Web Browsing Measurements: An Above-the-Fold Browser-Based Technique
Antoine Saverimoutou, Bertrand Mathieu, Sandrine Vaton · 2018
Web browsing is the most important Internet service, and offering the best performance to end-users is of prime importance. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has brought along the Page Load Time (PLT) metric as a QoE (Quality of Experience) and QoS (Quality of Service) benchmarking indicator, which is nowadays the de facto web metric used by researchers, large service companies and web developers. Although alternative web metrics have been introduced to measure part of the loading process, the techniques used need additional computing power and timings are not offered in real-time. In order to provide real-time fined-grained timings during web browsing measurement campaigns, we present in this paper the TFVR (Time for Full Visual Rendering), a technique being browser-based to calculate the Above-The-Fold (ATF) offering the loading time of the visible portion at first glance of a web page. The TFVR exposes fine-grained timings such as networking and processing time for every downloaded resource. Based on a measurement campaign on top 10,000 Alexa websites, we have been able to better quantify and identify web page loading inefficiencies through a tool we have designed, namely, MORIS (Measuring and Observing Representative Information on webSites).