Reining in Mobile Web Performance with Document and Permission Policies

TL;DR

This paper explores how enforcing document and permission policies can improve mobile web performance by reducing layout shifts and identifying common policy violations on popular websites.

Contribution

It evaluates the performance impact of policy violations and demonstrates that controlling media sizing can significantly improve web layout stability.

Findings

Controlling media size policies can reduce layout shifts.

70% of top websites violate unsized-media policies.

Enforcing policies can improve user experience metrics.

Abstract

The quality of experience with the mobile web remains poor, partially as a result of complex websites and design choices that worsen performance, particularly for users in suboptimal networks or devices. Prior proposed solutions have seen limited adoption due in part to the demand they place on developers and content providers, and the performing infrastructure needed to support them. We argue that Document and Permissions Policies -- an ongoing effort to enforce good practices on web design -- may offer the basis for a readily-available and easily-adoptable solution. In this paper, we evaluate the potential performance cost of violating well-understood policies and how common such violations are in today's web. Our analysis show, for example, that controlling for unsized-media policy, something applicable to 70% of the top-1million websites, can indeed reduce Cumulative Layout Shift metric.