  With the popularity of mobile devices, such as smartphones, tablets, users
prefer visiting Web pages on mobile devices. Meanwhile, HTTP(S) plays as the
major protocol to deliver Web contents, and has served the Web well for more
than 15 years. However, as the Web pages grow increasingly complex to provide
more content and functionality, the shortcomings and inflexibility of HTTP
become more and more urgent to solve, e.g., the sluggish page load, insecure
content, redundant transfer, etc. SPDY and HTTP/2 are promoted to solve the
shortcomings and inflexibilities of HTTP/1.x. We are interested in how Web
pages perform on smartphones with different protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS,
SPDY, and HTTP/2. In this paper, we divide our experiments into two parts.
First, in order to simplify our analysis, we develop our own HTTP client
ignoring complicated process in real browsers to fetch synthetic Web pages with
pre-specified object sizes and object numbers with different protocols,
respectively. Meanwhile, we emulate different network conditions between client
and server using Traffic Control. In order to test with real browsers, we clone
Alexa top 200 websites, which have the corresponding mobile version, into our
local host. Meanwhile, we control mobile Chrome browser to load those Web pages
with different protocols and emulate different network conditions using Traffic
Control. We identify how Web page characteristics and network conditions affect
Web performance on smartphones for each protocol. We also conduct experiments
on a low-end device to observe if a less powerful processor could affect Web
page performance for each protocol.
