The Influence of Client Platform on Web Page Content: Measurements, Analysis, and Implications

摘要

Modern web users have access to a wide and diverse range of client platforms to browse the web. While it is anecdotally believed that the same URL may result in a different web page across different client platforms, the extent to which this occurs is not known. In this work, we systematically study the impact of different client platforms (browsers, operating systems, devices, and vantage points) on the content of base HTML pages. We collect and analyze the base HTML page downloaded for 3876 web pages composed of the top 250 web sites using 32 different client platforms for a period of 30 days - our dataset includes over 3.5 million web page downloads. We find that client platforms have a statistically significant influence on web page downloads in both expected and unexpected ways. We discuss the impact that these results will have in several application domains including web archiving, user experience, social interactions and information sharing, and web content sentiment analysis.