SHADOW THE WEB BROWSER

Computer Science and Engineering

In the modern digital era, web browsers serve as the primary gateway to the internet, enabling users to access information, communication, and entertainment. However, most contemporary browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari are built on highly complex architectures with millions of lines of code, making them unsuitable for educational purposes or lightweight customization. This creates a significant gap for students, researchers, and developers who wish to understand browser internals or develop customizable browsing solutions. Furthermore, existing browsers are often platform-specific or rely heavily on closed-source rendering engines, limiting accessibility and flexibility for learning and experimentation.This project addresses these challenges by developing a cross-platform web browser using .NET MAUI (Multi- platform App UI), which enables deployment across Android with a single codebase. The proposed system features an innovative hybrid rendering architecture that combines native WebView controls for handling complex, dynamic web content with a custom-built lightweight HTML rendering engine designed to parse and display simplified web pages. This dual-rendering approach provides both real-world functionality and educational insight into browser mechanics, including DOM construction, rendering pipelines, and layout management. The application implements essential browser features such as navigation controls, bookmark management, browsing history, and tab management, while utilizing SQLite for persistent data storage and following MVVM architectural patterns for maintainable, scalable code. By bridging the gap between industrial-grade browser functionality and educational transparency, this project serves as both a functional browsing solution and a powerful learning tool for understanding web technologies and cross-platform application development

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