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Creators/Authors contains: "Madhyastha, Harsha V"

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  1. Operators of web archives have two options for how to crawl pages from the web. Browser-based dynamic crawlers capture all of the resources on every page, but incur high compute overheads. Static browserless crawlers are more lightweight, but miss page resources which are fetched only when scripts are executed. In this paper, we make the case that a web archive does not have to make a binary choice between dynamic or static crawling. Instead, by using a browser for a carefully chosen small subset of crawls, an archive can significantly improve its ability to serve statically crawled pages with high fidelity. First, we show how to reuse crawled resources, both across pages and across multiple crawls of the same page over time. Second, by leveraging a dynamic crawl of a page, we show that subsequent static crawls of the page can be augmented to fetch resources without executing the scripts which request them. We estimate that, as long as 8.9% of page crawls use a browser, an archive can serve roughly 99% of the remaining statically crawled pages without any loss in fidelity, up from 55% without our techniques. 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available October 28, 2026
  2. Free, publicly-accessible full text available September 8, 2026
  3. Free, publicly-accessible full text available July 7, 2026
  4. Low interaction response times are crucial to the experience that mobile apps provide for their users. Unfortunately, existing strategies to alleviate the network latencies that hinder app responsiveness fall short in practice. In particular, caching is plagued by challenges in setting expiration times that match when a resource's content changes, while prefetching hinges on accurate predictions of user behavior that have proven elusive. We present Marauder, a system that synergizes caching and prefetching to improve the speedups achieved by each technique while avoiding their inherent limitations. Key to Marauder is our observation that, like web pages, apps handle interactions by downloading and parsing structured text resources that entirely list (i.e., without needing to consult app binaries) the set of other resources to load. Building on this, Marauder introduces two low-risk optimizations directly from the app's cache. First, guided by cached text files, Marauder prefetches referenced resources during an already-triggered interaction. Second, to improve the efficacy of cached content, Marauder judiciously prefetches about-to-expire resources, extending cache lives for unchanged resources, and downloading updates for lightweight (but crucial) text files. Across a wide range of apps, live networks, interaction traces, and phones, Marauder reduces median and 90th percentile interaction response times by 27.4% and 43.5%, while increasing data usage by only 18%. 
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  5. Mobile web browsing remains slow despite many efforts to accelerate page loads. Like others, we find that client-side computation (in particular, JavaScript execution) is a key culprit. Prior solutions to mitigate computation overheads, however, suffer from security, privacy, and deployability issues, hindering their adoption. To sidestep these issues, we propose a browser-based solution in which every client reuses identical computations from its prior page loads. Our analysis across roughly 230 pages reveals that, even on a modern smartphone, such an approach could reduce client-side computation by a median of 49% on pages which are most in need of such optimizations. 
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