3PHealth Blog
Timing the Mobile Web Experience
Monday, December 19th, 2011
Alois Reitbauer has a great post up at the Performance Calendar …. where he talks about how complex it is to measure the users experience from the browser. One quote is very interesting… “Creating a waterfall chart like the one below by just using information available in the browser simply is impossible.” (see the link above for the image).
Well it’s not impossible, it’s just very difficult. Here’s four snapshots from our Mobile Performance Timing app that tells you the story of what’s taking place inside Androids browser when a user clicks on Google’s Mobile home page. We even integrate this with carrier and geo-location data.
HAR report
Webkit timing events
Detailed information on each element…
Carrier and Geo-Location information
Trends in Enterprise Mobility & The Cloud
Thursday, November 17th, 2011
Here is a quick slide show from Channel Insider which highlights how technologies are changing the way we work. Mobile and cloud technologies lead the charge in things to come – whether designed to reduce costs, attract new employees or solve specific business problems. Key stats from the presentation:
- 90% of surveyed enterprises will invest in productivty-boosting technologies
- 88% will make avialable to employees “smart” personal devices (tablets, smartphones, etc.)
- 46% of companies are already utlizing cloud-based services and that number is growing
- 30% annual savings- what you can expect to save on occupancy expenses with a well-designed workforce mobility program
Enterprises who strategically update their current Web strategies and infrastructure will have a much easier time adapting to new device support, location-based service and policy management, and the privacy and productivity issues associated with remote and mobile workforce support. There is no silver bullet to addressing all the IT and management issues associated with these changes, but Planning and Preparation in support of performance, privacy and personalization issues is a very good way to start.
So you want increased Web Performance & Privacy – Then “Know Before You Go”
Wednesday, November 9th, 2011
… To Send a Response
What does that mean?
Well in layman’s terms the Web is nothing more than 2 cans and a piece of string. One can (the device) sends a message (request) to the other can (the server). It then responds to the request. And that’s how the Internet works.
So what if the device sending a request to the server sent along a “little extra data”? What kind of data? How about a little more information about Who I am, What my Device is capable of doing and Where I am.
Well now the server would have more context before it needs to send a response. So instead of sending down extra data it would respond with exactly what I want, what works on my device and is relevant for my current location.
Now lets translate this into Performance gains…
So what about Privacy.
Well for that we have a secure database on the device. It encrypts all of your Who, What and Where data. And it allows you to control exactly what gets sent to who. Here’s what it looks like on Android and iPhone.
Summary…
The database integrates into the browser. It’s job is to send “a little extra data” with the Request. The server takes this information into account BEFORE it:
….Sends a Response
The results is a Faster more Private Web Experience
Making the Mobile Web Go Faster
Tuesday, November 8th, 2011
Here’s an interesting performance comparison. Bing vs. Google on Sprint’s network in Colorado. I’m going to make the assumption that both companies have brilliant engineers, unlimited budgets for servers, CDN’s etc. Basically anything and everything that can make their page get their faster.
So why is Google so much slower than Bing on Mobile? Well at first blush it appears that it might be related to the “extra 74,460 bytes” that Google is transmitting as part of the page.
However the time delta of 86% slower wouldn’t be covered by that amount of data. (Some of it would though). So what else could be causing the problem. Well look at the number of page elements – Bing has 7, while Google has 18.
Also if we dig into the HAR report from Google we see that it contains a huge chunk of JavaScript which has to be downloaded and compiled before it can be displayed.
In short:
- Google is sending too much data
- JavaScript account for over 50% of the page content
- On both pages I had “find my location” turned off
Measuring Web performance is never as black and white as I’ve made it above. There are too many variables to measure. However common sense is as good a yard stick as any, and here’s it’s pretty obvious what the problem is. Too much JavaScript and too many page elements.
If you want your page to load faster simply reduce the size of those two items.
Adding Geo-Location effects Performance on Mobile
Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011
This is fascinating. I ran two Mobile performance tests on Google.com. The first one was with location turned off, the second one allowed Google to access my location.
Check out the time gap (over a second and a half) and the extra bandwidth required (31,000 bytes of data). The rule of thumb is that each ½ a second is worth a billion a year in revenue to Google. That’s over 3 billion dollars you’re looking at. So how could they get that 1 ½ seconds back? Answer – 3PMobile’s Android Browser