NAME: Faraz Ahmed

PROGRAM: BS Computer Science

Submitted to Engr.Abdul Latif Shah

SEMESTER: 2nd (Fall 2014)

COURSE: Technical Report Writing

STD-ID: 695-2014

Section: ll-A

Monday, December 15, 2014

WEB BROWSERS


Summary

Web browser is the most commonly used client application speed and efficiency of our online work depends on browser to a great extent. As the market is flooding with new browsers there is a lot of confusion in everyone’s mind as to which is the best browser. Ourproject aims to answer this question. We have done a comparative study of the five most popular web browsers namely Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari. In the first phase of our project various comparison parameters are selected which can be broadly categorized into -General Features, Security features and browser extensibility features. Using the selected benchmarking tools each browser is tested. We have also use our own test scripts for some parameters .Depending on the performance of the browser points are assigned to each browser .Public opinion is considered for usability issue and finally I have come to a conclusion that Google Chrome are leading the browser war. Google Chrome has finished first scoring 51.84 and Internet Explorer has scored the next highest 21.7.90 other contributions include a K-chromium browser, fast browsing Google Chrome and scripts showing the major browserAttacks.

Table of Content

  • List of Figures
  • List of Tables
  • Acknowledgment
  1. Introduction
  2. Statement of Problem
  3. Motivations (Selection of Browsers)
  4. Mozilla Firefox
  5. Internet Explorer
  6. Google Chrome
  7. Opera
  8. Safari
  9. Organization of Report
  10. Background
  11. Test Environment
  12. Parameters Selection and Weight age
  13. Benchmark Selection
  14. Design
  15. Theoretical Analysis
  16. Procedure
  17. Result
  18. Conclusion
  19. References
  20. Appendices

List of Figures

  1. Desktop Top Browser Share Trend
  2. Usage of Web Browsers

List of Tables

  1. Table of Browsers Market Shares
  2. Table of Parameter Weight age
  3. Sun Spider JavaScript Benchmark Result:
  4. ACID3 Test Result
  5. CSS Rendering Result
  6. Graphics Rendering Result
  7. Category point Table

Acknowledgment

All praises and thanks to Al-Mighty “Allah”, the most merciful, the most gracious, the sourceof knowledge and wisdom endowed to mankind, who conferred us with the power of mindand capability to take this project to the exciting ocean of knowledge. All respects are for ourmost beloved Holy Prophet “Hazrat Muhammad peace be upon Him”, who is forever a torchof guidance for humanity as whole.Acknowledgement is due to INDUS UNIVERSITY for support ofthis Project. We wish to express our appreciation to Engineer “Latif Ahmed” who served as our major advisor. We would like to express our heartiest gratitude for theirkeen guidance, sincere help and friendly manner which inspires us to do well in the projectand makes it a reality.A special thanks to our family and friends and all the fellow students of our Classmates. Fortheir encouragement, continuous help and love, in fact, in every unconditional way, this made the project a success story.

1. INTRODUCTION

The World Wide Web has come a long way in its short existence. Without it, many people wouldn’t know what to do with their day. And others literally couldn’t survive without it. To browse the internet we use browser. A browser provides a user interface for displaying and selecting items from a list of data or from hierarchically organized lists of data such as directory paths. We can tell that browser is the most commonly used client side application. Earlier the choice of the browser was limited but this is no longer the situation now. Numbers of options are available making the choice of web browser difficult and confusing. Mainstream browsers are getting tough competition from the upcoming alternatives each one having its own unique features. Hence making a right choice is a daunting task. The main reason that motivates us to work on this project is that nowadays the users just use any browser they get without knowing its positives and negatives. Our project aims clear the confusion in user’s mindby systematically testing the browsers and deciding the best choice for different categories of users. First we discuss about the importance of a browser and its general architecture. In section III we elaborate our evaluation strategy. In section IV, V , VI VII we list and justify our selection of browsers, test environment ,parameters and benchmarks . Section VIII gives the details of the tools/scripts developed by us and the test results. Section IX gives discusses the security issues of the browser. Section X we list out the points of each browser

1.1 Statement OF Problems

Why web Browser different from each others.

Today most of what we use the web for isn’t just web pages, they are applications. Users upload download videos, chat, play online games, and use many other web services. Web browser is becoming more and more important as an application used to conduct billions of dollars of Internet-enabled commerce each year. It has evolved significantly over the past fifteen years. Web browsers run on diverse types of hardware, from cell phones and tablet PCs to desktop computers. Hence a proper design becomes very important. Reference architecture for web browsers can help implementers to understand trade-offs when designing new systems, and can assist maintainers in understanding legacy code. A web browser is client side application program that contacts remote servers and retrieves documents from it and displays them on screen, either within the browser window itself or by passing the document to an external helper application. It allows particular resources to be requested explicitly by URI, or implicitly by following embedded hyperlinks. Many other features are provided by

Browser which increases the ease of use. For example, most browsers keep track of recently visited WebPages and provide a mechanism for “book-marking” pages of interest. They may also store commonly entered form values as well as usernames and passwords. Finally, browsers often provide accessibility features to accommodate users with disabilities such as blindness and low vision, hearing loss, and motor impairments Browser Jargon you will come across in this report: Plug-in or Add-on : It consists of a computer program that interacts with a host application in our case a web browser to provide a certain specific function on demand . Extension :is a program designed to to be incorporated into web browser to extend the functionality of the later . On its own an extension is non-functional BHO : Browser Help Object, BHO is a help object added to your Internet browser. For example the Google Toolbars considered a Browser Help Object; this add-on enables users to perform Google searches through the toolbar and contains additional features that help improve a user's experience.

1.2 MOTIVATION

Selection of Browser

As our task was to compare the browsers, we need to decide which browser is to be selected. For that, we went through the usage statistics and found the following results given by some of the websites.

Market Share of browsers:

Year / IE / Firefox / Chrome / Safari / Opera / Others
2014 / 21.7 / 18.5 / 51.8 / 5.0 / 1.5 / 1.6

Table 1

1.2.1 Mozilla Firefox

Firefox is an open-source project that is managed by the Mozilla Foundation. Each component is divided into sub modules. Each of these modules is owned by a specific individual that is in charge of managing the development of that that module. It descended from Mozilla Corporation suite and is managed by Mozilla Corporation. Firefox includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search system that uses the user's desired search engine .Functions can be added through add-ons created by third-party developers, which include the No Script JavaScript disabling utility, Tab Mix Plus customizer, Foxy Tunes media player control toolbar, Ad block Plus ad blocking utility, Stumble Upon (website Discovery), Fox marks Bookmark Synchronizer (bookmark synchronizer), WOT: Web of Trust security site advisor, download enhancer, and Web Developer toolbar. With a market share of 45.5% in 2009 it is the most popularBrowser. But in 2014 Firefox market share is 18.5. [1]

1.2.2Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer; abbreviated MSIE), commonly abbreviated to IE, is a series of graphical web browser developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows Line of operating system starting in 1995. It has been the most widely used web browser since 1999, attaining a peak of about 95%usage during 2002 and 2003 with IE5 and IE6 and that percentage share has declined since in the face of renewed competition from other web browser developers. Internet Explorer uses DOCTYPE sniffing to choose between "quirks mode" (renders similarly to older versions of MSIE) and standard mode (renders closer to W3C's specifications) for HTML and CSS rendering on screen (Internet

Explorer always uses standards mode for printing). It also provides its own dialect of ECMA Script called Jscript.Internet Explorer has been subjected to criticism over its limited support for open web standards. [2]

1.2.3Google Chrome

Chrome the latest browser released in 2008 already had a market share of 48.7% in June 2014. Chromium is the open source project behind Google chrome.

Salient Features include:

1. Task Manager for Websites

2. Visual Browser History

3. Super Clean Contextual Menus

4. Search option from the Address Bar

5. Check Memory Usage by Different Browsers

6. Reopen Website tabs that you closed by mistake

7. Launch Websites from the Start Menu / Quick Launch Bar

8. Developers claim faster speed (Sun spider and v8 benchmarks), better stability and performance and high security. Architecture of chrome provides insight into its security features. Chromium has two modules in separate protection domain: browser kernel and rendering engine. This architecture helps mitigate high severity attack without compromising the compatibility. [3]

1.2.4Opera

Opera has market share of 1.5%. But the features of this browser get it a place in our comparison chart. Claimed to be a fast and secured browser it, has the following new features in its latest version:

• Content blocking

• Bit Torrent support

• Widgets

• Search engine editor

• Site preferences

• New installer. One package—30 languages

• Integrated source viewer

• Opera:configure for advanced settings configuration

• Tab use: Thumbnails when you hover the cursor over a tab

• Widgets in Opera are more like small standalone applications that can interact with the internet and live

Outside the browser, rather than interface elements that can change the basic behavior of the browser,

as Firefox's extensions are.

Innovative Features in Opera

Opera was the first browser with tabs, RSS support, and built-in Bit Torrentclient and tab thumbnails. It allows for duplication of tabs; Go to URL feature for web address that is not hyperlinked, periodic reloading, fitting to window size (ERA), rewinding, crash recovery, page zoom, instant back, tab closing. Along with this it does the best on the Acid2 web standards test. Though the safari browser is been used more as per the statistics given above we have taken chrome and operabecause chrome is the latest browser by Google which is popular and wanted to know the details of the new browser.[4]

1.2.5SAFARI

Safariis aweb browserdeveloped byApple Inc.included with theOS XandiOSoperating systems. First released as apublic betaon January 7, 2003,on the company's OS Xoperating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning withMac OS X v10.3"Panther". The native browser of iOS is also called Safari, but has a different UI and uses a different Web Kit version and API.

A version of Safari for theMicrosoft Windowsoperating system was first released on June 11, 2007,and supportedWindows XPService Pack 2, or later,but it has been discontinued.Safari 5.1.7, released on May 9, 2012, is the last version available for Windows.

According toW3Schools, as of August 2014, Safari accounted for 3.7% of their web browsing traffic with 1.7% of that traffic coming from Safari Mobile.

Safari 8 introduced the following features, available on OS X Yosemite:[52]

  • WebGL support, which allows developers to create 3D experiences that work natively in the browser.
  • IndexedDB, which allows web developers to store structured data for web applications that work online or require large amounts of data to be cached client side.
  • JavaScript Promises, which enables JavaScript authors to more naturally work with asynchronous programming patterns.
  • CSS Shapes and Compositing. Using CSS, websites can now easily flow text around images and geometry shapes, and perform image compositing operations on DOM elements.
  • SPDY. Safari supports SPDY, an open networking protocol that websites can adopt to reduce page load latency and improve security.
  • HTML5 Premium Video. Websites that provide video can now take advantage of EME to deliver encrypted, energy-efficient video in the browser [5]

1.3 Organizing Report

In this report we have started with the statement of problem there we describe why the web browsers are different from each other and then we appears the people’s problem that is selection of browsers. On what behalf a user select a browser. We gave full description of each browser. After these we put the background section in this report which may include test environment. We also show table of parameters weights age. After all these theories we gave a design in Market Share of Browsers. A portion of Theoretical analysis showing that what challenges we have to face. Procedure is deeply describing the features of all web browsers. All these study finally we got the result and after result we put the conclusion of this report. In the end of this report we also put the references and appendices as well.

2. Background

2.1TEST ENVIRONMENT

Browser

Mozilla Firefox

Internet Explorer

Google Chrome

Opera

Operating System RAM HDD Processor Speed

Windows XP Home Edition

512 MB DDR2, L2 cache 60 GB Intel Centurion 1.77 GHz, 100% CPU Usage is made available for each test. This is ensured by reboot after every test.

2.2PARAMETER SELECTION AND WEIGHTAGE

Parameter Weight age

1 / Web technologies Support / 5
2 / Cross-platform Support / 7
3 / Browser Features / 5
4 / Accessibility Features / 5
5 / Mobile Web technology support / 7
6 / Plug-in and Web Feed Support / 5
7 / Protocol Support / 5
8 / Securities / 8
9 / Add-ons / 8
10 / Speed / 10
11 / Benchmark Tool Testing / 10

Table 2

Justification for the weight age for parameters:

Every parameter was given a base of 5 points each. Added points were given to parameters depending on the relevance and importance at the present. Like mobile

technologies support was given extra 2 points because mobile tech is the upcoming technologies. Security, of course is really important parameters and hence the 8 points. Speed, is the ultimate decider for the best browsers and therefore we allot 10 points to it.

Market Share table given in “III. Browser Selection”

2.3 BENCHMARKS SELECTED

A benchmark suite that aims to measure JavaScript performance only not the DOM or Other browser API’s. It Tests on tasks that are relevant to the current and near future use of JavaScript in the real world, such as screen drawing, encryption and text manipulation. The suite further attempts to be balanced and statistically sound. It was released by Apple's Web Kit team in December 2007. It is designed to compare different versions of the same browser, and different browsers to each other.

Sun Spider JavaScript Benchmark Result:

SL No / Google Chrome / Mozilla Firefox / Internet Explorer / Safari / Opera
3D / 43.1 / 46.6 / 18.0 / 51.4 / 52.7
ACCESS / 19.9 / 19.3 / 14.1 / 40.2 / 19.6
BITOPS / 15.5 / 11.6 / 9.8 / 27.3 / 17.4
Control Flow / 2.3 / 2.4 / 1.6 / 3.3 / 2.9
CRYPTO / 23.1 / 23.3 / 9.9 / 19.8 / 23.5
DATE / 60.2 / 27.0 / 19.6 / 26.7 / 26.9
MATH / 21.2 / 18.2 / 16.8 / 31.0 / 23.3
REGEXP / 9.1 / 10.7 / 10.2 / 11.0 / 9.0
STRING / 101.6 / 94.2 / 58.7 / 73.1 / 101.5
TOTAL / 296.0 / 253.3 / 158.7 / 283.8 / 275.8

Table 3 *All times are in ms

Passing Condition

A passing score is only considered valid if the browser's default settings were used.

The following browser settings and user actions invalidate the test:

• Zooming in or out

• Disabling images

• Applying custom fonts, colors, styles, etc.

ACID3 Test Result

SL No / Browsers / Acid3 Test / Points
1 / Google Chrome / 99 / 9.9
2 / Mozilla Firefox / 69 / 6.9
3 / Safari / 69 / 6.9
4 / Opera / 69 / 6.9
5 / Internet Explorer / 65 / 6.5

Table 4

CSS Rendering Result

SL No / Browsers / Points
1 / Google Chrome / 5.0
2 / Mozilla Firefox / 5.0
3 / Safari / 5.0
4 / Opera / 4.0
5 / Internet Explorer / ----

Table 5

Graphics Rendering Result

Browser / 1 (Sec) / 2 (Sec) / 3 (Sec) / Average / Points
Chrome / 2.876 / 2.877 / 2.877 / 2.8766 / 9
Mozilla / 7.197 / 7.201 / 7.201 / 7.1996 / 6
Opera / 11.388 / 11.388 / 11.232 / 11.336 / 4
IE / 11.215 / 11.219 / 11.212 / 11.2153 / 4
Safari / 10.221 / 7.201 / 7.201 / 9.l222 / 5

Table 6

  1. Design

Market Shares OF Web Browsers

Green shows Google Chrome

Blue shows Internet Explorer

Red shows Firefox

Violet shows Safari

Sky blue shows Opera

Orange shows others

  1. Theoretical Analysis

Browsingis a kind of orienting strategy. It is supposed to identify something ofrelevancefor the browsing organism. When used about human beings it is ametaphortaken from the animal kingdom. It is used, for example, about people browsing open shelves in libraries or browsing databases or the Internet. InLibrary and information scienceit is an important subject, both purely theoretically and as applied science aiming at designing interfaces which support browsing activities for the user. [6]

Challenges
Yet, there are a few risks when relying on a browser, in addition to just listing the risk, I offer a few suggestions, this is a work in progress and I’ll update it base upon your feedback.

1) Users have multiple browsers and multiple computers so the graph will not work on standalone systems. Secondly, in cultures (like Asia, and some places in Europe) users go to internet cafes and may not ever use the same computer twice.

The fix? The ‘data’ of the graph will need to centrally located and transferred to browser to browser via secured login, likely Open ID as suggested by others.

2) Full browsers not supported by most mobile clients. I’m not sure if this is a serious risk yet, by a scaled down version of the browser (or a plug-in) should be able to work on a mobile device, so one can quickly find out what a friend is doing across the whole network.

3) Fear and mistrust of Browser vendors. This will always be the challenge; trust is a real issue for many users. Browser vendors will need to ensure information is not being gathered in an inappropriate way that would misdeed the user.[7]