Web QoE: Moving beyond Google's SpeedIndex .
Résumé
The World Wide Web is still among the most prominent Internet
applications. While the Web landscape has been in perpetual move-
ment since the very beginning, these last few years have witnessed
some noteworthy proposals such as SPDY, HTTP/2 and QUIC which
could disrupt the Web status quo and profoundly reshape the protocols
family at application layer. Technically solid means are clearly needed
to assess whether these new protocols can keep their promises: The
risk is that these new protocols could otherwise fail to be adopted.
While this investigation is already under way, both the industry
and the research community are in our opinion expressing the right
question, to which they however answer using the wrong tools.
Over the years, webpages have grown to quite complex entities
including hundreds of objects of several types, sharded over many
domains. Yet, the current practice is to express Web Quality of
Experience (QoE) via the document completion time (onLoad) de-
spite its known inaccuracy and poor correlation with the actual user
experience. At the same time, while better metrics do exist (e.g.,
the SpeedIndex, proposed by Google in 2012), they are complex to
evaluate and require a prohibitive amount of computing resources
(i.e., record filmstrips of the visual rendering in the browser). As
such, their use is limited to lab experiments, but have to date failed
to catch up in larger scale.
Fortunately, there is a way out of this impasse: as it often happens,
once found, the solution is very simple and elegant.