Browsers 2
Friday, 3:30–5:00 PM
Chair: Robin Chen
Smart Caching for Web Browsers
Zhang Kaimin, Wang Lu, Pan Aimin, Zhu Bin
This paper presents smart caching schemes for Web browsers. For modern Web applications, the style formatting and layout calculation often account for substantial amounts of the local computation in order to render a Web page. In this paper, we propose two caching schemes to reduce the computation of style formatting and layout calculation, named smart style caching and layout caching, respectively. The stable style data and layout data for DOM (Document Object Model) elements are recorded to construct the caches when a Web page is browsed. The cached data is checked in the granularity of DOM elements and applied directly if the identified DOM element is not changed in the sequent visits to the same page. We have implemented a prototype of the proposed caching schemes based on the Webkit layout engine. The experimental results with Web pages from Top 25 Web sites show that, with the smart style caching scheme enabled, the time consumed for style formatting is reduced by 64% on average; with both the smart style caching scheme and layout caching scheme enabled, the time consumed for layout calculation are reduced by 61% on average, and the overall performance improvement is about 46%.
Fast and Parallel Webpage Layout
Leo Meyerovich, Ras Bodik
The web browser is a CPU-intensive program. Especially on mobile devices, loading of webpages is too slow, spending much of its time in processing a document’s appearance. Due to power constraints, most hardware improvements will come in the form of parallel architectures. This is also true of mobile devices such as phones. Current browsers, however, do not yet fully exploit hardware parallelism, so we are designing a parallel mobile browser. In this paper, we introduce new algorithms for CSS selector matching, layout solving, and font rendering, which represent key components for a fast layout engine. Evaluation on popular sites shows speedups as high as 80x. We also formulate layout solving with attribute grammars, enabling us to not only parallelize our algorithm but prove that it computes in O(log) time and without reflow.
Alhambra: A System for Creating, Enforcing and Testing Browser Security Policies
Shuo Tang, Chris Grier, Onur Aciicmez, Sam King
Alhambra is a browser-based system designed to enforce and test web browser security policies. At the core of Alhambra is a policy-enhanced browser supporting fine-grain security policies that restrict web page contents and execution. Policies can restrict the construction of the document as well as the execution of JavaScript using access control rules and a taint-tracking engine. Using the Alhambra browser, we present two security policies that we have built using our architecture, both designed to prevent cross-site scripting. The first policy uses browsing history to create policies that restrict the contents of documents and prevent the inclusion of malicious content. The second policy uses the taint-tracking engine to prevent cross-site scripting attacks that exploit a bug in the client-side of the web application. Using Alhambra we analyze the impact of policies on the compatibility of web pages. To test compatibility, Alhambra supports revisiting user-generated browsing sessions and comparing multiple security policies in parallel to quickly and automatically evaluate security policies. To compare security policies for identical pages we have also developed useful comparison metrics that quantify differences between identical pages executed with different security policies. Not only do we show that our policies are effective with minimal compatibility cost, we also demonstrate that Alhambra can enforce strong security policies and provide quantitative evaluation of the differences introduced by security policies.
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