The Next Evolution of Web Browser Execution Environment Performance

Abstract

Web browsers have for long been wanting to host and execute feature-rich, compute-intensive, and complex applications or simply Compute-Intensive Applications (CIAs), within their Execution Environment (EE), with native desktop performance. There was Adobe Shockwave, Macromedia Flash, Java Applets, JavaScript Programming Language (JS) and recently WebAssembly Programming Language (WASM), but also short-lived relationships, such as Microsoft ActiveX, Silverlight and Apple Quicktime. One hindrance to web browsers hosting and executing CIAs with native desktop performance is that currently there is no web browser technology with the software architecture and design that can support them. This paper aims to review the evolution of the Web as an application platform since the rise of WASM, over the last decade or so, within the context of application performance relative to that of native desktop application performance. As well as to propose where researchers should focus their efforts in order to advance the Web as an application platform that is capable of executing CIAs. In future work, we plan to extend our study to include theoretical contributions, such as providing insights into how to improve the performance of web applications based on various software architectures and designs for web browser EEs, methodological contributions, such as providing methods and approaches developed, adapted or enhanced which detail the software architecture and design for web browser EEs that have higher performance than currently available, and practical contributions that will lay the groundwork for a production-ready web browser EE based on the prototype web browser EE produced by our study.