Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mike WittieGoel, Utkarsh2017-10-102017-10-102017https://scholarworks.montana.edu/handle/1/12782The evolution of Web technologies enables interactive Web communications and makes the Web ecosystem more complex. To ensure timely delivery of Web content, the Web Performance Community (WPC) -- comprised of browser vendors, content providers, content delivery networks (CDNs), and network regulators -- develops new protocols and optimization techniques. However, new protocols suffer from insufficiently wide adoption and the optimization techniques often require ISP support. To cope with these challenges, I present several measurement techniques through which WPC could better understand the current state of the Web performance. I also present several application-layer optimizations that enable applications to control how content is delivered in different networks. This work summarizes several best-practices, which have been extensively evaluated on production infrastructure, to which the WPC could and should transition to achieve faster Web communications.enInternetCommunicationComputer softwareDissertationCopyright 2017 by Utkarsh Goel