Delta encoding and shared dictionary compression (SDC) for accelerating Web content have been studied extensively in research over the last two decades, but have only found limited adoption in the industry so far; compression approaches that use a custom-tailored dictionary per website have all failed in practice due to lacking browser support and high overall complexity. General-purpose SDC approaches such as Brotli reduce complexity by shipping the same dictionary for all use cases, while most delta encoding approaches just consider similarities between versions of the same entity (but not between different entities). In this study, we investigate how much of the potential benefits of SDC and delta encoding are left on the table by these two simplifications. As our first contribution, we describe the idea of cross-entity delta encoding that uses cached assets from the immediate browser history for content encoding instead of a precompiled shared dictionary; this avoids the need to create a custom dictionary, but enables highly customized and efficient compression. Second, we present an experimental evaluation of compression efficiency to hold cross-entity delta encoding against state-of-the-art Web compression algorithms. We consciously compare algorithms some of which are not yet available in browsers to understand their potential value before investing resources to build them. Our results indicate that cross-entity delta encoding is over 50% more efficient for text-based resources than compression industry standards. We hope our findings motivate further research and development on this topic. The extended version of our previously published paper [10] includes an additional section on the deltas of HTML files, a more detailed description of our approach (including a new visualization for the different dictionary strategies), a deeper discussion of compression efficiency, and details on additional future and ongoing work.

Content delivery networks (CDNs) are critical for minimizing access latency in the Web as they efficiently distribute online resources across the globe. But since CDNs can only be enabled on the scope of entire websites (and not for individual users or user groups), the effects of page speed acceleration are often quantified with potentially skewed before-after comparisons rather than statistically sound A/B tests. We introduce the system Beaconnect for collecting and analyzing Web performance data without being subject to these limitations. Our contributions are threefold. First, Beaconnect is natively compatible with A/B testing Web performance as it is built for a custom browser-based acceleration approach and thus does not rely on traditional CDN technology. Second, we present our continuous aggregation pipeline that achieves sub-minute end-to-end latency. Third, we describe and evaluate a scheme for continuous real-time reporting that is especially efficient for large customers and processes data from over 100 million monthly users at Baqend.