MIT and Harvard University developed tools to help download websites 34% faster

Polaris - a new technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), can help the browser collect files more efficiently, thereby speeding up the loading of web pages.

Internet speed is getting faster and faster, but websites have too much complexity, and that's why we often have to wait to download a content."When websites increase complexity, they often require many factors that create delays," explains Ravi Netravali, one of the researchers. "Our approach will minimize the number of loops, which in turn can increase the page loading speed significantly . " Polaris was co-developed by scientists from University of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT) and Harvard University.

Downloading a website is an extremely complicated process. After accessing a URL or clicking on a link, your browser will conduct a series of collection of object files, including HTML, JavaScript, images and more. Each object is evaluated, then added to the site you are viewing. However, the evaluation process may result in having to download several other things, depending on the dependencies (dependancies) of the objects. The browser is completely ignorant of what content to download, until it obtains the first object. This has made the loading of a website more slow and that is the reason for Polaris's birth.

Black lines represent the typical order of objects on a loaded web page, from top to bottom.The red lines show how Polaris connects the dots together.

Polaris's mission was to record all the dependancies and "bury" them. It will aggregate all of these dependencies and create a chart, which helps the browser download the page components more effectively. For ease of understanding, researchers compare it to someone's travel. "When you visit a city, sometimes you can discover more cities you want to visit, before you go home. If someone gives you the entire list of cities before, you can plan the route as fast as possible.However, without this list, you will have to go round the city . For web browsers, download all the objects of a Polaris is like having to go through all the cities, Polaris is effective in that it gives you a list of all cities, before the trip actually begins. "

The team tested their systems on 200 different websites, including ESPN, Weather.com and Wikipedia. On average, Polaris has helped download webpages faster than the standard browser by about 34%. Written in the JavaScript language, Polaris can be used for any web site and its performance does not depend on the browser. But scientists' long-term hope is to integrate it into the browsers we use. Over the next few months, the team plans to disseminate their tools to everyone, in order to get feedback, thereby improving the effectiveness of Polaris.