2020/08/06 by Matteo Varvello, Benjamin Livshits, Varvello, Matteo +1 · 1 citation
Computer Science · Engineering · #Caching and Content Delivery #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Green IT and Sustainability #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI) #Opportunistic and Delay-Tolerant Networks #Other Computer Science (cs.OH) #Signal Processing (eess.SP) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2009.03740
openalex publication_date 2020/08/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Mobile web browsing has recently surpassed desktop browsing both in term of popularity and traffic. Following its desktop counterpart, the mobile browsers ecosystem has been growing from few browsers (Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) to a plethora of browsers, each with unique characteristics (battery friendly, privacy preserving, lightweight, etc.). In this paper, we introduce a browser benchmarking pipeline for Android browsers encompassing automation, in-depth experimentation, and result analysis. We tested 15 Android browsers, using Cappuccino a novel testing suite we built for third party Android applications. We perform a battery-centric analysis of such browsers and show that: 1) popular browsers tend also to consume the most, 2) adblocking produces significant battery savings (between 20 and 40% depending on the browser), and 3) dark mode offers an extra 10% battery savings on AMOLED screens. We exploit this observation to build AttentionDim, a screen dimming mechanism driven by browser events. Via integration with the Brave browser and 10 volunteers, we show potential battery savings up to 30%, on both devices with AMOLED and LCD screens.