A few weeks ago I tested (again) nearly 500 responsive websites in different resolutions. My test was focused on size differences between resolutions, but looked at the overall page size as a single unit.

In this blog post, I’d like to dig into the same data, but this time drill down into the specific types of resources on the page – Image, JavaScript, CSS and HTML files. Such a drill down can give us better insight into which optimizations are being applied today, and help guide us regarding where to focus our performance evangelism.
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Apple has always allowed only one browser rendering-engine on the iOS platform – the one included by default. Both the native browser (Mobile Safari) and the browser embedded into apps (UIWebView) use this engine. In addition, any alternate browser on iOS, most notably Chrome for iOS, must use UIWebView and not their own engines.

However, a browser is not just a rendering engine, and the iOS browsers still differ quite a bit. For example, Mobile Safari benefits from a JavaScript engine that is 3X faster than UIWebView. Chrome for iOS, in turn, uses a custom network layer designed to be as fast as the one used by Chrome for Android.

Still, because Chrome for iOS and Mobile Safari are both closed applications, we had no way of actually measuring their performance. We were limited to measuring using UIWebView within Mobitest, and had to assume the other browsers are faster. Fortunately, technology is always improving…

I’ve been working with Manish Lachwani, the CTO of a new startup called Appurify. He and his team have created a platform for automated testing and measurement of black-box apps, on real mobile devices. More specifically, the platform enables some probing into the internals of select apps, such as Mobile Safari and Chrome for iOS, and even lets one simulate network speeds and cellular conditions. Using this technology, we can finally compare the actual performance of these three browsers.
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Update: updated title and reference to mdot site below, following feedback

I like Responsive Design. Heck, I LOVE Responsive Design. I think it’s a brilliant methodology, which address true challenges in a very good way. But no matter how fond you are of RWD, I think you have to face the music – RWD makes it very hard to write a fast website.

I’m not saying you can’t write a high performance responsive website. I’m not saying you shouldn’t use RWD (Responsive Web Design) – I would actually recommend it to most organizations. However, RWD makes pages inherently more complicated, and all in all would make the mobile web slower.
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I had the pleasure of writing a small contribution to Tim Kadlec‘s awesome upcoming book “Implementing Responsive Design”. The book is a great pragmatic guide for how to build a responsively designed website, including the basics, advanced use-cases and practical advice on how to overcome the challenges RWD faces today. You can read more about it and pre-order it today here.

The book includes some great contributions from top thinkers in the Mobile Web space, and I was honoured to be included in that list. My contribution is related to my recent “Performance Implications of Mobile Design” presentation from a recent Breaking Development conference, and it’s included below to help you bridge the gap until you buy the the full book!
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In the last few months I’ve been giving several presentations about Mobile Web Performance in various venues such as Walmart, Time and others. I also had the honor of giving this presentation as a Google Tech Talk, and the google team recorded a video of this presentation.

The video is now up you can watch it below, and you can also read the blog post in the Google Code blog here:

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/12/mobile-web-performance-challenges-and.html

For better audio you can see our webinar of the same presentation below:

Breakthrough technology the first to pre-execute JavaScript in the Cloud

The recent launch of Amazon’s new Silk browser generated a lot of interest in the concept of a hybrid browser that pre-processed content in the cloud. While very innovative, this technology is limited to the users of Amazon’s new tablet.

Today, Blaze is pleased to announce the next generation of our Mobile Frontend Optimization (FEO) Service that will enable site owners to double the speed of their sites on most modern Tablet or Smartphone devices including iOS & Android. This new offering builds on our previous mobile optimization solution, adding new breakthrough innovations including the ability to pre-execute JavaScript in the Cloud.

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Today we’re launching a new optimization I’m very excited about – the ability to Pre-Execute JavaScript for Mobile Devices. Understanding JavaScript is critical when attempting to automatically understand web pages. Eliminating JavaScript from pages, to the extent possible,  is a major performance optimization opportunity.

Web Pages today are loaded with JavaScript. More specifically, scripts are used in abundance during page load. This type of usage is bad for performance even on a desktop PC. Browsers can’t anticipate dynamic content, and as a result they can’t optimize it. With no other option they resort to downloading files sequentially instead of in parallel, not performing DNS queries or opening connections ahead of time, etc.

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It’s been a while since we updated about Mobitest, and we’re way overdue for an update. Despite the lack of updates, Mobitest use has been growing quickly, and we have some exciting new additions we’re releasing today too.

First some words about growth. Mobitest has grown dramatically since we launched back in February of last year. Just in the last couple of months, Mobitest traffic has tripled, and with it the number of tests submitted. Testers clearly care about iOS the most – 55% of the tests are sent on iOS, and 69% of the tests on iOS. Granted, the fact iPhone is the default device probably helps those stats…
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After reviewing Apple’s latest software update in iOS 5, we wanted to test the new hardware as well. We got an iPhone 4S as soon as it was released, and ran it through a battery of measurements.

Before digging into the results, a reminder about the hardware differences. In a nutshell, iPhone 4S doubled both the CPU and GPU capacity.
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The much-hyped new version of iOS is finally here, and with it comes a new version of its browser. Here at Blaze we’ve been studying this new browser for a while, to learn what performance related changes it introduces.

Now that the release is official, we can finally share our insights (previously prevented by the Apple Developer NDA).
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