Overview

We ask the question: Why is mobile browsing performance slow and what factors affect the performance? Several factors may affect browser performance including the network speed, computational speed, web server performance, and page structure. Identifying how each of these factors affect page load is complicated.

In WProf-Mobile, we built an in-browser tool for mobile browsers to identify how page load happens. The tool is able to isolate the various activities performed during page load that are affected by the network, computation, web server, and page structure. This will allow us to understand how each of these factors affect the page load perfomance.

We use techniques developed in our previous work WProf, where we focused on understanding non-mobile browsers. While the techniques themselves are not different from WProf, we believe we will identify different trade-offs and bottlenecks in mobile browsers. Energy alone adds an additional constraining factor in mobile browsers. Mobile phones are also constrained by network and CPU capacity and mobile pages often have a different structure compared to non-mobile pages. These factors will likely lead to different findings in the mobile environment compared to the non-mobile counterpart.

For questions or comments, contact Aruna Balasubramanian at arunab@cs.washington.edu.