A Latency-Determining/User Directed Firefox Browser Extension

Abstract

As the World Wide Web continues to evolve as the preferred choice for information access it is critical that its utility to the user remains. Latency as a result of network congestion, bandwidth availability, server processing delays, embedded objects, and transmission delays and errors can impact the utility of the web browser application. To improve the overall user experience the application needs to not only provide feedback to the end user about the latency of links that are available but to also provide them controls in the retrieval of the web content. This thesis presents a background and related work relating to latency and web optimization techniques to reduce this latency and then introduce an improvement to the ``latency aware" Mozilla Firefox extension which was originally developed by Sterbenz et. al., in 2002. This these describes the architecture and prototype implementation, followed with an analysis of its effectiveness to predict latency and future work