Most web traffic today comes from smartphones and tablets, but the mobile web remains frustratingly slow. Even on fast 4G networks, a page takes 14 seconds to load on average—an eternity in today’s connected world.
A team of computer science researchers at U-M and MIT has found a way to dramatically speed up the mobile web. Their new Vroom software optimizes the end-to-end interaction between mobile devices and web servers. Testing on 100 popular news and sports websites found that Vroom cut the median load time on landing pages from 10 seconds to 5.
“Vroom dramatically improves upon solutions such as proxy servers, which come with security and privacy concerns. And it complements solutions such as Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project, which requires web pages to be rewritten. For any particular version of a web page, Vroom optimizes the process of loading that page,” said Harsha Madhyastha, U-M associate professor of computer science and engineering and one of Vroom’s developers.
