lock
Omnibox Autocomplete: While typing into the omnibox, Chromium searches for and suggests possible completions.
- HistoryQuickProvider: Suggests completions from the user's historical site visits.
Omnibox/IME Coordination
Omnibox Prefetch for Default Search Engines
Ozone Porting Abstraction
Password Form Styles that Chromium Understands
Password Generation
Plugin Power Saver
Preferences
Prerender
Print Preview
Printing
Rect-based event targeting in views: Making it easier to target views elements with touch.
Replace the modal cookie prompt
SafeSearch
Sane Time: Determining an accurate time in Chrome
Secure Web Proxy
Service Processes
Site Engagement: Tracking user engagement with sites they use.
Site Isolation: In-progress effort to improve Chromium's process model for security between web sites.
Software Updates: Courgette
Sync
Tab Helpers
Tab to search: How to have the Omnibox automatically provide tab to search for your site.
Tabtastic2 Requirements
Temporary downloads
TimeTicks: How our monotonic timer, TimeTicks, works on different OSes
UI Mirroring Infrastructure: Describes the UI framework in ChromeViews that allows mirroring the browser UI in RTL locales such as Hebrew and Arabic.
UI Localization: Describes how localized strings get added to Chromium.
User scripts: Information on Chromium's support for user scripts.
Video
WebSocket: A message-oriented protocol which provides bidirectional TCP/IP-like communication between browsers and servers.
- Design doc: mostly still relevant but some parts have been revised. In particular, mojo is used for the communication between Blink and //content now.
- WebSocket handshake: The HTTP-like exchange before switching to WebSocket-style framing in more detail.
- Obsolete design doc: WebSocket code has been drastically refactored. Most of the code described in this doc is gone. It is mostly only of historical interest.
Web MIDI
WebNavigation API internals
Web NFC

OS-Specific

Android
Chrome OS
- See the Chrome OS design documents section.
Mac OS X
iOS
- WKWebView Problems Solved by web// layer

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