Web Browsing Measurements: An Above-The-Fold Browser-Based Technique

International audienceWeb browsing is the most important Internet service,and offering the best performance to end-users is ofprime importance. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)has brought along the Page Load Time (PLT) metric as aQoE (Quality of Experience) and QoS (Quality of Service)benchmarking indicator, which is nowadays the de facto webmetric used by researchers, large service companies and webdevelopers. Although alternative web metrics have been introducedto measure part of the loading process, the techniques usedneed additional computing power and timings are not offeredin real-time. In order to provide real-time fined-grained timingsduring web browsing measurement campaigns, we present in thispaper the TFVR (Time for Full Visual Rendering), a techniquebeing browser-based to calculate the Above-The-Fold (ATF)offering the loading time of the visible portion at first glanceof a web page. The TFVR exposes fine-grained timings such asnetworking and processing time for every downloaded resource.Based on a measurement campaign on top 10,000 Alexa websites,we have been able to better quantify and identify web pageloading inefficiencies through a tool we have designed, namely,MORIS (Measuring and Observing Representative Informationon webSites)