Lessons learned from long-term micro-browser software architecture evolution

Abstract

With recent advances in devices, networking infrastructure and content, the mobile Internet is becoming a solid reality. The embedded software engineering needs to cope with this emerging demand. With the rapid changes in the mobile Internet landscape, it is difficult to identify how the software design methods are managed in this domain. There are multiple design factors in the embedded software architecture: portability, alignment to CPU and memory constraints, performance, extensibility, reliability and time to market. In order to identify the fits between these factors and requirements, the author describes the characteristics and design focus of four different microbrowser software architectures, which evolves for a decade to meet the digital appliance requirements. The author summarizes the design focus shift from the early stage to the recent stage. From this retrospective analysis, the author describes the relationship among software architecture, underlying environments and mobile-specific content, which is unique in the mobile microbrowser software engineering