Enabling the Transition to the Mobile Web with WebSieve

Motivation:

Web access on mobile platforms has taken a big part (more than 20%) of web traffic, however, the performance of the mobile web is quite poor. While some high-end website providers have improved their websites on the mobile platforms, most of the small web providers still make no change of their websites due to the expensive cost and complexity of mobile-specific customization.

The motivation of WebSieve is to generate mobile friendly websites focusing on reducing the high load times on mobile devices for general websites. And the way they proposed is either block or de-prioritize the loads of low utility objects to reduce user-perceived page load times.

Main Points:

• Three high-level requirements: 1) Structure-awareness: be aware of the complex inter-dependencies between objects in web pages; 2) Utility-awareness: mechanisms is needed to predict the expected utility; 3) Practical optimization: object selection needs to maximize the utility subject.

• Three key design challenges: 1) Dependencies: we cannot select to load an object without choosing to load its parent as well; 2) Utility inference: different users and providers have different understanding of utility; 3) Object selection: predicting the load time when a subset of objects is fetched is difficult, also the web browsers' parallelization techniques need to be considered, and the load time of specific device and operating conditions depends.

• Proposed approach:

• Dependency Extraction: distinguish between the objects that are genuinely missing vs. objects that have been replaced.

• Utility Inference: run user study to infer utilities, personalize the WebSieve, account for functional dependencies, account for provider utilities.

• Optimal Object Selection: use compact integer linear programming formulations, address the load time approximation.

Trade-offs:

• Some utilities, such as advertisement, which may not be important to users but important to the profits of providers. These independent utility may be filtered by WebSieve.

• Time cost of estimating dependencies as well as the optimization of object selection vs. Traditional load time need to be considered.