Deconstructing Google’s Web Light Service

Tahir, Ammar; Munir, Muhammad Tahir; Malik, Shaiq Munir; Qazi, Zafar Ayyub; Qazi, Ihsan Ayyub

doi:10.1145/3366423.3380168

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…For example, Google's Web Light [9] redirects the initial request for a webpage through its servers, without sharing the page's cookies to Google's servers. While this is a plus for privacy, as no client-side state can be inferred, it limits the reach of the approach, given that personalized content cannot be optimized [54]. Further, such implementations leak information about which URLs are requested to third party servers, providing an opportunity to build full browsing profiles of end-users [54].…”

Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a result, emphasis has been placed on changing Web browsing to consume less data [9,11,44,46,51]. While there has been some public confusion over the exact workings and reach of such data-saving methods [33], recent studies of their actual implementations [31,37,54] reveal a few key shortcomings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First and foremost, these solutions impose various privacy concerns to their users when compared to regular Web browsing. Some are deployed as middlebox services which either transparently proxy the user's unencrypted traffic [11,51], or, apply URL redirection [23] or Man-in-the-Middle proxies [44,46,58] to also operate on encrypted traffic (HTTPS) [37,54]. Given the rise of HTTPS [28], the former sees limited use, while the latter breaks the end-to-end principles of TLS, exposing potentially private or personalized Web contents to third parties [37,54].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Further, the exact measures these systems take to actually save data are often cryptic [31,33,37,54]. As determining Web-compat issues, or the ability to quantify broken webpages, is an open problem that requires large amount of manual effort [41], it is hard to determine how and when these solutions actually break webpages; though when they do so there is usually public outcry [12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Browselite: A Private Data Saving Solution for the Web

Kelton,

Varvello,

Aucinas

et al. 2021

Preprint

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The median webpage has increased in size by more than 80% in the last 4 years. This extra complexity allows for a rich browsing experience, but it hurts the majority of mobile users which still pay for their traffic. This has motivated several data-saving solutions, which aim at reducing the complexity of webpages by transforming their content. Despite each method being unique, they either reduce user privacy by further centralizing web traffic through data-saving middleboxes or introduce web compatibility (Web-compat) issues by removing content that breaks pages in unpredictable ways.In this paper, we argue that data-saving is still possible without impacting either users privacy or Web-compat. Our main observation is that Web images make up a large portion of Web traffic and have negligible impact on Web-compat. To this end we make two main contributions. First, we quantify the potential savings that image manipulation, such as dimension resizing, quality compression, and transcoding, enables at large scale: 300 landing and 880 internal pages. Next, we design and build BrowseLite, an entirely client-side tool that achieves such data savings through opportunistically instrumenting existing server-side tooling to perform image compression, while simultaneously reducing the total amount of image data fetched. The effect of BrowseLite on the user experience is quantified using standard page load metrics and a real user study of over 200 users across 50 optimized web pages. BrowseLite allows for similar savings to middlebox approaches, while offering additional security, privacy, and Web-compat guarantees.

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Section: Background and Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Browselite: A Private Data Saving Solution for the Web

Kelton,

Varvello,

Aucinas

et al. 2021

Preprint

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“…But these services do not handle video elegantly. Both of these services replacing videos with an image [112].…”

Section: B Providing Effective Abr For Developing Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adaptive Bitrate Video Streaming for Wireless nodes: A Survey

Nishat,

Gnawali,

Abdelhadi

2020

Preprint

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In today's Internet, video is the most dominant application and in addition to this, wireless networks such as WiFi, Cellular, and Bluetooth have become ubiquitous. Hence, most of the Internet traffic is video over wireless nodes. There is a plethora of research to improve video streaming to achieve high Quality of Experience (QoE) over the Internet. Many of them focus on wireless nodes. Recent measurement studies often show QoE of video suffers in many wireless clients over the Internet. Recently, many research papers have presented models and schemes to optimize the Adaptive BitRate (ABR) based video streaming for wireless and mobile users. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview of recent work in the area of Internet video specially designed for wireless network. Recent research has suggested that there are some new challenges added by the connectivity of clients through wireless. Also these challenges become more difficult to handle when these nodes are mobile. This survey also discusses new potential areas of future research due to the increasing scarcity of wireless spectrum.

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RightFusion: Enabling QoS driven Function Fusion in Edge-Cloud FaaS

Sheshadri,

Lakshmi

2024

2024 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Engineering (IC2E)

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Deconstructing Google’s Web Light Service

Cited by 8 publications

References 6 publications

Browselite: A Private Data Saving Solution for the Web

Browselite: A Private Data Saving Solution for the Web

Adaptive Bitrate Video Streaming for Wireless nodes: A Survey

RightFusion: Enabling QoS driven Function Fusion in Edge-Cloud FaaS

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