| Summary: | Mobile browsers are known to be slow. We characterize the performance of mobile browsers and find out that resource loading is the bottleneck. Leveraging an unprecedented set of web usage data collected from 24 iPhone users continuously over one year, we examine the three fundamental, orthogonal approaches to improve resource loading without infrastructure support: caching, prefetching, and speculative loading, which is first proposed and studied in this work. Speculative loading predicts and speculatively loads the subresources needed to open a webpage once its URL is given. We show that while caching and prefetching are highly limited for mobile browsing, speculative loading can be significantly more effective. Empirically, we show that client-only solutions can improve the browser speed by 1.4 seconds on average. We also report the design, realization, and evaluation of speculative loading in a WebKit-based browser called Tempo. On average, Tempo can reduce browser delay by 1 second (~20%).
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