Mobile Browser Research Articles

Compression Algorithms: Brotli, Gzip and Zopfli Perspective

Objectives: Websites response time is the most critical in today’s arena. This study contributes to various compression algorithms, which enable Web Servers to accelerate Websites responses to meet the need of Clients. Methods/Statistical Analysis: Different techniques are used to improve the browsing experience of the Clients and acceleration of Websites responses. The prominent techniques in practice are Web contents compression to decrease the HTTP response. One of the popular and effective compression file formats used over the Internet is Gzip. Team Google come up with two algorithms, known as Zopfli and Brotli, which are probably potential replacement of Gzip, because of their performance. Findings: This study provides an overview about these algorithms and then compares them with different types of files by mimicking the http compression using fiddler tool. It also highlights the short coming of Brotli that should be overcome in near future as to become a major success. Brotli distinguished itself in the comparison with its counterparts and is the future technology and probably will replace Gzip. Application/Improvements: Brotli enabled browsers are the need of the day. Also Brotli version for mobile browser will ease the mobile users. Keywords: Brotli, Compression, Decompression, Gzip, Zopfli

Investigating the Network Characteristics of Two Popular Web-Based Video Streaming Sites

The determinants of the strategies to be employed by video streaming sites are application (mobile devices or web browsers) and container of the video application. They affect video streaming network characteristics, which is often the traffic flow, and its quality. It is against this background that studies on streaming strategies suggested the need to investigate and identify the relationship between buffer time, video stream protocol, packet speed and size, upload time, and waiting period, specifically to aid network administrative support in case of network traffic bottlenecks. In view of this, this study investigates the network characteristics of YouTube and Vimeo, using experimental methodology, and involving WireShark as network analyzer. Google Chrome and Firefox are the web browsers employed, while packet size, protocols, packet interval, TCP window size and accumulation ratio are the metrics. Short ON-OFF, Long ON-OFF, and No ON-OFF cycles are the three streaming strategies identified. It is further shown that both Vimeo and YouTube employ these strategies but the choice depends on the container of the video streamed.

Pembangunan Class Library untuk Domain Product Management di Aplikasi M-Commerce pada Android

Criteo reports that the use of M-Commerce in 2015 has increased about 15% - 26%, compared to 2014. In 2015, users access M-Commerce using mobile phone more often than other devices. Around 54% of those users use mobile app while 46% use mobile browser. In addition, there is an increase in conversion value of the number of users switching from mobile browser to mobile app by 120%. In all these activities, 286% of users focus on product viewing activities. This phenomenon requires software developers to develop M-Commerce in a short time. On the other hand, the developers need time to develop MCommerce. One of the time-consuming activities is the development of functions for product management. Based on the software development, there is one concept that can be used, which is class library. A class library is a collection of classes and methods that provide functionality as basis for building a system within a case domain. The first step in this research is to do domain analysis to acquire frozenspot, hotspot, and function mechanism that will be provided in class library. The result of the hotspot will be analyzed to obtain the nine basic functions in the domain of product catalog case in M-Commerce. These functions will be mapped into ten classes in a class library which will be tested using unit testing and integration testing that can be used by M-Commerce developers to accelerate the development of product management on M-Commerce.

Digital forensic approaches for Amazon Alexa ecosystem

Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as the Amazon Echo – a smart speaker developed by Amazon – are undoubtedly great sources of potential digital evidence due to their ubiquitous use and their always-on mode of operation, constituting a human-life's black box. The Amazon Echo in particular plays a centric role for the cloud-based intelligent virtual assistant (IVA) Alexa developed by Amazon Lab126. The Alexa-enabled wireless smart speaker is the gateway for all voice commands submitted to Alexa. Moreover, the IVA interacts with a plethora of compatible IoT devices and third-party applications that leverage cloud resources. Understanding the complex cloud ecosystem that allows ubiquitous use of Alexa is paramount on supporting digital investigations when need raises. This paper discusses methods for digital forensics pertaining to the IVA Alexa's ecosystem. The primary contribution of this paper consists of a new efficient approach of combining cloud-native forensics with client-side forensics (forensics for companion devices), to support practical digital investigations. Based on a deep understanding of the targeted ecosystem, we propose a proof-of-concept tool, CIFT, that supports identification, acquisition and analysis of both native artifacts from the cloud and client-centric artifacts from local devices (mobile applications and web browsers).

Preventing the Forgotten Ureteral Stent by Using a Mobile Point-of-Care Application.

The forgotten ureteral stent (FUS) can lead to patient morbidity. To date, tracking ureteral stents is a cumbersome task, given their high frequency of insertion and variable indwelling times. To simplify this process, an application was developed to track patients with indwelling ureteral stents. We report our initial user experience and clinical outcomes with this application. Ureteral Stent Tracker™ (UST) is a secure, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA)-compliant, cloud-based point-of-care application. It is designed for logging stent insertion, scheduling the date of anticipated stent extraction, and confirming stent removal. It is accessible via a mobile phone application or web browser interface. We consecutively enrolled all patients who underwent ureteral stent insertion for any indication by two urologists from January 10, 2015, to October 10, 2016. A retrospective chart review was performed of all patients included in the UST database. Data extracted included patient demographics, diagnosis, procedure, and stent characteristics. A total of 115 patients were included with a mean age of 52.4 years; 54% (62/115) were male and 58% (67/115) were Caucasian. This cohort represented 146 ureteral stent care plans with 23 patients (23/115; 20%) having more than one care plan during the study period. The most common procedure performed was ureteroscopy (70/146; 48%) for a diagnosis of nephrolithiasis (108/146; 74%). The median indwelling ureteral stent time was 14 days (interquartile range: 7-45 days). A total of three patients (3/115; 3%) did not return for their scheduled extraction, but were identified only through the application. Each patient was contacted, resulting in effective removal of all three stents in the office. Tracking of ureteral stents is critical to prevent the patient safety issue of the FUS. The UST is a secure, HIPPA-compliant, cloud-based application, which once incorporated into the workflow of a urologic practice can prevent the FUS.

Mobile accessibility expense analysis of the agrarian WWW portal

The article analyses the potential expenditures that would be required in order to make the agrarian web information source (the areas of agriculture, food industry, forestry, water management) accessible from the mobile devices. The following approaches were analysed: creating of the responsive layout for mobile web browsers, creating a native application for the Android platform, and creating three native applications in the cross platform environment for the Android, iOS and Windows Phone. The experimental evaluation was performed using the Agrarian WWW portal AGRIS (www.agris.cz), which is one of the most visited online information source in the Czech Republic for covering the areas of agriculture, regional, and countryside development.

ActiveSchematics AutoRendering Mobile Device Optimization

In this modern era, technology is one of our main necessities. Technology is always evolving and changes from day by day. One of the major developments in technology is the increasing usage of mobile devices for personal use or even for company use. AA-AS/EDS-WIR2 is one of the sub departments in the Robert Bosch Company that creates applications for the automotive market. The department has created an application named ActiveSchematics AutoRendering. This application is used in car workshops to help mechanics to repair car defects by rendering the car schematics. This application is constructed with an ASP.NET framework combined with a standalone Delphi program as a plugin. The front-end development is done using HTML5, CSS, JavaScript code, and the back-end development is done using C#. The schematics are SVG-based with HTML as the container file. At present, the rendered schematics are not compatible when opened from a mobile browser, because the legacy support for interactivity (for example zooming and panning) is implemented without any mobile support code. The company wants the application to become a mobile device friendly application. The research proposal to be addressed is to solve which front-end libraries can be used to help the SVG schematics to implement mobile-based gesture compatibility. After some trial and error experiments, mobile device improvement will be implemented by adding jQuery, Hammer.js, jQuery PanZoom, and Bootstrap library. The experimental results have been successful and the company can have the mobile device friendly feature for their clients. This research shows that jQuery and hammer.js can be implemented on an SVG object to become a mobile device friendly schematic.

Modelling the relationship between design/performance factors and perceptual features contributing to Quality of Experience for mobile Web browsing

Browsing different types of Web sites on mobile devices has become a part of many people's everyday activities. In the context of Quality of Experience (QoE) research, there is an interest in understanding the impact of various web site design and performance factors, i.e., QoE influence factors (IFs) on different perceivable characteristics of a user’s experience which contribute to its quality, i.e., QoE features. In this paper, we refer to our recently published multidimensional QoE modelling study (Baraković and Skorin-Kapov, 2015), whereby 77 participants took part in a field study and rated sixteen different versions of an information portal and a thematic portal, and eight versions of an e-mail portal by using a smartphone or a tablet. We extend the previously reported data analysis with new findings explicitly exposing the relationships between QoE IFs and QoE features. In this paper, we quantify mutual relations between identified QoE IFs (Web site loading time, Web site aesthetics, number of taps to reach desired Web content, quality of Web site information) and selected QoE features (perceived Web site loading time, perceived Web site usability, perceived Web site aesthetics, perceived quality of Web site information). Results of the analysis show the existence of : (i) negative impact of number of taps to reach the desired Web content on perceived Web site loading time; (ii) negative impact of Web site loading time (in case of smartphones), and positive impacts of Web site aesthetics and quality of Web site information (in case of thematic portal) on perceived Web site usability; (iii) negative impact of number of taps to reach the desired Web content and positive impact of quality of Web site information (in case of thematic portal) on perceived Web site aesthetics; and (iv) positive impact of Web site aesthetics on perceived quality of Web site information. Moreover, obtained multiple linear regression models, which describe the mutual relations between considered QoE IFs and QoE features, extend previously reported multidimensional mobile Web QoE models and thereby enable the identification of the importance of distinct factors in terms of perceived QoE features.

Multipurpose Street Smart Garbage bin based on Iot

The government of India aims at “Swachh Bharat Mission” and for that we need smart city with smart streets enabled with smart garbage monitoring system. We see garbage bins around us placed at public places overflowing with due to increase in waste and results into unhygienic conditions for people and leads to deadly diseases. Thus to improve this situation, we proposed this project. In our proposed system, there are multiple smart garbage trash bins on a microcontroller board platform (Arduino Board) located throughout any city or the campus or hospital. The Arduino Board is interfaced with GSM modem and ultrasonic sensor. Once the level of threshold is being crossed, then ultrasonic sensors will trigger the GSM module which in turn continuously alert the authorised person by sending SMS reminder after until the dustbin is cleaned. Beside this, we will also create the central system that will keep showing us the current status of garbage on mobile web browser with html page by wi-fi. With the help of this, we will create shortest path for garbage collection vehicles using Dijkstra Algorithm. This is real time waste management by using smart trash bins that can be accessed anytime anywhere by the concerned person. Keywords: IoT; Smart city; Smart Garbage Bins; Arduino; Ultrasonic Sensors; GSM; Real time Analytics; Route Optimization

Personalized Assistive Web for Improving Mobile Web Browsing and Accessibility for Visually Impaired Users

Mobile web browsing has become a daily routine for many people, including those with visual impairments. However, usability and accessibility challenges of mobile handheld devices may compromise the benefits of mobile web access, particularly for users with visual impairments. To improve mobile web accessibility, we propose a Personalized Assistive Web (PAW) that aims to improve skimming in mobile web browsing for users with visual impairments through hierarchical outline view and personalization adaptations in this research. We empirically evaluated PAW via a controlled lab experiment with 21 blind participants and 34 sighted participants. The empirical results provide strong evidence for the positive impacts of the hierarchical outline view adaptation on user performance of information search (i.e., search time) and perceptions (i.e., perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness) across the two groups of participants and demonstrate that the positive effects of adaptation personalization vary with participants. The findings not only demonstrate the effectiveness of the hierarchical outline view adaptation for blind and sighted participants but also reveal some important similarities and interesting differences in the effect of personalized adaptation between the two groups of participants. This research provides design and technical insights that are instrumental for improving mobile web accessibility.

FluMob: Enabling Surveillance of Acute Respiratory Infections in Health-care Workers via Mobile Phones.

Singapore is a hotspot for emerging infectious diseases and faces a constant risk of pandemic outbreaks as a major travel and health hub for Southeast Asia. With an increasing penetration of smart phone usage in this region, Singapore’s pandemic preparedness framework can be strengthened by applying a mobile-based approach to health surveillance and control, and improving upon existing ideas by addressing gaps, such as a lack of health communication. FluMob is a digitally integrated syndromic surveillance system designed to assist health authorities in obtaining real-time epidemiological and surveillance data from health-care workers (HCWs) within Singapore, by allowing them to report influenza incidence using smartphones. The system, integrating a fully responsive web-based interface and a mobile interface, is made available to HCW using various types of mobile devices and web browsers. Real-time data generated from FluMob will be complementary to current health-care- and laboratory-based systems. This paper describes the development of FluMob, as well as challenges faced in the creation of the system.

AN INSECURE WILD WEB: A LARGE-SCALE STUDY OF EFFECTIVENESS OF WEB SECURITY MECHANISMS

This research work presents a large-scale study of the problems in real-world web applications and widely-used mobile browsers. Through a large-scale experiment, we find inconsistencies in Secure Socket Layer (SSL) warnings among popular mobile web browsers (over a billion users download). The majority of popular mobile browsers on the Google Play Store either provide incomplete information in SSL warnings shown to users or failed to provide SSL warnings in the presence of security certificate errors, thus making it a difficult task even for a security savvy user to make an informed decision. In addition, we find that 28% of websites are using mixed content. Mixed content means a secure website (https) loads a sub resource using insecure HTTP protocol. The mixed content weakens the security of entire website and vulnerable to man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. Furthermore, we inspected the default behavior of mobile web browsers and report that majority of mobile web browsers allow execution of mixed content in web applications, which implies billions of mobile browser users are vulnerable to eavesdropping and MITM attacks. Based on our findings, we make recommendations for website developers, users and browser vendors.

An End User Development Approach for Mobile Web Augmentation

The trend towards mobile devices usage has made it possible for the Web to be conceived not only as an information space but also as a ubiquitous platform where users perform all kinds of tasks. In some cases, users access the Web with native mobile applications developed for well-known sites, such as, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. These native applications might offer further (e.g., location-based) functionalities to their users in comparison with their corresponding Web sites because they were developed with mobile features in mind. However, many Web applications have no native counterpart and users access them using a mobile Web browser. Although the access to context information is not a complex issue nowadays, not all Web applications adapt themselves according to it or diversely improve the user experience by listening to a wide range of sensors. At some point, users might want to add mobile features to these Web sites, even if those features were not originally supported. In this paper, we present a novel approach to allow end users to augment their preferred Web sites with mobile features.We support our claims by presenting a framework for mobile Web augmentation, an authoring tool, and an evaluation with 21 end users.

Cloud Computing to Improve JavaScript Processing Efficiency of Mobile Applications

The burgeoning distribution of smartphone web applications based on various mobile environments is increasingly focusing on the performance of mobile applications implemented by JavaScript and HTML5 (Hyper Text Markup Language 5). If application software has a simple functional processing structure, then the problem is benign. However, browser loads are becoming more burdensome as the amount of JavaScript processing continues to increase. Processing time and capacity of the JavaScript in current mobile browsers are limited. As a solution, the Web Worker is designed to implement multi-threading. However, it cannot guarantee the computing ability as a native application on mobile devices, and is not sufficient to improve processing speed. The method proposed in this research overcomes the limitation of resources as a mobile client and guarantees performance by native application software by providing high computing service. It shifts the JavaScript process of a mobile device on to a cloud-based computer server. A performance evaluation experiment revealed the proposed algorithm to be up to 6 times faster in computing speed compared to the existing mobile browser`s JavaScript process, and 3 to 6 times faster than Web Worker. In addition, memory usage was also less than the existing technology.

Обеспечение систем автоматического управления современными информационными средствами удаленного доступа и мобильного контроля

The work is devoted to the equipment of technological processes under the control of automation systems of modern telecommunication functions that enable remote access and mobile control. Shows the mechanisms of realization of such functions, and issues to ensure their information security. The paper presents the features of building a Web application, automation system, made by technology based on free ASPX Web server running MS IIS 7.5 Express. Given the capabilities of the developed on the basis of the FTP server from a mobile browser, providing remote access and control of the manufacturing process using mobile devices. The practice of using developed means of telecommunication gave a positive result and showed the possibility of using them on other automation objects.

Mobile Website User Experience (UX) Evaluation on Indonesia's Online Marketplace

Internet economy is growing in Indonesia, and so is the smartphone usage. The popularity of online marketplace is getting bigger by the day yet the market is not utilized as best as it could. A lot of new smartphone user may not be familiar with the concept of mobile application, yet they browse for products to purchase using their mobile web browser. Therefore a mobile website User Experience (UX) evaluation on online marketplace in Indonesia is needed. By using User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ), this research hopes to evaluate which aspect of a marketplace’s mobile website is looked for by its users. An interview is conducted to 30 people to simulate shopping experience on Tokopedia and Bukalapak using a mobile web browser. The result shows that users prefers shopping without having to register, thus making online shopping quick and easy. In addition, user prefers to have all information they need regarding a product in one page rather than having to perform many action to reveal more information.

RETHINKING ENERGYPERFORMANCE TRADE-OFF in Mobile Web Page Loading

Excerpted from "Rethinking Energy-Performance Trade-Off in Mobile Web Page Loading," from Proceedings of the 21st Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking with permission. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2790103 © ACM 2015. Web browsers are one of the core applications on smartphones and other mobile devices, such as tablets. However, web browsing, particularly web page loading, is of high energy consumption as mobile browsers are largely optimized for performance and thus impose a significant burden on power-hungry mobile devices. With the advent of modern web capabilities, websites even become more complex and energy demanding. In the meantime, slow progress in battery technology constrains battery budget for mobile devices. As users are more aware of energy consumption of apps, it is desirable to improve the energy efficiency of web browsing, particularly web page loading.

Comparison of Mobile Web Browsers for Smartphones

ABSTRACTPrevious studies on mobile Web browsers have focused on phone features and technical performance, but not on the user interface. In this study, we compared three mobile Web browsers in the iPhone and ultimately proposed recommendations for the design of mobile Web browsers for smartphones. To develop such recommendations, we redefined the user interface (UI) components of mobile Web browsers from previous studies to conform to smartphones and compared the Chrome, Safari, and Opera Mini-browsers. To do this, we conducted experiments on usability tests with several dependent variables, including usefulness, perceived time reduction, minimal action, usability, ease to memorize, learnability, fun, and satisfaction. Finally, we developed several recommendations, based on the experimental results and participant interviews, which will fulfill user needs for the interface design of mobile Web browsers for smartphones. Multi-windows need to be implemented in a 3D environment. Developers should consider UI components and features that ease learning how to use the browser for novice users.

Demystifying the Imperfect Client-Side Cache Performance of Mobile Web Browsing

The web browser is one of the most significant applications on mobile devices such as smartphones. However, the user experience of mobile web browsing is undesirable because of the slow resource loading. To improve the performance of web resource loading, client-side cache has been adopted as a key mechanism. However, the existing passive measurement studies cannot comprehensively characterize the “ client-side ” cache performance of mobile web browsing. For example, most of these studies mainly focus on client-side implementations but not server-side configurations, suffer from biased user behaviors, and fail to study “ miscached ” resources. To address these issues, in this article, we present a proactive approach to making a comprehensive measurement study on client-side cache performance. The key idea of our approach is to proactively crawl resources from hundreds of websites periodically with a fine-grained time interval. Thus, we are able to uncover the resource update history and cache configurations at the server side, and analyze the cache performance in various time granularities. Based on our collected data, we build a new cache analysis model and study the upper bound of how high percentage of resources could potentially be cached and how effectively the caching works in practice. We report detailed analysis results of different websites and various types of web resources, and identify the problems caused by unsatisfactory cache performance. In particular, we identify two major problems— Redundant Transfer and Miscached Resource , which lead to unsatisfactory cache performance. We investigate three main root causes: Same Content , Heuristic Expiration , and Conservative Expiration Time , and discuss what mobile web developers can do to mitigate those problems.

A Systematic Analysis on Mobile Application Software Vulnerabilities: Issues and Challenges

Objectives: Mobile network, ad-hoc network or Wireless ad-hoc network is the latest networking trend today. In the past fifteen years the no. of Mobile phone users has grown exponentially. The perks offered by this wireless mode of networking are open to all: anywhere, anytime, un tethered access to a huge no. of global users. Statistical Analysis: This paper consists of systematic review and analysis of various existing techniques which helps us to cope against such disasters with an actual and sorted representation. In the end, we wind up our results with the merits and demerits of existing methods along with the liabilities of future scope in this area. Findings: The review studies have shown various mobile software vulnerabilities with their advantages, disadvantages along with their future scopes. Application: The application of mobile software networks is innumerable, from mobile browsers to e-commerce to mobile money, there uses are extensive and important.