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Aurora – a browser engine experiment in Rust

Aurora – a browser engine experiment in Rust

by JohannaAlmeida·Apr 13, 2026·4 points·5 comments
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AI Analysis

●●SolidWizardryBig Brain

GPU rendering from scratch with wgpu and Vello instead of relying on Skia.

Strengths
  • •Single atlas with batching and rasterization pipeline shows real graphics programming skill.
  • •Boa JavaScript engine integration means simple scripts actually execute in rendered pages.
  • •Explicit minimal implementation teaches browser pipeline better than reading Servo docs.
Weaknesses
  • •Author explicitly states this is a learning project, not production-ready software.
  • •Minimal HTML subset and primitive layout limits what pages can actually render.
Target Audience

Systems programmers interested in browser internals

Similar To

Servo · Ladybird · NetSurf

Post Description

I’ve been building Aurora, an early-stage browser engine in Rust.

It currently implements a minimal end-to-end pipeline: parsing a narrow HTML subset, building a DOM tree, parsing CSS from style tags, computing basic styles, deriving a simple block layout tree, and painting the result into a small text framebuffer. It also includes basic HTTP/HTTPS fetching with redirect support.

JavaScript execution is integrated using the Boa JavaScript engine. This is still early, but simple scripts do run.

Rendering is done on the GPU from scratch using wgpu and Vello, without relying on Skia. The renderer uses a single atlas and a simple pipeline for batching and rasterization.

The goal is not to build a full browser, but to understand and implement the core pieces of the pipeline in a small and explicit way.

Next steps are improving tokenization, expanding CSS support, making layout less primitive, and continuing work on the GPU rendering path.

Current render snapshot : https://imgur.com/a/NtbgR5i

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