A Reference Architecture for Web Browsers

Overview

Reference architecture for a domain captures the fundamental subsystems common to systems of that domain as well as the relationships between these subsystems. Having reference architecture available can aid both during maintenance and at design time: it can improve understanding of a given system, it can aid in analyzing tradeoffs between different design options, and it can serve as a template for designing new systems and re-engineering existing ones. This paper examines the history of the web browser domain and identifies several underlying phenomena that have contributed to its evolution. The authors develop reference architecture for web browsers based on two well known open source implementations, and validate it against two additional implementations.