Understanding Quality of Experiences on Different Mobile Browsers: Measurements, Analysis, and Implications

Abstract

The web browser is one of the major channels to access the Internet on mobile devices. Based on the smartphone usage logs from millions of real-world Android users, it is interesting to find that about 38% users have more than one browser on their devices. However, it is unclear whether the quality of browsing experiences are different when visiting the same webpage on different browsers. In this paper, we collect 3-week consecutive traces of 337 popular webpages on three popular mobile browsers: Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. We first use a list of metrics and conduct an empirical study to measure the differences of these metrics on different browsers. Then, we explore the variety of loading time and cache performance of different browsers when visiting the same webpage, which has a great impact on the browsing experience. Furthermore, we try to find which metrics have significant effect on the differences, investigating the possible causes. Finally, according to our findings, we give some recommendations to web developers, browser vendors, and end users.