The amount of JavaScript used in web pages has substantially grown in the past decade, leading to large and complex pages that are computationally intensive for handheld mobile devices. Due to the increasing usage of these devices to access today’s web, and to accommodate the needs of a large number of mobile web users who solely rely on low-end devices, we propose “JSAnalyzer,” an easy-to-use tool that enables web developers to quickly optimize JavaScript usage in their pages and to generate simpler versions of these pages for mobile web users. JSAnalyzer is motivated by the widespread use of non-critical JavaScript elements, i.e., those that have negligible (if any) impact on the page’s visual content and interactive functionality. JSAnalyzer allows the developer to selectively enable or disable JavaScript elements in any given page while visually observing their impact on the page to (1) accurately identify any non-critical JavaScript elements and (2) create a simplified page with these elements removed. Our quantitative evaluation shows that, given a low-end mobile phone, JSAnalyzer achieves an increase of nearly 90% in Google’s lighthouse performance score while reducing the page load time by 30%. A qualitative study of 22 users shows that the lighter pages produced by JSAnalyzer maintain more than 90% visual similarity compared to the original pages. Moreover, JSAnalyzer was evaluated by 69 developers, showing that it scores nearly 90% in terms of usefulness and usability while retaining the page’s content and functionality. Finally, we show that JSAnalyzer outperforms state-of-the-art solutions in terms of timing speedups and resource savings.

A significant fraction of the World Wide Web suffers from the excessive usage of JavaScript (JS). Based on an analysis of popular webpages, we observed that a considerable number of JS elements utilized by these pages are not essential for their visual and functional features. In this paper, we propose JSCleaner, a JavaScript de-cluttering engine that aims at simplifying webpages without compromising their content or functionality. JSCleaner relies on a rule-based classification algorithm that classifies JS into three main categories: non-critical, replaceable, and critical. JSCleaner removes non-critical JS from a webpage, translates replaceable JS elements with their HTML outcomes, and preserves critical JS. Our quantitative evaluation of 500 popular webpages shows that JSCleaner achieves around 30% reduction in page load times coupled with a 50% reduction in the number of requests and the page size. In addition, our qualitative user study of 103 evaluators shows that JSCleaner preserves 95% of the page content similarity, while maintaining nearly 88% of the page functionality (the remaining 12% did not have a major impact on the user browsing experience).