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On the Impact of the Critical CSS Technique on the Performance and Energy Consumption of Mobile Browsers

Published: 13 June 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Context. Due to the growing popularity of smartphones, mobile web browsing is more popular than ever with users desiring fast loading web apps and low energy usage. A technique that might improve the run-time performance and reduce the energy consumption of this action is the Critical CSS technique.
Goal. The goal of this research is to analyze the impact of the Critical CSS technique for the purpose of evaluating the impact on run-time performance and energy consumption from the point of view of a developer in the context of Android mobile web apps.
Method. To assess the impact of the Critical CSS technique, 40 web apps were served with and without Critical CSS on a mobile Android device. For each website, the energy consumption, load time, first paint and, first contentful paint were measured.
Results. Applying the Critical CSS technique had a medium effect size on the first paint for Google Chrome, and on the first contentful paint for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, the effect size is small. Therefore, we can claim that applying critical CSS to web apps served to Android mobile devices has a small but positive effect on their run-time performance. The loading time difference for Google Chrome was small to negligible. Finally, the energy consumption for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, and the loading time and first paint for Mozilla Firefox showed no significant differences.
Conclusions. Depending on the characteristics of the web application, it is advisable to apply the Critical CSS technique to enhance the run-time performance (e.g., to ensure a fast loading time of the web app) of Android mobile web apps. Moreover, the experimental results show that applying the Critical CSS technique tends to have no significant impact on the energy consumption of mobile web apps on Android.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
EASE '22: Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering
June 2022
466 pages
ISBN:9781450396134
DOI:10.1145/3530019
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 13 June 2022

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)REDUCE—A Tool Supporting Inconsistencies Reduction in the Decision-Making ProcessApplied Sciences10.3390/app14231146514:23(11465)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2024
  • (2024)An Empirical Study on the Impact of CSS Prefixes on the Energy Consumption and Performance of Mobile Web AppsProceedings of the IEEE/ACM 11th International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems10.1145/3647632.3647989(12-21)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Variability Features: Extending Sustainability Decision Maps via an Industrial Case Study2023 IEEE 20th International Conference on Software Architecture Companion (ICSA-C)10.1109/ICSA-C57050.2023.00024(1-7)Online publication date: Mar-2023
  • (2023)Speed Up the Web with Universal CSS RenderingWeb Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-34444-2_14(191-205)Online publication date: 16-Jun-2023

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