The Web for Under-Powered Mobile Devices: Lessons learned from Google Glass
This work addresses performance and energy efficiency issues for web content providers and users of resource-constrained mobile devices, but it is incremental as it builds on existing web optimization studies.
This paper investigates the challenges of delivering a seamless web experience on underpowered mobile devices like Google Glass, finding that webpage complexity significantly degrades performance compared to smartphones, with JavaScript execution times 3-8 times slower and only 7 out of 50 websites optimized for such devices.
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.