Browselite: A Private Data Saving Solution for the Web

TL;DR

Browselite is a client-side web data-saving tool that reduces image data transfer without compromising user privacy or web compatibility, achieving significant savings comparable to middlebox solutions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel client-side approach for image-based web data saving that preserves privacy and web compatibility, unlike existing middlebox methods.

Findings

Achieves significant image data reduction through resizing and compression.

Maintains web compatibility and user privacy.

Provides comparable savings to middlebox solutions.

Abstract

The median webpage has increased in size by more than 80% in the last 4 years. This extra complexity allows for a rich browsing experience, but it hurts the majority of mobile users which still pay for their traffic. This has motivated several data-saving solutions, which aim at reducing the complexity of webpages by transforming their content. Despite each method being unique, they either reduce user privacy by further centralizing web traffic through data-saving middleboxes or introduce web compatibility (Webcompat) issues by removing content that breaks pages in unpredictable ways. In this paper, we argue that data-saving is still possible without impacting either users privacy or Webcompat. Our main observation is that Web images make up a large portion of Web traffic and have negligible impact on Webcompat. To this end we make two main contributions. First, we quantify the potential savings that image manipulation, such as dimension resizing, quality compression, and transcoding, enables at large scale: 300 landing and 880 internal pages. Next, we design and build Browselite, an entirely client-side tool that achieves such data savings through opportunistically instrumenting existing server-side tooling to perform image compression, while simultaneously reducing the total amount of image data fetched. The effect of Browselite on the user experience is quantified using standard page load metrics and a real user study of over 200 users across 50 optimized web pages. Browselite allows for similar savings to middlebox approaches, while offering additional security, privacy, and Webcompat guarantees.