Possibly the best part of working on Web performance is the community. It always amazes me how users, vendors, and even competitors work together to make the Web faster. Akamai does its best to support this community, through actions like sponsoring Web performance meetups and open-sourcing tools like Mobitest.

However, the most valuable resource Akamai has to offer this community arguably isn’t tools – it’s data. That’s the reason I’m really excited to share with you the launch of Akamai IO – The Akamai Internet Observatory.
Read the rest of this entry »

As you may have heard, Akamai acquired Blaze today.

This is obviously big news for Blaze, and we’re thoroughly excited about it. Beyond that, we see this as a big moment for the field of Front-End Optimization (FEO), and for the goal of making the web faster. Having Akamai provide an automated FEO solution will make this technology easily available to thousands of the top websites in the world, and make a real impact on the web. Read the rest of this entry »

For the last year we’ve been building our automated Web Performance Optimization (WPO) service and testing it with beta customers. We are pleased to announce that we’ve successfully competed our beta testing and are formally launching our commercial service today.

When designing the Blaze service we evaluated three options for how to deliver the solution: a software product, a hardware appliance and a hosted service. After discussions with customers it became clear that the hosted service was by far the preferred approach. It’s the simplest and cheapest option to deploy and manage. It can be deployed in less than an hour. No software, no hardware and no code changes required.
Read the rest of this entry »

Last week we published a report on Mobile browsing performance differences between iPhone and Android. We knew there would be a lot of interest in the story but were completely blown away by the level of coverage this story got. In some part, the escalated coverage was fueled by the controversy around the results.

Upon pronouncing Android the clear winner in the race we were immediately set upon by the iPhone community calling the report flawed and misleading. Blaze was accused of being dishonest, biased and other nasty things. In a world where the sighting of a white iPhone is a headline news story, we should have expected a passionate response but the intensity definitely surprised us.
Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today we released a massive study comparing the performance of iPhone and Android’s Browsers. Our study showed Android’s browser to be 52% faster than iPhone’s. The study stirred a lot of chatter online, as this is a topic close to the heart of many.

To perform the measurements, we made use of purposefully written apps that used each platform’s Embedded Browser (as stated in the initial report). Embedded browsers are software components available to mobile apps to invoke the browser, and are the only ways both platforms allow users to interact with a browser. It’s important to emphasize – we used each platform’s embedded browser, not our own browser.
Read the rest of this entry »

Today we’re excited to announce a new community service – Mobitest.
Mobitest is a free service that lets website owners get detailed web page load performance on various mobile devices. Let’s take this sentence apart…
Detailed web page load performance means all the great info we got used to seeing from YSlow, WebPageTest and other tools – but on a phone. This includes load times, waterfall charts, detailed HAR files, video playback and more. This type of information is critical when trying to understand a web page’s performance, and was hard to impossible to obtain for mobile devices.

Various mobile devices means real physical smartphones browsing the web page. We avoided emulators which run on very different hardware and don’t’ reflect a real user’s experience. The devices include iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy S (Android 2.2) to begin with, and we expect to constantly add more devices and platforms. More details about that later. Read the rest of this entry »

For the converted the benefits of Web Performance Optimization are blatantly obvious.  To name a few: increased conversion rates, increased pageviews, lower server bandwidth costs, increased search engine rankings, and lower website abandonment rates.

These are all great benefits that come from implementing WPO but convincing a client or the company you work at that investing in WPO is worth the effort often requires cold hard facts.

Here is a roundup of some of the most compelling statistics proving the effectiveness of WPO to business results:
Read the rest of this entry »