Web browsers are probably one of the most widely used applications on desktops and smartphones. While Google Chrome is currently the dominant web browser, users can decide to install different web browsers to improve their experience or for other reasons like privacy concerns, performance issues, …

A recent series of posts by Jonathan Sampson takes a very interesting viewpoint by looking at what different browsers actually do when they are installed on a new machine. For this, he installed a proxy that intercepts all the requests made by the fresh browser and analyses its logs. The results are both surprising and interesting. Surprising because some browsers send a lot of requests to various web sites that are not directly related to the company that controls the browser. Interesting, because Jonathan Sampson analyses all these requests in details. Here are the pointers to the analyses of the different browsers:

• What happens when Apple Safari launches with a new profile?
• What happens when you instal the Edge beta browser?
• What happens when you install the Opera browser?
• What happens when you install the Vivaldi browser?
• What happens when you install the Brave browser?
• What happens when you install the Chrome browser?
• What happens when you install the Firefox browser?

From this analysis, it is clear that some browsers could be optimized to perform fewer requests to external domains.

This blog post was written to inform the readers of Computer Networking: Principles, Protocols and Practice about the evolution of the field. You can subscribe to the Atom feed for this blog. These notes are also posted on the ebook’s Facebook page