Accelerating mobile web browsing with screen scrolling

Abstract

During the past decade, we have witnessed the pervasive penetration of mobile smart devices such as smartphones, tablets, and wearable devices, which significantly enrich Internet applications and improve user experience. In the foreseeable future, mobile smart devices are predicted to take up over 50% of global devices/connections and surpass 4/5 of mobile data traffic by 2021 [1]. Such mobile smart devices as smartphones, phablets, and tablets, undoubtedly reshape the way that users access Internet services, e.g., web browsing. Different from traditional desktop applications, in which users interact via interfaces like large displays, keyboards, and mouses, mobile applications require users to enter the inputs through touch screens and allow them to view the outputs on limited size of displays. This distinct feature introduced by mobile hardware interfaces brings both challenges and opportunities to mobile-based Internet applications. On one hand, mobile service providers should prepare multiple copies of media contents with different resolutions and even multiple versions of application UI layouts to fit various sizes of screens on heterogeneous devices. On the other hand, as media contents are usually organized in certain order in mobile-based Internet applications, it is possible to predict the viewing region (referred as viewport hereafter) given the user inputs and the fixed size of display.