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ControlJS part 3: overriding document.write

December 15, 2010 11:18 pm | 22 Comments

This is the third of three blog posts about ControlJS – a JavaScript module for making scripts load faster. The three blog posts describe how ControlJS is used for async loading, delayed execution, and overriding document.write. The goal of ControlJS is to give developers more control over how JavaScript is loaded. The key insight is […]

ControlJS part 2: delayed execution

December 15, 2010 11:11 pm | 15 Comments

This is the second of three blog posts about ControlJS – a JavaScript module for making scripts load faster. The three blog posts describe how ControlJS is used for async loading, delayed execution, and overriding document.write. The goal of ControlJS is to give developers more control over how JavaScript is loaded. The key insight is […]

ControlJS part 1: async loading

December 15, 2010 10:45 pm | 30 Comments

This is the first of three blog posts about ControlJS – a JavaScript module for making scripts load faster. The three blog posts describe how ControlJS is used for async loading, delayed execution, and overriding document.write. The #1 performance best practice I’ve been evangelizing over the past year is progressive enhancement: deliver the page as […]

Velocity China

December 10, 2010 10:54 am | 10 Comments

I returned from Velocity China yesterday. It was a great, great conference. It sold out with ~600 people – the main ballroom was standing room only for the morning keynoters. One thing I noticed that’s different in China – people fill in the seats from the front back, whereas in the US people have to […]

Evolution of Script Loading

December 6, 2010 8:06 am | 14 Comments

Velocity China starts tomorrow morning. I’m kicking it off with a keynote and am finishing up my slides. I’ll be talking about progressive enhancement and smart script loading. As I reviewed the slides it struck me how the techniques for loading external scripts have changed significantly in the last few years. Let’s take a look at […]

Web Directions South, Sydney photos

October 18, 2010 5:53 pm | 4 Comments

I just got back from Web Directions South in Sydney. John Allsopp and team do a great job. I and many others complimented John on pulling together great speakers at an awesome venue. I especially appreciated the smaller things he did to make a great conference – informal talks during lunch, great coffee and afternoon […]

Render first. JS second.

September 30, 2010 11:10 am | 28 Comments

Let me start with the takeaway point: The key to creating a fast user experience in today’s web sites is to render the page as quickly as possible. To achieve this JavaScript loading and execution has to be deferred. I’m in the middle of several big projects so my blogging rate is down. But I […]

newtwitter performance analysis

September 22, 2010 10:51 pm | 15 Comments

Among the exciting launches last week was newtwitter – the amazing revamp of the Twitter UI. I use Twitter a lot and was all over the new release, and so was stoked to see this tweet from Twitter developer Ben Cherry: The new Twitter UI looks good, but how does it score when it comes […]

Twitter vs blogging

September 15, 2010 2:21 pm | 8 Comments

My rate of blogging has dropped dramatically since I saw how @dalmaer was able to get so much news out via Twitter. I was slow to adopt Twitter, but now I love it. If you follow my blog but aren’t following me on Twitter, you should start following me: @souders. Here are some of the […]

WebPagetest.org and Page Speed

September 7, 2010 9:36 am | 2 Comments

Pat Meenan just blogged about Page Speed results now available in Webpagetest. This is a great step toward greater consistency in the world of web performance, something that benefits developers and ultimately benefits web users. I’ve been spreading the meme about WPO – the industry emerging around web performance optimization. I contend that in the […]

Redirect caching deep dive

July 23, 2010 12:34 am | 4 Comments

I was talking to a performance guru today who considers redirects one of the top two performance problems impacting web pages today. (The other was document.write.) I agree redirects are an issue, so much so that I wrote a chapter on avoiding redirects in High Performance Web Sites. What makes matters worse is that, even […]

Velocity: TCP and the Lower Bound of Web Performance

July 13, 2010 7:08 pm | 13 Comments

John Rauser (Amazon) was my favorite speaker at Velocity. His keynote on Creating Cultural Change was great. I recommend you watch the video. John did another session that was longer and more technical entitled TCP and the Lower Bound of Web Performance. Unfortunately this wasn’t scheduled in the videotape room. But yesterday Mike Bailey contacted […]

Velocity: Forcing Gzip Compression

July 12, 2010 6:57 pm | 25 Comments

Tony Gentilcore was my officemate when I first started at Google. I was proud of my heritage as “the YSlow guy”. After all, YSlow was well over 1M downloads. After a few days I found out that Tony was the creator of Fasterfox – topping 11M downloads. Needless to say, we hit it off and […]

Mobile cache file sizes

July 12, 2010 10:07 am | 8 Comments

Mobile is big, but knowledge about how to make a mobile web site fast is lacking. The state of mobile web performance is in a similar place as desktop was six years ago when I started my performance deep dive. How many of us are happy with the speed of web pages on mobile? (I’m […]

Diffable: only download the deltas

July 9, 2010 9:31 am | 15 Comments

There were many new products and projects announced at Velocity, but one that I just found out about is Diffable. It’s ironic that I missed this one given that it happened at Velocity and is from Google. The announcement was made during a whiteboard talk, so it didn’t get much attention. If your web site […]

Velocity: Google Maps API performance

July 7, 2010 1:09 pm | 1 Comment

Several months ago I saw Susannah Raub do an internal tech talk on the performance improvements behind Google Maps API v3. She kindly agreed to reprise the talk at Velocity. Luckily it was videotaped, and the slides (ODP) are available, too. It’s a strong case study on improving performance, is valuable for developers working with […]

Velocity: Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS

July 3, 2010 12:22 pm | 3 Comments

Nicole Sullivan and Stoyan Stefanov had the #3 highest rated session at Velocity – The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS. Nicole (aka, “stubbornella”) wrote a blog post summarizing their work. The motivator for paying attention to CSS are these stats that show how bad things are across the Alexa Top 1000: 42% don’t GZIP […]

Back to blogging after Velocity

July 2, 2010 12:04 pm | 3 Comments

The last few weeks have been hectic. I was in London and Paris for 10 days. I returned a day before Velocity started. Most of you experienced or have heard about the awesomeness that was Velocity – great speakers, sponsors, and attendees. Right after Velocity I headed up to Foo Camp at O’Reilly HQ. This […]

Velocity wrap-up

June 25, 2010 3:53 pm | 3 Comments

Velocity ended yesterday at 6pm – and the final presentations from 5:20-6:00 were still packed! It was a great conference. I’m wiped out from talking web performance from 8am to 10pm the last three days. The highlight of the conference was the conference itself: 1200 attendees 89 speakers 28 sponsors 26 exhibitors Compare that to […]

Velocity is coming fast June 22-24

June 4, 2010 1:09 am | 1 Comment

Jesse Robbins and I co-chair Velocity – the web performance and operations conference run by O’Reilly. This year’s Velocity is coming fast (get it?) – June 22-24 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. This is the third year for Velocity. The first two years sold out, and this year is looking even stronger. We’ve added […]