Vulture: Cross-Device Web Experience with Fine-Grained Graphical User Interface Distribution

Abstract

We propose a cross-device web solution, called Vulture, which distributes graphical user interface (GUI) elements of apps across multiple devices without requiring modifications of web apps or browsers. Several challenges should be resolved to achieve the goals. First, the peer-server configuration should be efficiently established to distribute web resources in cross-device web environments. Vulture exploits an in-browser virtual proxy that runs the web server's functionality in web browsers using a virtual HTTP scheme and a relevant API. Second, the functional consistency of web apps must be ensured in GUI-distributed environments. Vulture solves this challenge by providing a single-browser illusion with a two-tier document object models (DOM) architecture, which handles view state changes and user input seamlessly in cross-device environments. We implemented Vulture and extensively evaluated the system under various combinations of operating platforms, devices, and network capabilities while running 50 real web apps. The experiment results show that the proposed scheme provides functionally consistent cross-device web experiences by allowing fine-grained GUI distribution. We also confirmed that the in-browser virtual proxy reduces the GUI distribution time and the view change reproduction time by averages of 38.47% and 20.46%, respectively.