text: This paper examines some of the potential challenges associated with enabling a seamless web experience on underpowered mobile devices such as Google Glass from the perspective of web content providers, device, and the network. We conducted experiments to study the impact of webpage complexity, individual web components and different application layer protocols while accessing webpages on the performance of Glass browser, by measuring webpage load time, temperature variation and power consumption and compare it to a smartphone. Our findings suggest that (a) performance of Glass compared to a smartphone in terms of power consumption and webpage load time deteriorates with increasing webpage complexity (b) execution time for popular JavaScript benchmarks is about 3-8 times higher on Glass compared to a smartphone, (c) WebP is more energy efficient image format than JPEG and PNG, and (d) seven out of 50 websites studied are optimized for content delivery to Glass.
  @cite_3: Multiple entities in the smartphone ecosystem employ various methods to provide better web browsing experience. In this paper, we take a first comprehensive examination of the resource usage of mobile web browsing by focusing on two important types of resources: bandwidth and energy. Using a novel traffic collection and analysis tool, we examine a wide spectrum of important factors including protocol overhead, TCP connection management, web page content, traffic timing dynamics, caching efficiency, and compression usage, for the most popular 500 websites. Our findings suggest that that all above factors at different layers can affect resource utilization for web browsing, as they often poorly interact with the underlying cellular networks. Based on our findings, we developed novel recommendations and detailed best practice suggestions for mobile web content, browser, network protocol, and smartphone OS design, to make mobile web browsing more resource efficient.
  @cite_2: Despite the growing popularity of mobile web browsing, the energy consumed by a phone browser while surfing the web is poorly understood. We present an infrastructure for measuring the precise energy used by a mobile browser to render web pages. We then measure the energy needed to render financial, e-commerce, email, blogging, news and social networking sites. Our tools are sufficiently precise to measure the energy needed to render individual web elements, such as cascade style sheets (CSS), Javascript, images, and plug-in objects. Our results show that for popular sites, downloading and parsing cascade style sheets and Javascript consumes a significant fraction of the total energy needed to render the page. Using the data we collected we make concrete recommendations on how to design web pages so as to minimize the energy needed to render the page. As an example, by modifying scripts on the Wikipedia mobile site we reduced by 30 the energy needed to download and render Wikipedia pages with no change to the user experience. We conclude by estimating the point at which offloading browser computations to a remote proxy can save energy on the phone.
  @cite_7: Web page load time is a key performance metric that many techniques aim to reduce. Unfortunately, the complexity of modern Web pages makes it difficult to identify performance bottlenecks. We present WProf, a lightweight in-browser profiler that produces a detailed dependency graph of the activities that make up a page load. WProf is based on a model we developed to capture the constraints between network load, page parsing, JavaScript CSS evaluation, and rendering activity in popular browsers. We combine WProf reports with critical path analysis to study the page load time of 350 Web pages under a variety of settings including the use of end-host caching, SPDY instead of HTTP, and the mod pagespeed server extension. We find that computation is a significant factor that makes up as much as 35 of the critical path, and that synchronous JavaScript plays a significant role in page load time by blocking HTML parsing. Caching reduces page load time, but the reduction is not proportional to the number of cached objects, because most object loads are not on the critical path. SPDY reduces page load time only for networks with high RTTs and mod pagespeed helps little on an average page.
  @cite_8: Over the years, the web has evolved from simple text content from one server to a complex ecosystem with different types of content from servers spread across several administrative domains. There is anecdotal evidence of users being frustrated with high page load times or when obscure scripts cause their browser windows to freeze. Because page load times are known to directly impact user satisfaction, providers would like to understand if and how the complexity of their websites affects the user experience. While there is an extensive literature on measuring web graphs, website popularity, and the nature of web traffic, there has been little work in understanding how complex individual websites are, and how this complexity impacts the clients' experience. This paper is a first step to address this gap. To this end, we identify a set of metrics to characterize the complexity of websites both at a content-level (e.g., number and size of images) and service-level (e.g., number of servers origins). We find that the distributions of these metrics are largely independent of a website's popularity rank. However, some categories (e.g., News) are more complex than others. More than 60 of websites have content from at least 5 non-origin sources and these contribute more than 35 of the bytes downloaded. In addition, we analyze which metrics are most critical for predicting page render and load times and find that the number of objects requested is the most important factor. With respect to variability in load times, however, we find that the number of servers is the best indicator.
summary: Prior works have investigated the performance of web browser on desktop and smartphones from different perspectives such as caching, protocols and webpage content @cite_7 @cite_3 , webpage complexity @cite_8 and energy @cite_2 . In contrast, our major focus is, (a) to find out the web browsing performance issues on an underpowered device such as Glass and, (b) how today's webpage complexity and design contribute to such issues.