I Built a Browser From Scratch, and It Finally Renders the World's First Website Like Chrome Does

A while back I set myself a slightly unhinged goal: build a web browser from scratch in Node.js and Electron no external HTML/CSS/layout libraries, everything hand-rolled. URL parser, TCP/TLS socket, HTTP pipeline, HTML tokenizer, DOM builder, CSS tokenizer, CSS parser, style matcher, layout engine, canvas renderer. All of it, from zero. so,I called it Courage Browser . This week, after dozens of daily sessions, I hit a milestone that felt disproportionately satisfying: Courage now renders info.cern.ch the very first website ever put on the internet almost pixel-for-pixel identical to real Chrome. It sounds small. It is not small. Getting there meant chasing down bugs across nearly every layer of the browser. Why info.cern.ch If you haven't seen it, info.cern.ch is CERN's preserved copy of Tim Berners-Lee's original website. It's about as simple as HTML gets — one heading, a paragraph, a bulleted list of links. No CSS file, no JavaScript, no styling of any kind beyond what a browser applies by default. Which is exactly why it's a great test case. If your browser can't get a page with zero author CSS to look right, it has no business trying to render anything more complex. Default styling headings being bold, links being blue and underlined, bullets showing up in the right place has to work before anything else does. The bugs I found by just... comparing screenshots I put a screenshot of Courage's render side-by-side with Chrome's and started listing differences. Two jumped out immediately: The <h1> wasn't bold in Courage, even though it clearly should be. The links had underlines but weren't blue , they were rendering in the default text color. Neither of these had anything to do with what I was originally working on that day (CSS attribute selectors, for an upcoming GitHub-rendering push). But they were visible, they were wrong, and they were small enough to fix in one sitting. So I did. Bug #1: styles computed before they were applied Courage has a defaultRules ar