Mobile Browser Research Articles

Displaying Videos in Web Surveys

Videos are often used in web surveys to assess attitudes. While including videos may allow researchers to test immediate reactions, there may be issues associated with displaying videos that are overlooked. In this article, we examine the effects of using video stimuli on responses in a probability-based web survey. Specifically, we evaluate the association between demographics, mobile device usage, and the ability to view videos; differences in ad recall based on whether respondents saw a video or still images of the video; whether respondents’ complete viewing of videos is related to presentation order; and the data quality of follow-up questions to the videos as a function of presentation order and complete viewing. Overall, we found that respondents using mobile browsers were less likely to be able to view videos in the survey. Those who could view videos were more likely to indicate recall compared to those who viewed images, and videos that were shown later in the survey were viewed in their entirety less frequently than those shown earlier. These results directly pertain to the legitimacy of using videos in web surveys to gather data about attitudes.

Layered Architecture for Mobile Web Based Application

Mobile and other PDA devices allow us to access the World Wide Web anytime and anywhere using fully functional mobile web browsers. This study utilizes the mobile web to deliver services to register students for courses at Fiji National University (FNU). Developing dynamic web based applications for mobile devices is a challenging task, because these devices have limited processing power and physical memory. In order to overcome these limitations, the author proposed layered architecture for the development of this system. This paper describes the architecture, design and implementation of the new system. Experimental results demonstrate that proposed architecture can effectively reduce the client side resource utilization (processing power and physical memory) of dynamic mobile web based systems. Furthermore the author conclude this paper by outlining future work for research in this area.

Towards Context-Aware Mobile Web Browsing

With the rapid development of mobile web technology, different kinds of mobile web services are emerging, such as instant news, music, advertisement, etc. Due to the limit of mobile devices and the overloaded information, it is necessary to recommend personalized information to the end-users. In this paper, we propose a context-aware mobile web browsing system for personalized information recommendation on mobile devices. We capture the user's contexts such as time and location during web browsing to obtain context-based user preferences. The system then recommends users most favoured content by adapting the webpage according to user profile and the current context. Finally, we implement a prototype of context-aware mobile web browsing system using HTML5 on Android platform and conduct a preliminary evaluation with respect to user satisfaction and recommendation accuracy.

Network assisted latency reduction for mobile web browsing

To load a webpage, a web browser first downloads the base HTML file of the page in order to discover the list of objects referenced in the page. This process takes roughly one round-trip time and constitutes a significant portion of the web browsing delay on mobile devices as wireless networks suffer from longer transmission and access delays compared to wired networks. In this work, we propose a solution for eliminating this initial delay, which is transparent to end systems, does not require modifying HTTP, and is well suited for web browsing on mobile devices. Our solution, called WebPro, relies on a network proxy that builds an up-to-date database of resource lists for the websites visited frequently by network users. The proxy resides in the wired part of the network, and hence can afford to pro-actively build and refresh the resource list database periodically. When a request for a webpage comes to the proxy, it simultaneously fetches the base HTML and all referenced objects required to render the webpage using the corresponding resource list stored in the local database. We also show that the benefits of WebPro become more significant by increasing the complexity of webpages as it is able to circumvent the inter-object dependencies in a webpage. We have built a working prototype of WebPro and have used real-world traffic traces along with live experiments over Wi-Fi and LTE networks to assess its performance. Our results show an average of 26% reduction in page load time for a mix of popular web sites chosen from categories such as news, sports and shopping. Moreover, in comparison to another best known proxy-based solution, WebPro provides delay reductions ranging from 5% to 51% for a variety of web sites.

PD19-04 A MOBILE POINT-OF-CARE APPLICATION FOR URETERAL STENT TRACKING

You have accessJournal of UrologySurgical Technology & Simulation: Instrumentation & Technology II1 Apr 2016PD19-04 A MOBILE POINT-OF-CARE APPLICATION FOR URETERAL STENT TRACKING Justin Ziemba, Wesley Ludwig, Leticia Ruiz, Eduardo Carvalhal, and Brian Matlaga Justin ZiembaJustin Ziemba More articles by this author , Wesley LudwigWesley Ludwig More articles by this author , Leticia RuizLeticia Ruiz More articles by this author , Eduardo CarvalhalEduardo Carvalhal More articles by this author , and Brian MatlagaBrian Matlaga More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.juro.2016.02.1403AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES The “forgotten” ureteral stent is a significant hazard that can lead to invasive surgery and loss of renal function. To date, tracking stents is a cumbersome task, given their high frequency of placement and variable indwelling times. To simplify this process an application was designed to track patients with indwelling ureteral stents. METHODS Ureteral Stent Tracker® is a secure mobile cloud-based point-of-care (POC) application 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 enrolled all patients of an international healthcare network who required a stent following ureteroscopy during a 12 week period. A unique profile with name and medical record number was created for each patient. Within the profile, a stent care plan was created that included manufacturer, type, serial number, size, laterality, date of insertion, date of anticipated extraction, and confirmed date of extraction (Figure 1). The application provides a real-time dashboard of all stent care plans within the practice (Figure 2) and can generate weekly email reminders to providers. RESULTS A total of 41 patients were enrolled in the study, which represented 42 ureteral stents. All patients had a profile and care plan created within the application at the time of stent insertion in the operating room. Stent removal was performed in the clinic and then marked as extracted in the care plan. At the end of the study period, a total of 16 (38%) stents were extracted with the remaining 26 (62%) indwelling and scheduled for extraction. No patients were lost to follow up. CONCLUSIONS Stent insertion, anticipated extraction, and confirmation of removal can easily be monitored with a secure mobile cloud-based POC application. Incorporating this system into routine workflow will prevent the “forgotten” stent, which is a significant risk in a busy urologic practice. © 2016FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 195Issue 4SApril 2016Page: e446-e447 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2016MetricsAuthor Information Justin Ziemba More articles by this author Wesley Ludwig More articles by this author Leticia Ruiz More articles by this author Eduardo Carvalhal More articles by this author Brian Matlaga More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement Advertisement PDF downloadLoading ...

Energy consumption and privacy in mobile Web browsing: Individual issues and connected solutions

Providing mechanisms to improve energy efficiency of mobile devices is, in the past few years, one of the important objectives in the field of green computing and energy savings. Several studies have addressed this issue from different point of views, i.e., hardware, software, as well as by analyzing the energy drained by different mobile applications. On the other hand, the energy consumption of Web browsing activities has been poorly addressed, given the lack of analysis about users’ real browsing sessions. In this paper we explore how energy savings in mobile devices can be effectively tackled by switching on/off filtering techniques offered by a privacy-enhancing technology. We present first, results about a survey that we conducted to understand the beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and expectations of mobile users towards privacy and energy issues, and their behavioral intention on what kind of countermeasures adopt to reduce their privacy leakage. Then, we present a tool, mNoTrace, that allows to protect privacy during Web Navigation and prove, by an experimental study, that, by helping users in protecting their privacy, mNoTrace also achieves a significant reduction in terms of communication and computation overhead and thus battery consumption. Conclusions, remarks and lessons learned on our experimental methodology, that employs hardware-based instrumentation, real workloads, and testing on real sites, will conclude the paper.

Technology Forecasting: A Case Study of Software Technology Product Families

With increasing use of computers, information and communication technologies, some software technologies products become part of everyday life. Many reports shows that use of desktop and mobile operating systems, search engines, web browsers, web servers and programming languages are increasing rapidly. This paper focuses on forecasting growth pattern of selected software technology product families using market share as indicator. Results of four growth curve methods namely Logistic, Gompertz, Log Logistic and Mono-Molecular are compared using MAD and RMSE error measures. For the period under consideration, majority software product families follow increasing / decreasing growth pattern. Results indicate that industry of respective technology product remain dominated by few providers for year 2025. Monopoly or oligopoly market structure will lead to long increasing period for the top providers.

TouchSignatures: Identification of user touch actions and PINs based on mobile sensor data via JavaScript

Conforming to W3C specifications, mobile web browsers allow JavaScript code in a web page to access motion and orientation sensor data without the user's permission. The associated risks to user security and privacy are however not considered in W3C specifications. In this work, for the first time, we show how user security can be compromised using these sensor data via browser, despite that the data rate is 3–5 times slower than what is available in app. We examine multiple popular browsers on Android and iOS platforms and study their policies in granting permissions to JavaScript code with respect to access to motion and orientation sensor data. Based on our observations, we identify multiple vulnerabilities, and propose TouchSignatures which implements an attack where malicious JavaScript code on an attack tab listens to such sensor data measurements. Based on these streams, TouchSignatures is able to distinguish the user's touch actions (i.e., tap, scroll, hold, and zoom) and her PINs, allowing a remote website to learn the client-side user activities. We demonstrate the practicality of this attack by collecting data from real users and reporting high success rates using our proof-of-concept implementations. We also present a set of potential solutions to address the vulnerabilities. The W3C community and major mobile browser vendors including Mozilla, Google, Apple and Opera have acknowledged our work and are implementing some of our proposed countermeasures.

From Multi-Channel to Omni-Channel: Determinants of Channel Choice

Digital platforms empowered and altered consumer shopping behavior in a big way. Consumers buying journey today encompasses interaction with multiple channels such as search engine, comparison sites, mobile browsers, apps, social media platforms and physical stores. As digital continues to empower consumers in newer and better ways to discover, research, engage and buy products and services, retailers should continuously tweak, evolve or even radically change the way they look at or operate their business in order to create seamless customer experience across all touch points and channels customers interact. Retailers who fail to adopt to the changing consumer dynamics risks falling behind. Therefore it is imperative for retailers to understand consumers channel choice and factors that drive consumers channel choice decisions. The main objective of the study is to investigate factors that drive consumers channel choice. Consumers stage in the buying journey and product type was taken as key independent variables and channel choice as dependent variable. A survey was conducted to investigate consumers channel choice across diverse product categories-selected based on Products perceived risks, degree of involvement (search and purchase effort) and tangibility. Consumers channel choice during different stages in the buying journey was also investigated. Data is collected from consumers who have experienced online shopping at least once and bought one or few products selected for the study. Based on the analysis, a conceptual model is derived. It was found that consumers use multiple channels during the research phase (for product information, comparison and evaluation) of their buying journey. There is a strong relationship between consumers channel choice and stages in the buying journey. Online channels such as search engine, review sites, online retailers are mostly preferred due to its perceived benefits. When it comes to making an actual purchase of products like home, kitchen appliances and furniture, physical retailers are still highly preferred by consumers. The convenience and simplicity of giving ratings perhaps explains the reason behind why majority had preferred ratings over other touch points or channels during the post purchase stage. Retailers should strive to create seamless experience for its consumers across channels. Be it search experience in mobile, website or purchase experience inside the physical store, retailers should not leave any stones unturned. The simple mantra is to be there when and where it matters to consumers. Consumers’ decision making journey today is non-linear and fluidic. Consumers’ criss-cross across channels during the journey making it even more imperative for retailers to create relevant, personalized and timely information. This call for a unified approach (no channel demarcation but integration for better consumer experience) and presence across channels consumers interact.

Mobile Software Testing: Thoughts, Strategies, Challenges, and Experimental Study

Mobile devices have become more pervasive in our daily lives, and are gradually replacing regular computers to perform traditional processes like Internet browsing, editing photos, playing videos and sound track, and reading different files. The importance of mobile devices in our life necessitates more concerns of the reliability and compatibility of mobile applications, and thus, testing these applications arises as an important phase in mobile devices adaption process. This paper addressed various research directions on mobile applications testing by investigating essential concepts, scope, features and requirements for testing mobile application. We highlight the similarities and the differences between mobile APP testing and mobile web testing. Furthermore, we discuss and compare different mobile testing approaches and environments, and provide the challenges as emergent needs in test environments. As a case study, we compared the testing experience of hybrid application in an emulator and a real world device. The purpose of the experiment is to verify to which extent a virtual device can emulate a complete client experience. Set of experiments are conducted where five android mobile browsers are tested. Each browser will be on a real device as well as an emulated device with the same features (CPU used, memory size, etc). The application will be tested on the following metrics: Performance and function/behavior testing

Man-in-the-browser-cache: Persisting HTTPS attacks via browser cache poisoning

In this paper, we present a systematic study of browser cache poisoning (BCP) attacks, wherein a network attacker performs a one-time Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attack on a user's HTTPS session, and substitutes cached resources with malicious ones. We investigate the feasibility of such attacks on five mainstream desktop browsers and 16 popular mobile browsers. We find that browsers are highly inconsistent in their caching policies for loading resources over SSL connections with invalid certificates. In particular, the majority of desktop browsers (99% of the market share) and popular mobile browsers (over a billion user downloads) are affected by BCP attacks to a large extent. Existing solutions for safeguarding HTTPS sessions fail to provide comprehensive defense against this threat. We provide guidelines for users and browser vendors to defeat BCP attacks. Meanwhile, we propose defense techniques for website developers to mitigate an important subset of BCP attacks on existing browsers without cooperation of users and browser vendors. We have reported our findings to browser vendors and confirmed the vulnerabilities. For example, Google has acknowledged the vulnerability we reported in Chrome's HTML5 AppCache and has fixed the problem according to our suggestion.

Concurrency in Mobile Browser Engines

browsers are one of the most pervasive applications for an entire range of personal computing platforms--from mobile devices to desktops. Using technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) to build Web apps has the promise of creating portable applications for all platforms. Thus browsers become application containers, requiring increased performance from browser engines. Here, the authors discuss advances in browser technologies that exploit multicore processing. They use the Zoomm browser and the MuscalietJS JavaScript engine as running examples of highly concurrent browser and JavaScript engines. They show how concurrency is effectively exploited at different levels: to speed up computation performance, preload network resources, and preprocess resources outside the critical path to speed up page loading and workloads.

A Bayesian approach to predicting website revisitation on mobile phones

Mobile web browsing is highly recurrent, in that a large proportion of user's page requests are to a small set of websites. Despite this, most mobile browsers do not provide an efficient means for revisiting sites. Although significant research exists on prediction in the personal computer realm, little work has been done in the mobile realm where physical constraints of the device and mobile browsing behaviors are vastly different. The current research proposes a Bayesian model approach, based on a cognitive model of memory retrieval that integrates multiple cues in order to predict the next site a user will visit. These cues include frequency of site visitation, the recency of site visitation, and the context in which specific sites are accessed. The model is assessed using previously collected web logs from 24 iPhone users over the course of one year. Our model outperforms simpler models based on frequency or recency, which are sometimes implemented in desktop browsers. Potential applications of the model are discussed with the objective of increasing browsing efficiency on mobile devices. HighlightsPredicts website revisitation on mobile phones.Accounts for nearly 50% of site visits.Incorporates frequency, recency, and context (current site) to make predictions.Comparison of models to show contribution of each predictive cue.

An Empirical Evaluation of Security Indicators in Mobile Web Browsers

Mobile browsers are increasingly being relied upon to perform security sensitive operations. Like their desktop counterparts, these applications can enable SSL/TLS to provide strong security guarantees for communications over the web. However, the drastic reduction in screen size and the accompanying reorganization of screen real-estate significantly changes the use and consistency of the security indicators and certificate information that alert users of site identity and the presence of strong cryptographic algorithms. In this paper, we perform the first measurement of the state of critical security indicators in mobile browsers. We evaluate ten mobile and two tablet browsers, representing over 90% of the market share, against the recommended guidelines for web user interface to convey security set forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). While desktop browsers follow the majority of guidelines, our analysis shows that mobile browsers fall significantly short. We also observe notable inconsistencies across mobile browsers when such mechanisms actually are implemented. We show where and how these failures on mobile browsers eliminate clues previously designed for, and still present in, desktop browsers to detect attacks such as phishing and man-in-the-middle. Finally, we offer advice on where current standards are unclear or incomplete.

Multidimensional modelling of quality of experience for mobile Web browsing

The increasing use of mobile devices for Web browsing has driven a rising interest amongst actors involved in the service provisioning chain in understanding the factors influencing user experience. Research activities stemming from both the fields of human–computer interaction (focusing on user experience, UX) and networking and telecommunications (focusing on Quality of Experience, QoE) have addressed different factors, both aiming for a similar goal – understanding and enhancing the user experience when accessing mobile Web sites. We draw these diverged studies under a common umbrella with the aim of studying multiple factors that impact QoE while browsing the mobile Web, focusing on design, information quality, and loading time. We present a multidimensional analysis of the quality of user experience in the context of browsing information, thematic, and e-mail portals on smartphones and tablet devices. Experiments were conducted in field settings with 77 participants during a two-month period. Based on factor manipulations, participants rated sixteen versions of an information portal and a thematic portal, and eight versions of an e-mail portal by using a smartphone or a tablet. For the purpose of data analysis and hypotheses testing, analysis of variance, Pearson correlation analysis, and multiple regression analysis have been reported. Results show the existence of significant effects of examined factors on QoE. Mutual relations between QoE and multiple perceivable characteristics of the experience that contribute to its quality, referred to as QoE features, are found to be highly and positively correlated, and are further quantified using multiple linear regression models.

Designing Musical Instruments for the Browser

Native Web technologies provide great potential for musical expression. We introduce two JavaScript libraries towards this end: Gibberish.js, providing heavily optimized audio DSP, and Interface.js, a GUI toolkit that works with mouse, touch, and motion events. Together they provide a complete system for defining musical instruments that can be used in both desktop and mobile Web browsers. Interface.js also enables control of remote synthesis applications via a server application that translates the socket protocol used by Web interfaces into both MIDI and OSC messages. We have incorporated these libraries into the creative coding environment Gibber, where we provide mapping abstractions that enable users to create digital musical instruments in as little as a single line of code. They can then be published to a central database, enabling new instruments to be created, distributed, and run entirely in the browser.

Phone Number Extraction and Area Code Mining in Mobile Web Browsing for Smart Phones

The phone numbers listed on a Web page displayed on a mobile phone can be useful information for instant reservations or general inquiries. Although current software technology for smart phones can recognize and highlight phone numbers on a page and auto-dial them when clicked, the extraction accuracy often drops significantly due to many cases of data that are falsely recognized as phone numbers. Furthermore, there are many situations in which the area code is missing, preventing the mobile phone from auto-dialing correctly. To resolve these problems, this paper proposes an intelligent phone number extraction and area code mining technique for smart phones in a mobile environment. A series of experiments performed using Android smart phones showed that our method greatly improved the accuracy of phone number mining and the speed of auto-dialing in a mobile Web environment.

An intelligent Mobile Web Browser to adapt the mobile web as a function of the physical environment

Today, millions of users all over the world visit websites using their Smartphones. Mobile devices have several features that may contribute to worsen the user experience when using mobile webs, such as: small displays and virtual keyboards, poor precision to select elements using the finger as cursor. In addition, the mobile Web has a peculiar feature, is not always used in the same place or in the same situations; in many cases environmental factors can adversely affect the user experience while he is using a web application, adverse situations derived from the ambient may be different: noise pollution, an excess of light, not being able to see well the letters while walking, etc. This research presents a novel mobile Web paradigm that allows the adaptation of web applications depending on the environment. The proposed solution introduces a novel Mobile Web Browser based on the principles of the Ambient Intelligence (AmI). This Web browser uses the Smartphone's hardware elements as sensors and microphones to capture the environmental information, which will be intelligently analyzed to detect events and other situations. The identified situations will be communicated to the web application, so that appropriate adaptation are made and there by improve the user experience.

The Role of the CPU in Energy-Efficient Mobile Web Browsing

Mobile Web browsing advancements have largely been driven by the single-minded pursuit of performance. This article takes a different stance and examines the energy efficiency of mobile Web browsing. Focusing on both the network and CPU, the authors find that generational advancements in network technology have reached a point where the mobile CPU is starting to have noticeable impact on Web browsing performance and energy consumption. Achieving energy-efficient mobile Web browsing requires considering both CPU and network capabilities (that is, latency). The authors show that under different network latency conditions, achieving energy-efficient mobile Web browsing mandates different CPU performance capabilities. It is important to understand and leverage such interactions between the network and CPU to deliver high mobile Web performance while maintaining a low energy footprint, which current OS dynamic voltage and frequency scaling governors fail to achieve. The authors' findings suggest that designing future high-performance and energy-efficient mobile Web clients implies looking beyond individual components and taking a full system perspective.

The Development of a Gamebook for Education

Abstract Mobile technologies are becoming very accessible to students, due to advances in the development of technology and a simultaneous decline in hardware costs. In this way, it is relevant to consider the potential of these devices in teaching and learning. Our research was designed to evaluate the possibility of creating gamebooks (gamified books) that are effective in teaching and learning. After analyzing the features available in many free or open tools for making ebooks we find out that these tools were not appropriate creating gamebooks. This paper presents a novel interactive book, the gamebook (g-book): a book with a story that can be read sequentially or not. The main difference refers to the ability to choose different paths to the main characters or the unfolding of the history, as happens in games. We built a model of a dynamic book that functions as an educational game for “Environmental Studies”, aimed at children in the 4th grade, mostly 9-10 years old, in Portuguese schools. This paper presents the design and features of this g-book titled “Adventures in the Guadiana River”, implemented with the Unity3D platform that can be explored in iPhones, iPads, Android mobile devices and web browsers for the OSX and Windows platforms. Preliminary tests with our prototypes revealed very good usability and promising pedagogical potential in the proposed models.