JSAnalyzer: A Web Developer Tool for Simplifying Mobile Pages Through JavaScript Optimizations
This addresses performance bottlenecks for mobile web users, but it is an incremental improvement over existing tools like JSCleaner and Google AMP.
The paper tackles the problem of JavaScript-heavy web pages causing performance issues on mobile devices by introducing JSAnalyzer, a tool that optimizes pages by selectively disabling non-critical JavaScript elements, resulting in an 88% relative increase in performance scoring and a 30% reduction in page load time.
The amount of JavaScript embedded in Web pages has substantially grown in the past decade, leading to large and complex pages that are computationally intensive for mobile devices. In this paper, we propose JSAnalyzer, an easy-to-use tool that enables Web developers to quickly optimize and generate simpler versions of existing web pages for mobile users. JSAnalyzer can selectively enable or disable JavaScript elements in a page while visually observing their impact, such that non-critical elements can be removed without sacrificing the visual content or the interactive functionality. Our quantitative evaluation results show that JSAnalyzer achieves more than 88% relative increase in performance scoring for low-end mobile phones (i.e., from 32% to 60%), and reduces the page load time by 30%. A qualitative study of 22 users shows that JSAnalyzer maintains more than 90% visual similarity to the original pages, whereas a developer evaluation study conducted with 23 developers shows that JSAnalyzer scores more than 80% in terms of usefulness and usability while retaining the page content and functional features. Additionally, we show that JSAnalyzer outperforms state-of-the-art solutions such as JSCleaner and Google AMP.