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More than a billion people access the Internet through residential broadband connections worldwide, and this number is projected to grow further. Surprisingly, little is known about some important properties of these networks: What performance do users obtain from their ISP? What factors affect performance of broadband networks? Are users bottlenecked by their ISP or by their home network? How are applications such as the Web affected by these factors? Answering these questions is difficult; there is tremendous diversity of technologies and applications in home and broadband networks. While a lot of research has tackled these questions piecemeal, the lack of a good vantage point to obtain good measurements from these networks makes it notably difficult to do a holistic characterization of the ﾓlast mileﾔ. In this dissertation we use the home gateway to characterize home and access networks and mitigate performance bottlenecks that are specific to such networks. The home gateway is uniquely situated; it is always on and, as the hub of the network, it can directly observe the home network, the access network, and user traffic. We present one such gateway- based platform, BISmark, that currently has nearly 200 active access points in over 20 countries. We do a holistic characterization of three important components of the last mile using the gateway as the vantage point: the access link that connects the user to the wider Internet, the home network to which devices connect, and Web performance, one of the most commonly used applications in today's Internet. We first describe the design, development, and deployment of the BISmark platform. BISmark uses custom gateways to enable measurements and evaluate performance opti- mizations directly from home networks. We characterize access link performance in the US using measurements from the gateway; we evaluate existing techniques and propose new techniques that help us understand these networks better. We show how access link technology and home networking hardware can affect performance. We then develop a new system that uses passive measurements at the gateway to localize bottlenecks to either the wireless network or the access link. We deploy this system in 64 homes worldwide and characterize the nature of bottlenecks, and the state of the wireless network in these homes - specifically we show how the wireless network is rarely the bottleneck as throughput exceeds 35 Mbits/s. Finally, we characterize bottlenecks that affect Web performance that are specific to the last mile. We show how latency in the last mile results in page load times stagnating at throughput exceeding 16 Mbits/s, and how simple techniques deployed at the gateway can mitigate these bottlenecks.

Surfing the web has moved from the stationary computers to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets. As the technology moves further and more devices comes out on the market this is a trend that will continue. This makes it more important for web developers to adapt and make their websites fit not only for one device. The website needs to fit all devices. Since many of these devices are using wireless connections, the website performance has also become even more important in order to give the users a good experience.   Responsive web design is an approach for designing and developing web pages. By using the three techniques of flexible grid layout, flexible images and media, and media queries, websites can get a design that fits all devices. Responsive web techniques will also make the web page perform better on each device since it makes the web page adapt to its environment. There are several performance techniques that can be applied to a website in order to increase performance and loading time. Responsive web design including performance techniques can together make a great impact on a website's loading speed and user experience.   This thesis embraces this approach for web development. By developing a design theory, a website emerges where these approaches of web development have been implemented. During the development of the website the experiences implementing this approach and techniques is discussed. The website developed for this thesis was able to finish loading below 4 seconds on a mobile device using a 3G connection. We argue that responsive web design and performance techniques can help a website immensely to increase its user experience and performance.

With the digital world we live in today, inclusion on the web is crucial. Ensuring all who want to access the web can do so is a responsibility that can be vague. As prior research has shown that making a website accessible is a low prioritized matter because of time and money, but also lack of knowledge, the purpose with this thesis was to find out if factors used for search engine optimization could cater to web accessibility. There is a general understanding that there are overlapping factors between the two concepts. Since search engine optimization is a desired and successful part of providing a website with traffic, an overlap should improve accessibility. To understand in what way the search engine optimization factors could affect the accessibility of a webpage as a whole, with this thesis we go into the context of implementation by interviewing web professionals. As this thesis will show, there are multiple aspects needed to be taken into consideration when measuring to what extent the overlapping factors affect website performance in regards to accessibility. Factors like the clients, thoughts about responsibility, experience and even personal interest come into play. The method used was qualitative where we analysed the data with a thematic analysis and descriptive statistics. The data collection had three parts: a survey, an in-depth interview with a few of the participants from the survey, and finally a web performance test. The latter was performed by Siteimprove crawl, which administers one of the top accessibility ranking tools online. The general indication was that we cannot draw a conclusion to the benefit of it being enough to just implement the SEO factors that overlap. Although, this investigation provides an insight into to what extent web professionals are implementing the overlapping factors between search engine optimization and web accessibility, and what other aspects may influence web performance.

This thesis deals with a load testing of web applications. The text is introduced with a definition of the load testing, reasons for its execution and a description of its types. Recommended procedures are provided for preparation, execution and evaluation of the testing. Several commercial and open-source load testing tools are described. Cloud testing -- the contemporary phenomenon -- is also included. The entire process of load testing depicted in this text is demonstrated on a selected application. A following chapter briefly deals with a profiling of web applications. It, again, covers its definition and its purpose, accompanied with a practical example. The aim of this thesis is to introduce the reader to the world of load testing, which is primarily accomplished by describing an example, which provides an in-depth explanation for every step necessary in order to perform the web application testing successfully.

The goal of this thesis is to experiment with the latest web technologies and to design new process for mobile application creation. It is possible to create multiplatform applications which are almost unrecognizable from native applications by proposed procedures.  It is focused on performance and native behaviour of the user interface in this thesis. Described practices are demonstrated on application designed for work with historical maps, which is able to show maps from historical archives whole over world real-time. Rapid acceleration has been showed on the demonstrative application compared to standard process of creation of web applications.