The Web for Under-Powered Mobile Devices: Lessons learned from Google Glass

TL;DR

This study investigates the challenges of web browsing on underpowered devices like Google Glass, analyzing performance, power consumption, and content optimization to inform better web design for such devices.

Contribution

It provides empirical insights into the performance limitations and content optimization strategies for web access on Google Glass compared to smartphones.

Findings

Performance worsens with webpage complexity on Glass.

JavaScript execution is 3-8 times slower on Glass.

WebP images are more energy-efficient than JPEG and PNG.

Abstract

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.