Web Performance Digest: August 2012 - Facebook's big iOS update, SPDY vs. HTTP, and how to use WebPagetest

29 August 2012  -   Tags:

Contributed by Tammy Everts. 

At the end of each month, we update our Web Performance Hub with a collection of the most compelling articles, posts, videos and presentations from around the web performance community.  

This month's Web Performance Digest features 10 new links. Get the latest on Facebook’s big update to their iPhone and iPad application, find out if SPDY outperforms HTTP, and learn how to use WebPagetest to measure site performance.  

New links include:

First Annual State of the Union for Mobile Ecommerce Performance [announcement]
Velocityconf.com – August 23, 2012
Summary: At this October’s Velocity Europe conference, Strangeloop’s Joshua Bixby will unveil findings from the first-ever study of mobile performance over 3G networks. What will his presentation include? Check out this post to find out. 

Facebook Doubles Speed of iPhone and iPad App with Update [article]
BusinessWeek.com – August 23, 2012
Summary: Facebook is launching a major update of its iPhone and iPad application, aimed at doubling start-up and page scroll speeds on Apple devices. How important is this update? Considering how a lack of mobile monetization has affected their freefalling stock price, we'd say pretty important.

Visualizing SPDY vs HTTP [diagram]
Belshe.com - August 21, 2012
Summary: As this chart illustrates, SPDY is (almost) always faster than HTTP. Using a copy of Alexa’s Top-300 websites for the test, Google’s Mike Belshe shows us how SPDY outperforms across a number of KPIs.

SaaS APM For the Win - A Gartner APM Leader [article] 
NewRelic.com – August 21, 2012
Summary: Gartner’s 2012 edition of its “Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring” report has placed New Relic in its coveted “Leaders” quadrant. Read on to find out why this SaaS vendor is gaining such praise. 

Mobile consumers expect speed greater than what many retailers are providing [article] 
InternetRetailer.com – August 20, 2012
Summary: A new poll by Keynote Systems makes it clear that mobile site owners ignore user expectations at their own peril. Mobile users cite slow pages and improper page rendering as their top two concerns. Check out this article to see how much the mobile ‘expectation gap’ has tightened.

Performance: See a Bigger Picture [blog post]
SpeedAwarenessMonth.com – August 20, 2012
Summary: Strong web performance comes from a comprehensive approach encompassing a range of design and implementation details, not a focus on one specific facet. This post details how looking at the ‘big picture’ is the best way to ensure success.

Images. Can we have less? [blog post]
Yoav Weiss – August 16, 2012
Summary: It’s no secret that the proliferation of images online adds to latency and hinders performance. Using ‘lossless compression’ and WebP, Yoav Weiss shows us how much we can reduce image sizes and load times to improve performance.

New findings: How does browser usage vary throughout the week? [blog post]
Web Performance Today – August 8, 2012
Summary: Web users are quite particular about their browsers. We know the overall usage statistics for each browser, but how much do these rates vary throughout the day and week? Check out this post to see if your assumptions hold true.

A History of Web Performance @ Lonely Planet [blog post]
LonelyPlanet.com – August 7, 2012
Summary: Lonely Planet’s web performance journey began at Velocity 2010, and continues today as they document the effectiveness of their optimization efforts. Just how valuable has performance optimization been to their online presence? Check out this post to find out.

Getting started with WebPagetest [blog post]
SpeedAwarenessMonth.com - August 2, 2012
Summary: Measure, analyze, adjust…repeat. Performance optimization is a test of patience, but online tools like WebPagetest makes the process much easier. This post is the perfect beginners guide for performance novices.

Check out the rest of the Hub for hundreds more links to the best selection of performance-related resources on the web.

We tend to all hold pre-conceived notions as to which browsers people use at work versus what they use at home. As very little data is available on the subject, these semi-educated guesses are mostly based on anecdotal evidence.
There’s plenty of aggregate data on overall browser usage, but we at Strangeloop wanted to delve further in hopes of answering a few lingering questions: How does usage vary throughout the day? Does everyone switch to Chrome or Safari at night? Do users actually like Internet Explorer?  
Methodology
1. Gathered monthly traffic data from two large North America-based ecommerce sites.
2. Isolated traffic for the four major browsers: Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari.
3. Aggregated data for each day of the week and plotted it on a graph for each site.
4. Aggregated data for each hour of the day and plotted it on a graph for each site.
By the numbers…
Browser usage throughout the week
(pic 1)
(pic 2)
Observations
• The vast majority of visitors used Internet Explorer
• Safari traffic increased dramatically over the weekend
• Weekend traffic flatlined or decreased for every browser except Safari
• Friday is a big browsing/shopping day across all browsers
Browser usage throughout the day
(pic 3)
(pic 4)
Our main observation from these graphs is that Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome use decreases towards the end of the day, just as Safari is trending upwards.  
Takeaways
Though this data represents only two websites, we can comfortably draw two conclusions:
1. Internet Explorer should remain the default browser for testing North American ecommerce sites. Though usage dips at night, the majority of browsing/shopping is still done on this browser.
2. The good times are rolling on Safari. By day’s end, users are flocking to this browser. We don’t know for sure, but some here in the office have theorized that this is due to skyrocketing growth in the iPad market. Either way, the trend is quite prominent. 
Once again, this data represents a very small sample size. We’re still in the early stages of the browser wars, so it remains to be seen if these trends stay consistent. 
For more on the browser wars, check out last month’s post “Has IE8 run its course as a default test browser