With the release of Firefox 2.0 (which should be official on the afternoon of Tuesday, 24th October 2006), the web browser war is once again heat up. The rush of RC3 to final after just a week of release again signifies the worries of Firefox community about IE7’s challenge.
Apart from the user interface differences, lest we forget the differences at the core, which is called the layout engine or rendering engine. It takes web content (such as HTML, XML, image files, etc.) and formatting information (such as CSS, XSL, etc.) and displays the formatted content on the screen. It “paints” on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer.
The layout engine exists not only in web browsers but also email clients, media players with mini-browser and any applications that can display web contents.
There are 4 major rendering engines on the market.