In defence of Blaze

Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby, talks about Blaze's post in his blog:

I follow a lot of blogs, but I rarely read comments, especially on contentious posts, because people can quickly lose all sense of decency and get nasty. A recent example of this: a couple of weeks ago, Blaze released its study of mobile browser performance — announcing that the iPhone browser is 52% slower than Android — and came under heavy fire from many people.

As it turned out, some errors were made in this study. I won’t get into the particulars here (Blaze has been forthright about it in their own post), but these errors triggered a flood of vitriol, which I think the folks at Blaze have handled exceptionally well.

Find out more here.

Experimental new Webpagetest feature lets you test sites on Chrome

From the blog of Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby:

I’m always excited any time WebPagetest announces a new feature, and the recent announcement of the experimental new Chrome feature is no exception. At the risk of being labelled “that guy who runs a bunch of tests every time a new performance measurement tool comes out,” I… well… I ran a bunch of tests.

The test subjects were some of the winners of Gomez’s “Best of the Web” performance awards. I wanted to see how they performed across all of WPT’s current browsers, from the Dulles, VA, location.

See results here. 

Above-the-fold time (AFT): Useful, but not yet a substitute for user-centric analysis

Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby, talks about Above-the-fold-time in his blog:

It was great to see above-the-fold time (AFT) on the agenda at yesterday’s Velocity Online. It’s been pretty widely acknowledged, here and on other blogs, that load time and doc complete time don’t fully cut it as measurement numbers. Our industry needs a user-centered approach to measuring page performance, one that tells site owners when visitors are able to see and interact with a significant amount of page content. AFT is a promising concept.

Coming up with a universal algorithm for such a nuanced measurement — an algorithm that can be applied to any site to consistently and accurately measure performance — is a gargantuan undertaking. Pat Meenan and the rest of the gang at Google who are working on WebPagetest deserve huge respect for being the first to tackle this hairy challenge.

Defining “Above the Fold”

In yesterday’s session on above-the-fold time, led by Google’s Jake Brutlag, AFT was defined as the moment when content “above the fold” (aka “what you see in your browser window”) stops changing and reaches its final state.

Learn more about above-the-fold-time here. 

Web Performance Hub launches today

Joshua Bixby announces Strangeloop's Web Performance Hub on his blog:

One of the most popular posts on this blog is the performance cheat sheet, a collection of stats covering everything from the psychology of the user experience to the ecommerce benefits of fixing performance. A couple of months back, it occurred to me that it would be handy to create a larger directory of links to performance-related websites, tools, how-to’s, studies, and articles — both for our team here at Strangeloop, and for anyone else interested in performance.

Our marketing team got to work, and this morning we launched the Web Performance Hub. Check it out. There’s a lot of material in there, but it’s definitely a work in progress. I’d love to hear your feedback, including tips on any links we’ve missed.

Mobile applications redefined the user experience but represent only a pit stop in the continuing evolution.

Published in Entrepreneur:

"There's a great deal of confusion about the mobile web," says Joshua Bixby, president of website optimization firm Strangeloop, in Vancouver, B.C. "Businesses haven't known what to do about it, and the largest companies have been focused on coming out with their own apps for individual phones.

"What's getting the mobile web more attention is executives checking out their competitors' websites from their iPhones and finding out [those sites] work better on mobile than their own," Bixby says. "Then they force their IT departments to change direction and prioritize the mobile web."

Read full article here. 

HTML5: Options and Opportunities

Published in EContent:

Joshua Bixby is co-founder and president at Strangeloop Networks, a firm that designs, builds, installs, and supports hardware and software solutions that accelerate the performance of websites and web-based applications. Bixby says the term HTML5 has come to be used almost in the same manner as the terms Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 have been used-as a catchall phrase that represents the next evolution in online experiences. "People are trying to come to grips with what to call an interactive web experience in a modern browser," says Bixby. "Others have started to release these incredible interactive web experiences that we want to name. We want to call it something, so everyone is calling it HTML5."

"It's not the standard that's interesting," adds Bixby. "It's this idea of a new web application that is more dynamic, more integrated, more HTML-based than ever before."

Read full article here. 

Hotel booking provider Kiwi Collection accelerates its site load times

Published in Internet Retailer:

“We were incredibly impressed at how quickly Strangeloop improved the site’s performance,” says Reid.

For instance, the retailer cut the average load time across the world by more than half, from 13 seconds to 6 seconds. And, the effect was even more pronounced in Asia, where the load time fell from 22 seconds to 10 seconds.

Read full article here. 

Performance and the cloud: The era of the end user

Strangeloop president, Joshua Bixby, talks about BitCurrent's report on his blog:

This week at Strangeloop, we’re missing our VP of Product, Hooman Beheshti. He’s in Santa Clara, chairing the Performance and Monitoring track at Cloud Connect. If you want to follow along at home, they’re streaming the keynotes live, and BitCurrent (one of the forces behind Cloud Connect) has been live-blogging some of the sessions.

In the lead-up to Cloud Connect, BitCurrent released a very readable report called The Era of the End User, which discusses the cloud, user experience, and internal productivity.

Read more about the report here.

Chrome 10: More About Speed Than Security

Published in TechNewsWorld:

"Security is a difficult proposition for a browser," Bixby told TechNewsWorld. "Calling attention to all of the potential evil that exists and making people paranoid about browser vulnerabilities does not help Google get ad clicks, Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) get downloads, or Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) get people to use their software in the cloud."

Read full article here. 

Strangeloop VP of Product Hooman Beheshti to chair Performance and Monitoring track at Cloud Connect 2011

“One of the keys to the great content at Cloud Connect is that the track chairs all have day jobs,” said Alistair Croll, Cloud Connect Content Chair. “They get their hands dirty every day on complex issues, running some of the biggest sites in the world, digging into thorny performance issues, and building public and private clouds. They speak from experience, and Hooman is no exception. I’ve worked with him for a decade, and I consider him the smartest person I know on anything to do with web performance and optimization. We’re thrilled to have him be a part of the event, particularly on a topic that’s of such growing importance.”

As chair of the Performance and Monitoring track, scheduled for Thursday, March 10, Mr. Beheshti will be bringing together experts from the field of performance measurement to discuss what they’ve learned from measuring the performance of cloud platforms, what companies should be measuring in their cloud applications, and the best methodologies for making those measurements. Guest moderators and panelists include Cloudscaling CEO Randy Bias, Gomez CTO Imad Mouline, and Reddit.com Operations Manager Jeremy Edberg.

Read full announcement.