The Web for Underpowered Mobile Devices: Lessons Learned from Google Glass

This article examines some of the potential challenges associated with enabling a seamless web experience on underpowered mobile devices having display capabilities such as Google Glass from the perspective of web content providers, device, and network. We conducted experiments to study the impact of webpage complexity, individual web components, and different application layer protocols while accessing webpages on the performance of the Glass browser. We measured webpage load time, temperature variation, and power consumption and compared them to a smartphone. Our findings suggest that (a) performance of Glass compared to a smartphone in terms of power consumption and webpage load time deteriorates with increasing webpage complexity, (b) execution time for popular JavaScript benchmarks is about three to eight times higher on Glass compared to a smartphone, (c) WebP is a more energy-efficient image format than JPEG and PNG, and (d) seven out of 50 websites studied are optimized for content delivery to Glass.