Despite the promise of the mobile web, today, many users within developing regions are hampered from fully utilizing the web by the performance and poor quality of experience. Through empirical studies and a large-scale measurement study, we observe that due to an unhealthy interaction between insufficient webpage optimizations, resource allocation strategies and Android’s OOM, memory intensive pages crash browsers.

Towards resolving this problem, we present a straw-man for a system, WebMedic, that addresses memory constraints by intelligently removing JS function while ensuring that crucial user-desired functionality remains: in short, WebMedic trades off functionality for availability/performance.