Comparative Study on I/O Characteristics of Mobile Web Browsers

Abstract

Web browsers are one of the most widely used application in smartphone. Since there are a number of different layout engines for the web browsers, the IO efficiency of each browsers are very different. In this paper, we identify areas of improvement by analyzing and comparing the IO characteristics of four widely used web browsers, that is Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Dolphin. Via analyzing I/O characteristics of the four mobile web browsers, Firefox browser is the most efficient I/O behavior and Dolphin Browser is the worst one. Firefox has highest buffered writes in 57%. Journal and metadata are 21% which is the smallest fraction of all I/O size. In contrast, Dolphin has highest synchronous write ratio in 79%. Dolphin generates 502 of fsync() calls which is 6 more than Firefox. Through the comparative study, we identify areas for improvement by comparing I/O characteristics of the mobile web browsers.