Mobile Browser Research Articles

Enhancing Dynamic-Viewport Mobile Applications with Screen Scrolling

The pervasive penetration of mobile smart devices has significantly enriched Internet applications and undoubtedly reshaped the way that users access Internet services. Different from traditional desktop applications, mobile Internet applications require users to input via touch screens and view outputs on the displays with considerably limited size. The significant conflict between the limited-size of touch screens and the richness of online media contents widely exists in dynamic-viewport mobile applications, a class of mobile Internet applications that download contents beyond the user's viewing region (referred to as viewport). As dynamic-viewport mobile applications usually use HTTP for content downloading, to improve their quality of experience (QoE) and cost efficiency, in this paper, we present a Mobile-Friendly HTTP middleware (MF-HTTP), which can interpret user touch screen inputs and optimize the HTTP downloading of media objects for such applications. We first demystify screen scrolling in mobile operating systems and precisely break down the viewport moving process. We identify the key influential factors for media object downloading and develop an optimal download scheme. Towards building a practical middleware, we further discuss and address the implementation issues in detail. We implement a MF-HTTP prototype based on Android platforms and evaluate the performance of MF-HTTP by conducting concrete case studies on two representative dynamic-viewport mobile applications, namely, web browsing and 360-degree video streaming.

Мултисензорна система за наблюдение и контрол на изкуствена среда за отглеждане на растения

The paper represents a small controller with wireless connection, which measures air temperature, air humidity and soil humidity. As an output action it can switch on and off an irrigation pump. Monitoring is realized over Wi-Fi connection to a gateway and cloud service. The service allows database storage and graph representation of the input values via desktop or mobile device browser. Sensors choice is also explained in details with advantages and disadvantages of the possible solutions. Developed device allows fine tuning, according to the target plants, can be duplicated many times in the range of the hothouse. It is one of the cheapest solutions which provides very stable work as a result of the specific implementation.

Focus on software, data acquisition, and instrumentation

Focus on software, data acquisition, and instrumentation

Identifying Short-term Interests from Mobile App Adoption Pattern

With the increase in an average user’s dependence on their mobile devices, the reliance on collecting user’s browsing history from mobile browsers has also increased. This browsing history is highly utilized in the advertising industry for providing targeted ads in the purview of inferring user’s short-term interests and pushing relevant ads. However, the major limitation of such an extraction from mobile browsers is that browsing history gets reset when the browser is closed or when the device is shut down/restarted; thus rendering existing methods for identification of user’s short-term interests on mobile devices, ineffective. In this paper, we propose an alternative method to identify such short-term interests by analysing user’s mobile app adoption (installation/uninstallation) patterns over a period of time. Such a method can be highly effective in pinpointing the user’s ephemeral inclinations like buying/renting an apartment, buying/selling a car or a sudden increased interest in shopping (possibly due to a recent salary bonus, he received). Subsequently, these derived interests are also used for targeted experiments. Our experiments result in up to 93.68% higher click-through rate in comparison to the ads shown without any user-interest knowledge. Also, up to 51% higher revenue in the long term is expected as a result of the application of our proposed algorithm.

SMART BIN: SMART MONITORING SYSTEM TO KEEP OUR CITY CLEAN

The Internet of Things is a rapidly changing concept. The Internet is now a manner of existence with the World becoming linked via the Internet. For all our fundamental requirements, we also need the Internet, say for bank account management, grocery shopping, travel arrangements management, the list is infinite. Most of the appliances (“things”) we use it on a regular basis are regulated on in our own mobile devices only by remotes and sometimes by apps. This has resulted into its own “network” and is also frequently referred to as the “Internet of Things”. Using the IoT, all the facilities we use in our daily lives can be monitored and controlled. Most of the process is achieved in IoT using sensors. Everywhere, detectors are created and these devices transform pure physical information into digital signals and deliver them to their command core. Through the Internet, we can track environmental changes remotely from a corner of the world. I work the same way with the mixture of detectors namely IR detector smart selection bin. The IR detector will demonstrate us the different trash concentrations in the dustbins and push their performance forward when they cross their limit level. The NodeMCU also receives this information and the NodeMCU provides the transmitter unit the information. A mobile phone is linked to the client in the receiver segment to display information of the garbage bin on the HTML site in our mobile phone's web browser. In this document we will evaluate internet stuff, IoT background, intelligent dustbins and their work, apps and disadvantages of intelligent dustbin.

An Experimental Examination of Mobile Cloud Computing and IOT: Application, Techniques and Issues

A technology in which voice, video and data can transfer through a computer or any wireless device is known as mobile computing. There is no need to connect to a fix physical link in mobile computing. By using the cloud computing mobile computing the powerful mobile applications can build. The approach of mobile cloud computing allows the developers to design the applications especially for mobile users. And the applications are not bounded with the memory capacity, computing process and operating system of Smartphone. From a remote web server through mobile browser the mobile cloud computing centered simply accesses. On the recipient Smartphone it is not necessary to install the client application

A Comparative Study on 3D Data Performance in Mobile Web Browsers in 4G and 5G Environments

Since their emergence in 2007, smart phones have advanced up to the point that 5G mobile communication in 2019 started to be commercialized. Accordingly, now it is possible to share 3D modeling files and collaborate by means of a mobile web. As the recently commercialized 5G mobile communication network is so useful in sharing 3D modeling files and collaborating that even large-size geometry files can be transmitted at ultra high speed with ultra low transfer delay. We examines characteristics of major 3D file formats such as STL, OBJ, FBX, and glTF and compares the existing 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) network with the 5G NR (New Radio) mobile communication network. The loading time and packets of each format were measured depending on the mobile web browser environments. We shows that in comparison with 4G LTE, the loading time of STL and OBJ file formats were reduced as much as 6.55 sec and 9.41 sec, respectively in the 5G NR and Chrome browsers. The glTF file format showed the most efficient performance in all of the 4G/5G mobile communication networks, Chrome, and Edge browsers. In the case of STL and OBJ, the traffic was relatively excessive in 5G NR and Edge browsers. The findings of this study are expected to be utilized to develop a 3D file format that reduces the loading time in a mobile web environment.

A METHOD FOR CLASSIFYING USABILITY FINDINGS TO ENHANCE VALIDATION OF NEW HEURISTICS

Different usability heuristics have been proposed as new application domains arise. Such proposals usually depend on the validation of the new heuristics. However, current validation methods are still biased by subjective comparisons of usability findings. In this paper, we aimed to enhance the process of matching usability finding descriptions and mitigate the bias of such process. To reach our goal, we adopted ontology techniques to extend the User Action Framework for the context of validating new usability heuristics. We tested three hypotheses about the feasibility of our new framework based on a case study with 173 usability findings. These usability findings were retrieved from an online project of a private mobile browser. Our data analysis of supported merging three classification schemes for our framework: User Action Framework, Typical Usability Defects (from ISO) and the heuristics of Nielsen. Finally, we describe a logical process for our method, because some of the contents from the classification schemes are not disjoint.

An Energy Efficiency Study of Web-Based Communication in Android Phones

Currently, mobile devices are the most popular pervasive computing devices, and they are becoming the primary way for accessing Internet. Battery is a critical resource in such personal computing gadgets, network communications being one of the primary energy consuming activities in any mobile app. Indeed, as web-based communication is the most used explicitly or implicitly by mobile devices, HTTP-based traffic is the most power demanding one. So, mobile web developers should be aware of how much energy demands the different web-based communication alternatives. The goal of this paper is to measure and compare the energy consumption of three asynchronous HTTP-based methods in mobile devices in different browsers. Our experiments focus on three HTTP-based asynchronous communication models that allow a web server to push data to a client browser through a HTTP/1.1 interaction: Polling, Long Polling, and WebSockets. The resulted measurements are then analysed to get more accurate understanding of the impact of the selected method, and the mobile browser, in the energy consumption of the asynchronous HTTP-based communication. The utility of these experiments is to show developers what are the factors and settings that mostly influence the energy consumption when different web-based asynchronous communication methods are used, helping them to choose the most beneficial solution if possible. With this information, mobile web developers should be able to reduce the power consumption of the front-end of web applications for mobile devices, just selecting and configuring the best asynchronous method or mobile browser, improving the performance of HTTP-based communication in terms of energy demand.

Key technology of lightweight Web3D online planning of metro fire escape

Virtual training of metro fire evacuation definitely becomes considerably more efficient and convenient immigration of trainees from the PC desktop to mobile web browsers. However, web browsers face extreme difficulty in sustaining online visualization of large-scale building information modeling (BIM) data on metro, FDS smoking data, crowding passengers, and planning of fire evacuation path simultaneously due to the weak rendering capability and limited networking bandwidth. Herein, a novel lightweight Web3D technology roadmap is proposed to address these problems. First, the lightweight preprocessing of metro BIM data is performed by semantic and geometric retrieval of repetitive entities. Second, crowding passengers are visualized online by reusing several avatars and behavior randomly in terms of textures and scales in a lightweight manner. Third, substantial smoking data are reduced by redundancy elimination and voxel normalization and rendered online with spirit texture particle. Finally, the backbone escape paths are extracted by clustering the virtual evacuation traces that are collected by virtual reality devices, such as HTC VIVE, as initial heuristics, and a lightweight metro fire evacuation planning evacuation based on adaptive ant colony optimization is realized on mobile web browsers. Numerous tests have been conducted online, and experimental results show that the proposed method can be loaded remotely in a few seconds and visualized on mobile web browsers smoothly.

Design and Implementation of Augmented Reality Browser for Mobile Terminal

The rapid advancement of mobile internet technology has promoted the vigorous development of Augmented Reality (AR) applications. However, the native AR application on the mobile terminal has the disadvantages of closedness and high cross-platform cost. The Web-based application has universality and good cross-platform characteristics. Using Web as the carrier of AR applications will solve the problems of the native application. However, there is a large gap between Web applications and the native applications in the performance and efficiency of the algorithm. To solve these problems, the mobile browser’s support for AR applications has been expanded in this paper. The native computing ability of the mobile phone is encapsulated into a Web-callable interface, and the hybrid rendering method is used which uses both the native and the Web to render the AR applications.

PleioNet: a web-based visualization tool for exploring pleiotropy across complex traits

Pleiotropy plays an important role in furthering our understanding of the shared genetic architecture of different human diseases and traits. However, exploring and visualizing pleiotropic information with currently publicly available tools is limiting and challenging. To aid researchers in constructing and digesting pleiotropic networks, we present PleioNet, a web-based visualization tool for exploring this information across human diseases and traits. This program provides an intuitive and interactive web interface that seamlessly integrates large database queries with visualizations that enable users to quickly explore complex high-dimensional pleiotropic information. PleioNet works on all modern computer and mobile web browsers, making pleiotropic information readily available to a broad range of researchers and clinicians with diverse technical backgrounds. We expect that PleioNet will be an important tool for studying the underlying pleiotropic connections among human diseases and traits. PleioNet is hosted on Google cloud and freely available at http://www.pleionet.com/.

What Is This Sensor and Does This App Need Access to It?

Mobile sensors have already proven to be helpful in different aspects of people’s everyday lives such as fitness, gaming, navigation, etc. However, illegitimate access to these sensors results in a malicious program running with an exploit path. While the users are benefiting from richer and more personalized apps, the growing number of sensors introduces new security and privacy risks to end users and makes the task of sensor management more complex. In this paper, first, we discuss the issues around the security and privacy of mobile sensors. We investigate the available sensors on mainstream mobile devices and study the permission policies that Android, iOS and mobile web browsers offer for them. Second, we reflect the results of two workshops that we organized on mobile sensor security. In these workshops, the participants were introduced to mobile sensors by working with sensor-enabled apps. We evaluated the risk levels perceived by the participants for these sensors after they understood the functionalities of these sensors. The results showed that knowing sensors by working with sensor-enabled apps would not immediately improve the users’ security inference of the actual risks of these sensors. However, other factors such as the prior general knowledge about these sensors and their risks had a strong impact on the users’ perception. We also taught the participants about the ways that they could audit their apps and their permissions. Our findings showed that when mobile users were provided with reasonable choices and intuitive teaching, they could easily self-direct themselves to improve their security and privacy. Finally, we provide recommendations for educators, app developers, and mobile users to contribute toward awareness and education on this topic.

A survey of techniques for improving efficiency of mobile web browsing

SummaryMobile web traffic has now surpassed the desktop web traffic and has become the primary means for service providers to reach out to the billions of end users. Due to this trend, optimization of mobile web browsing (MWB) has gained significant attention. In this paper, we present a survey of techniques for improving the efficiency of web browsing on mobile systems, proposed in the last 6‐7 years. We review the techniques from both the networking domain (eg, proxy and browser enhancements) and the processor architecture domain (eg, hardware customization and thread‐to‐core scheduling). We organize the research works based on key parameters to highlight their similarities and differences. Beyond summarizing the recent works, this survey aims to emphasize the need of architecting for MWB as the first principle, instead of retrofitting for it.

U.S. consumer m-commerce involvement: Using in-depth interviews to propose an acceptance model of shopping apps-based m-commerce

AbstractM-commerce refers to electronic commerce (e-commerce) using mobile devices such as smartphones. M-commerce takes two different forms: one using mobile web browsers, and the other, using sma...

Using Machine Learning to Optimize Web Interactions on Heterogeneous Mobile Systems

The web has become a ubiquitous application development platform for mobile systems. Yet, web access on mobile devices remains an energy-hungry activity. Prior work in the field mainly focuses on the initial page loading stage, but fails to exploit the opportunities for energy-efficiency optimization while the user is interacting with a loaded page. This paper presents a novel approach for performing energy optimization for interactive mobile web browsing. At the heart of our approach is a set of machine learning models, which estimate at runtime the frames per second for a given user interaction input by running the computation-intensive web render engine on a specific processor core under a given clock speed. We use the learned predictive models as a utility function to quickly search for the optimal processor setting to carefully trade responsive time for reduced energy consumption. We integrate our techniques to the open-source Chromium browser and apply it to two representative mobile user events: scrolling and pinching (i.e., zoom in and out). We evaluate the developed system on the landing pages of the top-100 hottest websites and two big.LITTLE heterogeneous mobile platforms. Our extensive experiments show that the proposed approach reduces the system-wide energy consumption by over 36% on average and up to 70%. This translates to an over 17% improvement on energy-efficiency over a state-of-the-art event-based web browser scheduler, but with significantly fewer violations on the quality of service.

GUI-Squatting Attack: Automated Generation of Android Phishing Apps

Mobile phishing attacks, such as mimic mobile browser pages, masquerade as legitimate applications by leveraging repackaging or clone techniques, have caused varied yet significant security concerns. Consequently, detection techniques have been receiving increasing attention. However, many such detection methods are not well tested and may therefore still be vulnerable to new types of phishing attacks. In this article, we propose a new attacking technique, named GUI-Squatting attack, which can generate phishing apps (phapps) automatically and effectively on the Android platform. Our method adopts image processing and deep learning algorithms, to enable powerful and large-scale attacks. We observe that a successful phishing attack requires two conditions, page confusion and logic deception during attacks synthesis. We directly optimize these two conditions to create a practical attack. Our experimental results reveal that existing phishing defenses are less effective against such emergent attacks and may, therefore, stimulate more efficient detection techniques. To further demonstrate that our generated phapps can not only bypass existing detection techniques, but also deceive real users, we conduct a human study and successfully steal users’ login information. The human study also shows that different response messages (e.g., “Crash” and “Server failed”) after pressing the login button mislead users to regard our phapps as functionality problems instead of security threats. Extensive experiments reveal that such newly proposed attacks still remain mostly undetected, and are worth further exploration.

Mobile Apps versus Web Browsers: A Comparison of Self-administered Survey Platforms

The research program at 23andMe, Inc., a personal genetics company, studies a variety of health and medical conditions using customers' genetic and self-reported health information. While genetic i...

Wykorzystanie technologii mobilnych w handlu elektronicznym

The aim of this article is the analysis of the possibilities of using in mobile commerce and mobile browsers on the mobile devices (smartphone, tablet) and traditional (laptop, desktop computer) from the customer’s point of view. This analysis was carried out in two stages. The first stage assessed the possibilities and conditions for the use of mobile and traditional devices in e-commerce. In the second stage, electronic commerce conducted on mobile devices was compared with the use of mobile applications and web browsers, with electronic commerce carried out using browsers on traditional devices. The structure of the article consists of presenting the assumptions of the study, describing the methodology and the research sample as well as analyzing and discussing the obtained results. A qualitative study was conducted using the CAWI method on a selected sample of university students.

An empirical study on customer adoption of mobile payment application in India

Digital economy is becoming a reality. Business all over the world is moving towards digital platform and so is the payment option. Mobile application is becoming one of the easiest and fastest options for making payments and is predicted to have a very large potential in the days to come. This study focuses on the customer adoption of mobile payment application. The study reveals that the factors like usefulness, pervasiveness, ease of use, offers and cash back and service assume a vital role in encouraging adoption of mobile payment applications. Results show customers have greater preference towards mobile payment applications over the mobile web browsers, which is a clear sign of awareness among the customers. The study also showed that teenagers are more aggressive in embracing mobile payment application than the older age groups. Compared to other modes of payments, mobile payment with 14.5% preference among customers is low and there is a need for aggressive promotions and marketing campaigns. The study throws light into the customer adoption factors which can act as guidelines for improving customer adoption and awareness of mobile payment applications.