Performance Characterization of Web Applications with HTML5 Enhancements

In the age of Mobile Internet, web browsing has become more fundamental, and a number of applications are built on top of popular browser engines such as WebKit [1]. In latest developments, HTML5 has been proposed to enable more powerful web applications. HTML5 based operating systems, like Chrome OS and Firefox OS, are also emerging as alternatives to current generation mobile platforms. However, web-based platforms still have a long way to catch up with iOS/Android and their native apps in terms of performance and user experiences. Therefore, understanding and optimizing the performance of HTML5 based applications/systems are invaluable work for speeding up their adoption. As a first step, we make an in-depth analysis on the performance of a popular web browsing engine, WebKit. Our work covers a set of important aspects of both the traditional web browsing, and new features of the HTML5 standard. This study exposes some interesting observations, from which we make reasoning´s and provide guidelines for developing efficient web-based applications. The analysis in this work can also serve as a basis for the optimization of HTML5 based operating system design.