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

TL;DR

This study compares the browsing experience across Chrome, Firefox, and Opera on mobile devices by analyzing metrics like loading time and cache performance over three weeks, revealing differences and implications for users and developers.

Contribution

It provides an empirical analysis of browsing experience differences across popular mobile browsers using real-world data and offers insights for improving web performance.

Findings

Significant differences in loading times among browsers.

Cache performance varies notably between browsers.

Certain metrics strongly influence browsing experience differences.

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.