Imagen: runtime migration of browser sessions for javascript web applications

Due to the increasing complexity of web applications and emerging HTML5 standards, a large amount of runtime state is created and managed in the user's browser. While such complexity is desirable for user experience, it makes it hard for developers to implement mechanisms that provide users ubiquitous access to the data they create during application use. This paper presents our research into browser session migration for JavaScript-based web applications. Session migration is the act of transferring a session between browsers at runtime. Without burden to developers, our system allows users to create a snapshot image that captures all runtime state needed to resume the session elsewhere. Our system works completely in the JavaScript layer and thus snapshots can be transfered between different browser vendors and hardware devices. We report on performance metrics of the system using five applications, four different browsers, and three different devices.