Reordering Webpage Objects for Optimizing Quality-of-Experience

Abstract

The quality of experience (QoE) perceived by users is a critical performance measure for Web browsing. “Above-The-Fold” (ATF) time has been recently recognized and widely used as a direct measure of user-end QoE by a number of studies. To reduce the ATF time, the existing works mainly focus on reducing the delay of networking. However, we observe that the webpage structures and content orders can also significantly affect theWeb QoE. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization framework that reorders the webpage objects to minimize the user-end ATF time. Our core idea is to first identify the webpage objects that consume the ATF time but have no impact on the page experience and then change the positions of these objects to achieve the minimum ATF time. We implement this framework and evaluate its performance with popular websites. The results show that the ATF time is greatly reduced compared with the existing works, especially for complex webpages.

Keywords

• Web browsing
• quality of experience (QoE)
• reordering