A strong ecosystem is a critical factor in the success of mobile platforms today. Acknowledging this fact, Google, Apple and other vendors woo app developers and boast rich SDKs. However, browsing is by far the top activity on mobile devices. Is the browsing experience the same on all of them?
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The growth of Web browsing from smart phones and tablets is skyrocketing, putting pressure on site owners to improve the user experience on these devices. One of the top issues for mobile users is performance. With slower CPUs and slower connections, browsing speed can be painful. Creating a faster site on a growing variety of mobile devices is a major challenge for site owners. To address this need, Blaze is introducing a mobile optimization service that will automatically transform sites to make them load faster on smart phones and tablets.
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From the day we launched Mobitest, we were also working on getting it working on Tablets. Today, after a few rounds of bug fixes and UI improvements, our tablet agents are finally ready for prime time. To try it out, simply choose a tablet from the agent drop-down menu over at Mobitest.
As of today, Mobitest has 3 new agents: iPad 1, iPad 2 and the Motorola XOOM.
These devices are currently only available from our lab in Ottawa, Canada. We’re hoping a few additional locations will be added soon. If you’re interested in hosting a tablet device in another location, please let us know.
Tablets share similar hardware and software with smartphones, thus also sharing the lack of tools and the many performance concerns. However, while mobile phones often solve this problem by creating a simpler mobile site – tablets don’t have that luxury. On tablets users expect to get the fully featured website, and all the performance challenges it comes with.
Example: Walmart website and waterfall on iPhone and iPad 2
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Most of the conversation in the WPO community revolves around HTML, scripts and stylesheets. These are clearly the more complex items on pages, and so there are many variations on what can be done with them. However, images account for over 50% of the total page size, the largest single component.
The total images size grew more than 10% over the last year, as shown by the HTTP Archive. In the last upgrade to Blaze, we added and improved several image optimization techniques. These optimizations can make a material impact on your load time and on your bill, by reducing the download size per page.
In this post I’ll explain 4 key image optimizations:
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