Polaris Loads Web Pages Faster Than Ever Before

Have you ever felt like banging your smartphone on the table or simply throwing it furiously on the floor simply because it takes just about forever to load a website, and you know that it is because of the connection you’re one? Well, such days of throwing tantrums (and devices) will soon be over, as researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Harvard University have managed to come up with a way to lower the amount of waiting time where a web page loads through a streamlined file retrieval process.

Known as Polaris, this particular technique will load individual objects that make up a web page in a far more efficient manner. In other words, Polaris will be able to map out a more direct route for the browser to travel between such individual objects that are in a web page.

MIT PhD student Ravi Netravali explained, “It can take up to 100 milliseconds each time a browser has to cross a mobile network to fetch a piece of data.” Hence, if a web page is particularly complex, then the browser will have to make far more trips across the network. Polaris’ work is to lower the amount of such trips, and it does not take the data compression route. So far, Polaris has been used to test out a wide range of network conditions on 200 leading websites in the world, ESPN.com, NYTimes.com and Weather.com included, and the conclusion is, it works better with large, complex sites in addition to mobile networks. [Press Release]

Edwin Kee
Categories: Cellphones, Computers
Tags: polaris