Measuring Sustainability and Adoption Trends of Open Source Web Browsers

Web-based applications typically collect enormous archives of usage data — including profiles of users, their usage environment, locality, and their browsing behaviour — that are often disregarded or unused by the development team. This paper explores whether such usage data can be unified with development information, such as the release history, to assess the sustainability of a software project. In particular, we have combined usage data culled from web server logs with product release histories to study the history and sustainability of two open source web browsers: Firefox and Chrome. Our findings suggest that Firefox fosters better hardware sustainability, while Chrome facilitates larger diversity and ethnicity among its users. We detected no evidence in age-specific differences in navigational behaviour among Chrome and Firefox users; however, we hypothesize that younger users are more likely to have more up-to-date versions than more mature users. Keywords-Release history, user adoption, web usage mining, software sustainability