Janus: Detecting Rendering Bugs in Web Browsers via Visual Delta Consistency

Rendering lies at the heart of our modern web experience. However, the correctness of browser rendering is not always guaranteed, often leading to rendering bugs. Traditional differential testing, while successful in various domains, falls short when applied to rendering bug detection because an HTM...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inProceedings / International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 2702 - 2713
Main Authors Zhou, Chijin, Zhang, Quan, Qian, Bingzhou, Jiang, Yu
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 26.04.2025
Subjects
browser reliability
browser testing
Browsers
bug detection
Computer bugs
fuzzing
Heart
Rendering (computer graphics)
rendering bugs
Software engineering
test oracle
Testing
Visualization
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Summary:Rendering lies at the heart of our modern web experience. However, the correctness of browser rendering is not always guaranteed, often leading to rendering bugs. Traditional differential testing, while successful in various domains, falls short when applied to rendering bug detection because an HTML file is likely yield different rendered outcomes across different browsers. This paper introduces Visual Delta Consistency, a test oracle to detect rendering bugs in web browsers, aiming to make rendered pages across browsers comparable. Our key insight is that any modifications made to an HTML file should uniformly influence rendering outcomes across browsers. Specifically, when presented with two HTML files that differ only by minor modifications, the reaction of all browsers should be consistent, i.e., either all browsers render them identically or all render them differently. Based on this insight, We implemented it as a practical fuzzer named Janus. It constructs pairs of slightly modified HTML files and observes the change statuses of the corresponding rendered pages across browsers for bug detection. We evaluated it on three widely-used browsers, i.e., Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. In total, Janus detected 31 non-crash rendering bugs, out of which 24 confirmed with 8 fixed.
ISSN:1558-1225
DOI:10.1109/ICSE55347.2025.00013