Making the Mobile Web Fast

Web usage on mobile devices is exploding, and in many countries, mobile devices are the predominant means of accessing the Internet. But the mobile web is still incredibly slow; clearly the web was not designed for mobile networks. Our team at Google is working to solve this problem, by optimizing all layers of the stack: device operating systems, browsers, network protocols, servers, and web content. In this talk, I'll talk about why the mobile web is slow, provide some insight into the inner workings of 3G and 4G networks, and provide an overview of some of our efforts to make the mobile web fast. I'll also talk a bit about what it was like to make the leap from academia to industry. Matt Welsh is the head of mobile web performance at Google. Prior to joining Google, he was a professor of Computer Science at Harvard, where he worked on projects ranging from deploying wireless sensor networks on volcanoes in Ecuador to building a swarm of robotic bees. He did his PhD at UC Berkeley.