DRIVESHAFT: Improving Perceived Mobile Web Performance

Abstract: With mobiles overtaking desktops as the primary vehicle of Internet consumption, mobile web performance has become a crucial factor for websites as it directly impacts their revenue. In principle, improving web performance entails squeezing out every millisecond of the webpage delivery, loading, and rendering. However, on a practical note, an illusion of faster websites suffices. This paper presents DriveShaft, a system envisioned to be deployed in Content Delivery Networks, which improves the perceived web performance on mobile devices by reducing the time taken to show visually complete web pages, without requiring any changes in websites, browsers, or any actions from end-user. DriveShaft employs (i) crowdsourcing, (ii) on-the-fly JavaScript injection, (iii) privacy preserving desensitization, and (iv) automatic HTML generation to achieve its goals. Experimental evaluations using 200 representative websites on different networks (Wi-Fi and 4G), different devices (high-end and low-end phones) and different browsers, show a reduction of 5x in the time required to see a visually complete website while giving a perception of 5x-6x faster page loading.