A Comparative Performance Analysis of Popular Internet Browsers in Current Web Applications Boukari Souley, Amina S. Sambo Mathematical Sciences Programme, Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University(ATBU), Bauchi, Nigeria [email protected] +2348069667696 +2348033512019 Abstract As more and more services become available on the Internet, the issue of fast and secured access to online resources gains more importance. The growth of the internet has encouraged a high number of people to explore and take advantage of the World Wide Web (www). The window to the World Wide Web is a web browser, hence the development of various web browsers in the market today. A comparative study of four web browsers namely Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Netscape was carried out. A web portal developed and fully tested was used to evaluate the performance of the four browsers. The results revealed that Mozilla Firefox and Netscape perform best in down load time, Internet Explorer performs best in memory usage, privacy and security, Mozilla Firefox and Netscape performs best in Page Layout, and Opera performs best in speed and performance. Key words: World Wide Web, Internet Browser, W3C, APIs, Milnet Introduction Examples of web browsers include The World Wide Web (WWW) is one of Netscape Navigator, Mozilla Firefox, the most accessible parts of the Internet. Its Internet Explorer, Opera, Lynx, Enigma and ease of use allows people to perform tasks so on. For browser compatibility, there are quickly and easily. But the creation of basic ways one can make a Web application online shopping, banking, search engines, extensible in order to add new browser corporate websites and other personal support later. services leads many users to pass In developing web applications, information that should be kept private in an consideration must be given to possible environment to which potentially everyone browser differences; hence the developer could have access. Web browsers attempt to should be informed about them. Following present to user the best presentation they can those guidelines not only allow your web offer and other options to facilitate better applications to work in other browsers, but services on the web. Similarly, browsers also on other platforms. also attempt to notify the user when Web browsers are now an essential part of applications are downloaded and try to our daily lives. Many people use them to execute on the user’s machine. However, the access e-mail, perform research, buy result of various browsers based on some products and do other errands. Because web useful characteristics differs. browsers are used for so many tasks, there Though Web standards do exist, different are built- in functions to perform those tasks browsers behave differently (in fact, the as well as to protect users from malicious same browser may behave differently content on the World Wide Web. depending on the platform). Many browsers, Generally, browsers react and display such as Internet Explorer, also support pre- information differently and cross browser W3C APIs and have never added extensive compatibility should be considered during support for the W3C-compliant ones[11]. web design. The World Wide Web contains millions of web pages with a variety of two parts. MILNET, which catered for different types of content. military sites only, and a new smaller The lack of awareness of available web ARPANET for non-military sites. Around browser and their characteristics, discourages 1980, the American National Sciences many Nigerians from having access and Foundation (NSF) decided to create five enjoy faster access to vast mount of free supercomputing centers for research use. information available on the internet. The NSF created its own network NSFNET. A high volume of commercial activities By, 1990 almost all ARPANET traffic had occur on the internet not to mention free been moved to NSFNET. In 1994, several online resources that will enable research large, commercial networks had been created and empowering us with knowledge. within what is now called the internet. Internet access and awareness are currently These networks grew beyond the borders of available in most part of Nigeria. Though the United State and are today connected to bandwidth is restricted, Surfers should be almost all countries of the world. Other aware of the browser options they have and networks in other countries also linked up to select them based on their most important create the internet, as it is known today [2]. criteria. In [3] internet is defined as a sprawling For developers, the availability of a tool collection of computer networks that span that performs the comparison helps to speed the globe, connecting government, military up the development time, assists them to educational and commercial institutions, as become aware of the short comings, features well as private citizens to a wide range of and capabilities of each of the four web computer services, resources and browsers. This reduces the time it takes to information. A set of network conventions track down bugs in the web applications and common tools are employed to give the hence improves development time and appearance of a single large network even application performance. though the computers that are linked together This study of web browsers becomes use many different hardware and software imperative to help serve as a educational and platforms. decision making tool for users. This study A non technical definition of the internet exploits on and explains the web browser as seen by an average internet user would be, characteristics of four web browsers from the “A virtual world assessed through computers various available web browsers. and other devices. This virtual world modeled after the real world. This world Related Work now informally called ‘cyberspace’, has been Brief history of the internet evolving over the years and has continued to The internet started as a project called the evolve.. Advanced Research Projects Administration Network (ARPANET). It was meant to be Internet Services. both, an experiment in reliable networking The internet offers many services to its and to link the American Department of users. The most popular services include E- Defense (DOD) with military contractors mail, World Wide Web (WWW) and File and universities doing military funded Transfer protocol (FTP). Other less popular research. It was launched in 1969 and services offer access to other types of started connecting three supercomputers in internet resources. These include Telnet, California, U.S.A and one in Utah, USA. Finger and so on. The success of ARPANET caused many universities to desire to be connected to the E-Mail network [1] E-mail is the most popular internet service This caused its growth and eventually it and it provides reliable means of became hard to manage. It then split into communication worldwide. It consists of information, usually text that is The features of Mozilla Firefox electronically transferred over telephone distinguish it from other web browsers such lines, fiber optic cables and satellite links, as Internet Explorer, and are subject to both from a single sender to one or more rave reviews and harsh criticisms. It lacks recipients. Two pieces of information are many features found in other browsers, in an needed to send e-mail messages over the effort to combat interface bloat and to allow internet - the recipients’ user identification the browser to be shipped as a small, pared- and the computer name to which the mail is down core easily customizable to meet to be sent. Simple Mail Transfer Protocol individual users' needs. Instead of providing (SMTP) and Post Office Protocol (POP) are all features in the standard distribution, used to standardize the transmission format Mozilla Firefox relies on the extension [7]. system to allow users to modify the browser according to their requirements. File Transfer Protocol (FTP): This is a means of accessing files on a Internet Explorer: Internet Explorer (IE) is remote computer system, also called an ftp the popular Web browser created and site. These files are stored in a tree like distributed by Microsoft. IE was first structures of directories. A connection is released in 1995, and IE has been the most established with the computer system, the popular Web browser since 1999 [6]. desired files are located and copied or Internet Explorer has been designed to downloaded onto the Users’ hard disk. This view the broadest range of web pages allows information to be populated to the without major problems. During the heydays internet [9]. of the historic browser wars, Internet Explorer embraced Netscape by supporting World Wide Web: many of the progressive features of the time. The WWW is the fastest growing For a long period after the introduction of internet service and it is treated as the future version six, there was no further of internet navigational tools. It is a development on the browser. Major multimedia and hypertext system that allows development on the browser restarted in pictures, video clips and sound to be 2004 for Windows XP SP2 and continues in included in text pages. The pages also have IE7 [4]. links to other pages that are displayed when the links are selected using a pointing device Netscape Browser: Netscape Browser is the or keyboard. The WWW consists of name of a proprietary Windows web browser documents called web pages and a collection published by American Online, but of web pages on a particular subject