Home/ Questions/Q 6682301
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-26T04:41:24+00:00

I just checked out chromium’s source, but I desperately need to learn how to

  • 0

I just checked out chromium’s source, but I desperately need to learn how to navigate around this monster.

How would I search for parts of the code that implement behavior/features I’m interested in?

Let’s say I want to see what happens after a URL is entered into the address bar. How do I find that piece of code?

Or, that I want to see what happens when, while parsing HTML, a certain tag is reached.

I have before me a huge amount of source code, and no skill of navigating around it. How do I learn that skill?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    My recommendation for sort of diving in is to take a look at the source for http://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/.

    It’s sort of the condensed version of Chrome and if you look at the files it specifically uses, either ones included in its source tree, or files included therein from the Chromium repo at large. The Chromium code base is a huge amount of stuff, most of which isn’t actually in the browser. There’s a ton of pulled in code from third party repos which are then boiled down in the build process or Chromium’s implementation is located somewhere else in the tree, there’s a lot of side projects that (while interesting and an awesome resource for a wide breadth of stuff) will prevent you from achieving your goal of specifically honing in on the browser implementation and how that fits together.

    CEF is great because you can see someone who’s already done the process of pulling all that stuff together to build a project very specifically scoped at the browser view and nothing else. You can see which parts are primarily derived from webkit easily, you can see where the crossover comes in with Google’s implementations, and you can see pretty easily how V8 gets tossed into the mix.

    I do say “easily” in relative terms because we’re still talking a huge amount of code overall. CEF will put you smack in the center of the requirements, but that stuff is still pulling in the massive amount of various things from the rest of the tree. Compiling it takes me about an hour on a really good computer with 12 gigs of ram and 8 cores, and the generated files take up like 6-10 gigs depending.

    At the very least, there’s not going to be any sort of quick jump into the shallow end to pick something here or there piecemeal. Browsers are incredibly complex pieces of engineering necessarily, because they have to subsume such a huge amount of individual pieces of functionality and then combine them into a shared context. You may find the one thing you’re looking for, but you’ll find that it’s part of a class library that likely is composed of dozens or hundreds of files, which in turn relies on a hundred more of these libraries to handle each task, so to really take something away you’ll have to commit time to taking in a lot more than any given piece of information.

    Edit: oh also as your specific example.

    src is root http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src

    /chrome http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome

    The “chrome” tree largely contains the direct implementations (a lot of stuff isn’t in there though, most of it even, but that’s the starting point). This has overlap with chromeos (chromeos is kind of chromium browser taken to a crazy extreme)

    /chrome/browser http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/browser/

    Is getting you to close to where you want to be. You start to see specific references to things that you can match to the browser, like the tabs and whatnot (ignoring the giant elephant of the actual browser implementation itself which is what takes up the majority of the mindspace in all this stuff)

    /chrome/browser/ui http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/browser/ui/

    Brings you to where most of the ui code is for the browser. It can be confusing when there’s crossover or when stuff migrates, like there’s a “ui” in the root src directory which has some crossover.

    And finally http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome/browser/ui/omnibox/

    Which has a surprisingly small amount of code in it. But this is what you find a lot. The code here is an implementation of a number of classes that are built up elsewhere. For non-webview gui component you’ll find them mostly pointing back to the root “ui” and the native widgets stuff there, which is where the bulk of the actual event handling code is if I remember correctly.

    • 0