Many attempts at improving the speed of mobile web browsing involve some obvious sacrifices: Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages alter how you view the pages, while proxies introduce the risk of someone intercepting your sensitive data. Researchers have found a way to boost performance without those compromises, though. Their Vroom architecture loads mobile websites up to twice as quickly by optimizing how a site loads, no matter how that site is built — even an AMP page stands to load faster. It boils down to loading more of the site at once, rather than the back and forth that usually takes place.
Typically, your phone’s web browser has to process nearly 100 web links before you see an entire page. It has to make multiple requests and spend a lot of time idling. Vroom, however, bundles the info that a browser needs to load a page. When your browser requests info, the server also provides “hints” about other necessary resources and coordinates the delivery of that content to make the most of your phone’s processor.
The code does have a catch, as the name suggests: the web server has to know how to reshuffle data. Even if Vroom was ready right away (it isn’t), it’d take a while to propagate. However, there’s a realistic chance of that happening. The project has the backing of Google’s Faculty Research Award, the National Science Foundation and MIT, so there’s clearly interest in translating this technology to the real world.
Source: University of Michigan
