Mobile Web Browser Optimizations in the Cloud Era: A Survey

As most mobile devices are capable of accessing the Internet with a mobile web browser, the performance of mobile web browsers has become an interesting research topic recently. Due to network bandwidth and processing power limitations, mobile web browsers are slower compared to PC web browsers when dealing with large-size web contents and computation-intensive operations. In order to improve the performance of web browsers, researchers have attempted different techniques, including parallel optimization, web page prefetching, speculative loading, etc. With the introduction of mobile cloud computing, the performance of mobile devices can be augmented with the capability of the cloud. Mobile web browsers can also benefit from mobile cloud computing to improve the responsiveness and energy efficiency. This paper surveys current issues of mobile web browsers and approaches to optimize mobile web browsers, including client-side approaches and cloud-based approaches. We also discuss the challenges and future directions in mobile web browser optimization.