12 ABSTRACT Web browser is the most commonly used client applicationWeb and speedBrowsers and efficiency of our online work depends on browser to a great extent. As the market is flooding with new browsers there is a lot of confusion in everyone’s mind as to which is the best browser.Our project aims to answer this question. We have done a comparative study of the four most popular web browsers namely Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Opera. In the first phase of our project v arious comparison parameters are selected which can be broadly cat egorized into -General Features, Security features and browser extensibility features. Using the selected benchmarking tools each browser is tested. We have also use our own test scripts for some parameters .Depending on the performance of the browser points are assignedSubmitted to each browser by .Public opinion is considered for usability issue and finally we have come to a conclusion t hat opera and firefox are leading the browser war. firefox has finished first scoring 49.84 and opera has scored the next highest 48.90 Our other contributions include a K-chromium browserAmogh ,addon Kulkarni for firefox and (05CO05) scripts showing the major browser attacks. Jaison Salu John (05CO29) The report gives details of work done by our team from Jan 6 th 2008 till March 29 th 2008. Yohan John Thampi (05CO67) Shravan Udaykumar (05CO59) I. INTRODUCTION Gaurav Prasad(08IS03F) The World Wide Web has come a long way in itsVrinda short existence. Halarnkar Without it, (08IS04F) many people wouldn’t know what to do with their day. And others literally couldn’t survive without it. To browse the internet we use browser. A browser provides a user interface for displaying and selecting items from a list of data or from hierarchically organized lists of data such as directory paths. We can tell that browser is the most commonly used client side application. Earlier the choice of the browser was limited but this is no longer the situation now. Numbers of options are available making the choice of web browser difficult and confusing. Mainstream browsers are getting tough competition from the upcoming alternatives each one having its own unique features. Hence making a right choice is a daunting task. The main reason that motivates us to work on this project is that nowadays the users just use any browser they get without knowing its positives and negatives. Our project aims clear the confusion in user’s mind by systematically testing the browsers and deciding t he best choice for different categories of users. First we discuss about the importance of a browser and its general architecture. In section III we elaborate our evaluation strategy. In section IV, V , VI VII we list and justify our selection of browsers, test environment ,parameters and benchmarks . Section VIII gives the details of the tools/scripts developed by us and the test results. Section IX gives discusses the security issues of the browser . Section X we list out the points of each browser . II. WHY WEB BROWSERS ARE SO IMPORTANT? Today most of what we use the web for isn’t just web pages, they are applications. Users upload download videos, chat, play online games, and use many other web services. Web browser is becoming more and more important as an application used to conductDEPARTMENT billions of dollars OF of Internet COMPUTER -enabled commerce ENGINEER each year. ING It has evolved significantly over the past fifteen years. Web browsers run on diverse types of hardware, from cell phones and tablet PCs to desktop computers. Hence a proper design becomes very important. Reference NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY KARNATAKA SURATHKAL – 575 025 architecture for web browsers can help implementers to understand trade-o s when designing new systems, and can assist maintainers in understanding legacy code. A web browser is client side application program that contacts remote servers and retrieves documents from it and displaysMarch them 2009 on screen, either within t he browser window itself or by passing the document to an external helper application. It allows particular resources to be 12 3 requested explicitly by URI, or implicitly by following embedded hyperlinks. Many other features are provided by browser which increases the ease of use. For example, most browsers keep track of recently visited web pages and provide a mechanism for “book-marking ” pages of interest. They may also store commonly entered form values as well as usernames and passwords. Finally, browsers often provide accessibility features to accommodate users with disabilities such as blindness and low vision, hearing loss, and motor impairments Browser Jargon you will come across in this report : Plug-in or Add-on : It consists of a computer prog ram that interacts with a host application in our case a web browser to provide a certain specific function on demand . Extension :is a program desig ned to to be incorporated into web browser to extend the functionality of the later . On its own an extension is non-functional BHO : Browser Help Object, BHO is a help object added to your Internet browser. For example the Google Toolbar is considered a Browser Help Object; t his add-on enables users to perform Google searches through the toolbar and contains additional features that help improve a user's experience. III. Evaluation Method: Why are we different? We started by performing a literature survey of the latest research papers, articles and whitepapers on browsers. Our study included the browser architecture study which is very important to evaluate the browsers response to scripts, security of the browser, memory and CPU usage by the browsers etc. Then we used the output of the literature survey to choose the parameters. In broader sense the parameters were classified into general features, security features and t he add support . To evaluate each parameter following methods were adopted. 1) Test scripts were designed and used wherever possible (For ex. Speed Test 2) Public opinion was asked for assigning values to features like usability 3) Scripts were designed for attacking the browser 4) Standard Benchmarks were used IV .BROWSER SELECTION As our task was to compare the browsers, we need to decide which browser is to be selected. For that, we went throug h the usage statistics and found the following results given by some of the websites. Market Share of browsers: YEAR IE Fire fox Chrome Safari Opera Others 2009 39.9% 45.5% 3.9% 3.0% 2.3% 5.4% 3 4 2008 40.2% 44.4% 3.6% 2.7% 2.4% 6.7% A.Mozilla Firefox Firefox is an open-source project that is managed by the Mozilla Foundation. Each component is divided into sub- modules. Each of these modules is owned by a specific individual that is in charge of managing the development of that that module. It descended from Mozilla Corporation suite and is manag ed by Mozilla Corporation. Firefox includes tabbed browsing, a spell checker, incremental find, live bookmarking, a download manager, and an integrated search system that uses the user's desired search engine .Functions can be added through add-ons created by third-party developers, which include the NoScript JavaScript disabling utility, Tab Mix Plus customizer, FoxyTunes media player control toolbar, Adblock Plus ad blocking utility, StumbleUpon (website discovery), Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer (bookmark synchronizer), WOT: Web of Trust security site advisor, download enhancer, and Web Developer toolbar. With a market share of 45.5% in 2009 it is the most popular browser. A.Internet Explorer Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Ex plorer; abbreviated MSIE), commonly abbreviated to IE, is a series of graphical web browser developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating system starting in 1995. It has been the most widely used web browser since 1999, attaining a peak of about 95%usage during 2002 and 2003 with IE 5 and IE6 and that percentage share has declined since in the face of renewed competition from other web browser developers. Internet Explorer uses DOCTYPE sniffing to choose between "quirks mode" (renders similarly to older versions of MSIE) and standard mode (renders closer to W3C's specifications) for HTML and CSS rendering on screen (Internet Explorer always uses standards mode for printing). It also provides its own dialect of ECMA Script called Jscript.Internet Explorer has been subjected to criticism over its limited support for open web standards. B.Google Chrome Chrome the latest browser released in 2008 already had a market share of 3.9% in Jan 2009. Chromium is the open source project behind Google chrome. Salient Features include: 1. Task Manager for Websites 2. Visual Browser History 3. Super Clean Contextual Menus 4. Search option from the Address Bar 5. Check Memory Usage by Different Browsers 6. Reopen Website tabs that you closed by mistake 7. Launch Websites from the Start Menu / Quick Launch Bar 8. Developers claim faster speed (Sunspider and v8 benchmarks), better stability and performance and high security. Architecture of chrome provides insight into its security features . Chromium has two modules in separate protection domain: browser kernel and rendering engine. This architecture helps mitigate high severity attack without compromising the compatibility. 4 5 C.Opera Opera has market share of 2.3%. But the features of this browser get it a place in our comparison chart. Claimed to be a fast and secured browser it, has the following new features in its latest version: • Content blocking • BitTorrent support • Widgets • Search engine editor • Site preferences • New installer. One package—30 languag es • Integrated source viewer • opera:config for advanced settings configuration • Tab use: Thumbnails when you hover the cursor over a tab • Widgets in Opera are more like small standalone applications that can interact with the internet and live outside the browser, rather than interface elements that can change the basic behavior of the browser, as Firefox's extensions are.