Troubleshooting slow webpage downloads

One common way to search and access information available in the Internet is via a Web browser. When clicking on a Web page, the user expects that the page gets rendered quickly, otherwise he will lose interest and may abort the page load. The causes for a Webpage to load slowly are multiple and not easy to comprehend for an end-user. In this paper, we present FireLog, a plugin for the Firefox Web browser that relies on passive measurements during users´ browsing, and helps identify why a web page loads slowly. We present details of our methodology and illustrate it in a case study with real users.