Archives
Velocity CFP now open!
Velocity 2010 is just around the corner! Well, actually, it’s not until June 22-24, 2010. But Jesse and I have already been working with the O’Reilly conferences team for a few months. We have the venue – Hyatt Regency Santa Clara. We have the theme – Fast by Default. We have the cool blur motion […]
Fewer requests through resource packages
A few months back, I visited Alexander Limi at the Mozilla offices to discuss his proposal for resource packages. I liked the idea then and am excited that he has published the proposal in his article Making browsers faster: Resource Packages. I’ll start by reviewing the concept, provide my comments on some of the issues […]
SpeedGeeks LA videos now available
Quick follow-up on my blog post about SpeedGeeks LA, the performance meetup hosted at Shopzilla on Oct 26: Videos and slides from the presentations are now available: In Search of Speed – me (Google,slides, video) You Get What You Measure – Phil Dixon (Shopzilla,slides, video) A Holistic Approach to Building a High Performance Web Site […]
SPeeDY – twice as fast as HTTP
Mike Belshe and Roberto Peon, both from Google, just published a post entitled A 2x Faster Web. The post talks about one of the most promising web performance initiatives in recent memory – an improvement of HTTP called SPDY (pronounced “SPeeDY”). The title of their blog post comes from the impact SPDY has on page […]
Velocity OLC in December (discount #velfall09pcd)
The in-person Velocity conference is slated for June 22-24, 2010 in Santa Clara. But you don’t have to wait until then to whet your performance and operations appetite. On December 8 (less than 4 weeks from now!) the first Velocity Online Conference will be held. Sessions include: How Web Speed Affects Online Business KPIs – […]
Who’s not getting gzip?
The article Use compression to make the web faster from the Google Code Blog contains some interesting information on why modern browsers that support compression don’t get compressed responses in daily usage. The culprit? anti-virus software, browser bugs, web proxies, and misconfigured web servers. The first three modify the web request so that the web […]
Security tests added to Browserscope
Today, the first new test suite for Browserscope was launched: Security. Browserscope is an open source project for measuring browser capabilities. It’s a resource for users and developers to see which features are or are not supported by any particular browser. All of the data is crowdsourced, making the results more immediate, diverse, and representative. […]
Firebug Net Panel: more accurate timing
There’s a lot of work that transpires before I can recommend a performance tool. I have to do a large amount of testing to verify the tool’s accuracy, and frequently (more often than not) that testing reveals inaccuracies. Like many web developers, I love Firebug and have been using it since it first came out. […]
SpeedGeeks LA at Shopzilla
I co-hosted a great web performance meetup yesterday called SpeedGeeks LA. The idea started when Phil Dixon invited me down to Shopzilla to give a talk. (Phil and I have stayed in touch after his amazing session at Velocity 2009.) Phil suggested we invite some other performance-minded companies in the area, and then we started […]
HTTP Archive Specification: Firebug and HttpWatch
A few years ago, I set a goal to foster the creation of an Internet Performance Archive. The idea is similar to the Internet Archive. But whereas the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine provides a history of the Web’s state of HTML, IPA would provide a history of the Web’s state of performance: total bytes downloaded, […]
Øredev, Fronteers, JSConf.eu
A contingent of web dev gurus are on their way to Europe the first week of November for some awesome conferences. If you haven’t signed up, check into it soon – seats are going fast. The gurus I’ve been coordinating with include John Resig, Doug Crockford, Ben Galbraith, and Dion Almaer. But there’s more! Other […]
@font-face and performance
MAJOR CORRECTION: @font-face only blocks rendering in IE when there is a SCRIPT tag above the @font-face declaration. (more info below) Last week I was reading Ajaxian (my favorite blog) and saw the post about @font-face. I had been wondering for a few months about how font files impact web performance, so I followed the […]
Business impact of high performance
Alistair Croll adds more evidence to the business case for high performance web sites in his blog post Proof that speeding up websites improves online business. This was the primary theme of Velocity 2009, and major web destinations shared their business case studies, including Bing, Google, and Shopzilla. Alistair rounds out the stats by answering […]
Aptimize: realtime spriting and more
I love evangelizing high performance best practices and engaging with developers who are focused on delivering a fast user experience. Helping to optimize the Web appeals to the (speed)geek in me, and my humanitarian side feels good about creating a better user experience. There are many companies and developers out there that go the extra […]
dynaTrace Ajax Edition: tracing JS performance
DynaTrace has been around for several years focusing on the performance analysis of backend applications. They entered the frontend performance arena last week with the release of dynaTrace Ajax Edition. It’s a free tool that runs in IE as a browser helper object (BHO). I tried it out and was pleased. It’s important to have […]
Web Exponents speaker series
Earlier this year I started a speaker series at Google that I call Web Exponents. The word “exponents” is used in the context of “a person who actively supports or favors a cause”. I even have a tagline:Â raising web technology to a higher power. Classic. I post about these talks on the Google Code Blog. […]
Yahoo! Search – new features, faster performance
My last blog post was about Mobile Gmail performance best practices. It’s nice to follow that up with a review of a recent YDN blog post: Not Just a Pretty Face: Performance and the New Yahoo! Search. It’s great to see these industry leaders sharing their performance tips with the developer community and showing the […]
Mobile Gmail and async script loading
Mobile is the current web frontier where we’ll see the greatest growth in users and companies over the next few years. In case you didn’t see the announcement, Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith just joined Palm to head up their developer relations program. At this week’s Velocity kick-off meeting, mobile performance was highlighted as a […]
Sau-dərs: “sour”, not “super”
After my exhausting three part post on SpriteMe, I need a lighter one tonight. Often at conferences I’ll be introduced as Steve Sü-dÉ™rs (like “super”). The spelling is almost always correct, “Souders”, but most people mispronounce my last name, so I don’t say anything. But I wanted to get the official pronunciation out there: it’s […]