Language support for extensible web browsers

Abstract

Web browsers are sophisticated and crucial programs, and millions of users extend their browsers to customize their browsing experience. In this paper we argue the position that such extensions themselves constitute an important facet of web applications-one in need of serious programminglanguage research attention. We illustrate this position by contrasting the extension mechanisms of the two predominant extensible browsers, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, and highlighting their weaknesses. We then describe very preliminary work that addresses these shortcomings.

Energy wars - Chrome vs. Firefox

“…To analyze browsers' energy consumption when on YouTube, and help answer RQ1, another Selenium script performs the following: navigate to YouTube 12 , search for and watch a specific 4k video 13 , afterwards return to the YouTube main page, search for and watch a 1080p video 14 .…”

“…There are several studies focused on web browsers. They are sophisticated and crucial software systems, and millions of users extend their browsers to customize their browsing experience, so, extensions constitute an important facet of web applications [12]. In modern Web applications, style formatting and layout calculation often account for a substantial amount of local Web page processing time.…”