JSAnalyzer: A Web Developer Tool for Simplifying Mobile Pages Through JavaScript Optimizations

TL;DR

JSAnalyzer is a tool that helps web developers optimize JavaScript on web pages for mobile devices, significantly improving performance and load times while maintaining visual and functional integrity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, user-friendly tool that enables selective JavaScript disabling for mobile optimization, outperforming existing solutions in effectiveness and usability.

Findings

Achieves over 88% improvement in performance scores on low-end mobiles.

Reduces page load time by 30%.

Maintains over 90% visual similarity to original pages.

Abstract

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.