Synchronizing Web Browsing Data with Browserver Leandro G. de Carvalho, Raquel F. do Valle, Alexandre Passito, Edjard S. Mota, Edjair S. Mota, Diogenes Freitas Computer Science Department – Federal University of Amazonas Manaus – AM – Brazil Email: galvao@dcc.ufam.edu.br, raquel@pop-am.rnp.br, {passito,edjard,edjair}@dcc.ufam.edu.br, dextop123@gmail.com Abstract—People spend a lot of time navigating on the web. When moving from one computer device to another, it would be useful to have access to the navigation data produced in the previous web session. In this article, a synchronization service of navigation data, called Browserver, is presented. It is responsible for keeping user navigation information (tabs, history, forms, cookies, etc.) so that it can be recovered from any device connected to the Internet. Finally, Browserver performance is compared to a similar service, according to hardware and network consumption metrics. Index Terms—Browser; web session migration; browsing data synchronization. I. I NTRODUCTION Many people are spending most part of their time on web navigation, whether for work, study or leisure. As this activity is performed by means of web browsers, many personal data are generated and stored locally in the machine used for web browsing. Additionally, there is a multitude of computer devices from which people can browse (from mobile phones to common PC), as well as places from which access comes from (home, work, libraries, etc.). As a result, the quality of experience of Internet users when navigating on the web relies on their interaction with the browser. Moreover, when they switch from one computer device to another, their productivity will depend on the speed they recover personal browsing data, such as bookmarks, forms, history, open tabs and windows, passwords, custom entries to the spelling checker, etc. In order to provide ubiq- uitous access to those navigation data, this paper proposes a service that stores it in the web for future retrieval, regardless of computer device or operating system. This service is named Browserver [1] (= browser + server). While Browserver was being developed, similar initiatives emerged on the web, such as Mozilla Weave [2], Opera Link [3] and Xmarks [4]. The difference between these four services resides in the variety of navigation features they synchronize and the browsers they support. Thus, this article presents the Browserver service and com- pares its performance with Weave, which was selected as benchmark because it is the most similar service to Browserver among the three mentioned. The intention is not to polarize the analysis, since both services are in constant development, and future versions may include improvements or bugs. The reminder of this text is structured as follows. Section II describes the Browserver. Section III describes the envi- ronment and the methodology used for comparing Browserver and Weave performance, whose results are analyzed in Section IV. Section V present and discuss related work. Finally, conclusions and future work are outlined in Section VI. II. BROWSERVER ARCHITECTURE A. Web browser personal data According to [5], [6], the web can be described as consisting of two main types of programs: web servers and web clients. The former manages access to hypertext/multimedia docu- ments. The latter, typically implemented by web browsers, retrieves documents from remote web servers and displays them on screen, either in the browser window, or by invoking an external application. A reference architecture for web browsers was proposed by [6] and is reproduced in Fig.1. User Interface User Interface Browser Engine Data Pers Browser Engine Rendering Engine sistence Networking JavaScript Interpreter XML Parser Display Backend Interpreter Parser Fig. 1. Reference architecture for web browsers [6]. Certainly, a given web browser may differ from the refer- ence architecture. Some subsystems may be implemented as a single module, for simplicity, while others may be spread across multiple modules, to promote flexibility [6]. Anyway, it is the Data Persistence subsystem that stores web browsing data in the disk. This data is distributed along many files, depending on the browser implementation and the navigation features offered by the browser, such as bookmarks, browsing history, forms, cookies, passwords, plug-ins, addons (aka complements, extensions or widgets), open tabs, spell checker, quick search toolbar, thumbnails (aka speed dial), site-specific configurations, and browser preferences. Therefore, to recover a web session after migrating to a new device, the local files that store browsing data from the source device should be stored in some place so that they can be