Blaze IO vs. WebPageTest.org vs. HAR

Definitely needs looking into. I just ran a bunch of tests using Blaze.IO’s latest technology for measuring Mobile performance. I then compared that with WebPageTest.org (whose service they’re using) and then extracted all the HAR reports for viewing.

Ignore for the moment the timings for WebPageTest.org vs. Blaze.IO – the actual number of GET requests for the page should be identical (each are requesting the exact same page). But then it gets weirder – the HAR report shown on Blaze’s page shows 42 GET requests but if you download the actual one from the test it shows 53 GET request. Now start comparing all the times. Using WebPageTest.org through Chicago and a DSL connection it takes 3.419 seconds vs. Blaze at 3.78 seconds.

Think about it for a moment. Blaze gets 96kb down in 3.78 seconds (42GET requests) – WebPageTest gets 47kb down in 3.419 seconds. Throughput wise the Android device is twice as fast as a DSL connection. (I don’t think so).

Also one other HUGE issue. Androids browser is single threaded – which means the elements (GET Requests) load one after the other. All of the charts show data loaded concurrently – that’s not true.

Picture #1

Blaze.io Mobile test on www.jetsms.com
42 GET requests, 3.78 seconds, 96.1 Kb

Picture #2

The actual HAR report – 53 GET requests, 115.1KB and 3.78 seconds

 

Picture #3

WebPageTest.org report – 13 GET requests, 47KB and 3.419

 

Picture #4

The HAR report exported from the WebPageTest.org test

13 GET requests, 43.2KB and 3.76 seconds

Mobile Performance Measurement via JavaScript event messages

 

Let’s say that your customer needs to know exactly (at the microsecond level) when something is occurring inside the Web page. They would add a JavaScript event message like this to their web page:

<script> js5o9.message( "TITLE START" ); </script>

<title>EVENTS</title>

<script> js5o9.message( "TITLE END" ); </script>

Now when they run their test the performance results will include the exact millisecond timing of when that event occurred inside the browser.

Google On Designing Mobile Friendly Websites

link

RE: Google said they “expect smartphones to handle desktop experience content so there is no real need for mobile-specific effort from webmasters.

Really… How about some performance metrics. Click on the link below. This is British Airways desktop web site on Android. Check out the number of requests, the time to download and the size of the web site. Also pay close attention to the doubleclick ad timings.

Link to mobile performance report

Mobile Performance

Two different carriers (Sprint and Verizon) HTC vs. Droid X. Both connecting to the same web page. Sprint wins by over a second.

I guess location also makes a difference.

FL390, Night, Level 6 Thunderstorms–over the Pacific

So you want to know what flying into a thunderstorm does to a airplane? Read this. Having landed (and slide of a runway) in a level 6 storm I can barely imagine hitting one at FL390 in the dark over the Pacific – FL390

Nokia Plan B

It should read – Plan BS. Seriously what are these people thinking. Dump Windows Phone 7 OS and go with MeeGo.

Are you serious?

Have you even seen the OS lately. It’s a joke. No developers, no UI to talk of, basically a shell with nothing.

And then there’s talk of good old Symbian. Obviously they’ve never programmed this behemoth. It is so incredibly fragmented  that it’s now a nightmare.

Guys (gals) you cannot, I repeat cannot support multiple operating systems. pick one and execute. The most innovative platform out there right now (with the best developer tools) is Microsoft’s.

Remember “It’s the tools, stupid”. Without the developers you have nothing.

Where were you 70 years ago?

We’ve come along way for sure. I wonder what the next 70 will bring us?

 

Do NOT Track = #Fail

This just showed up in Firefox beta -

Never going to work. Why? Because I can’t tell if the web site is honoring the request.

What is needed is this – Privacy Options which allow YOU to control what gets sent to the web site. Telling a web site not to track you is one thing – turning off any data is something else. The former relies on the web site – the latter leaves you in control.

Androids Browser supports JavaScript Console messages

For the techies…

So exactly what kind of Mobile device is that?

Here’s an interesting exercise – the following 5 User Agents all came from the same mobile device. Was that device an iPhone, iPad, or Android smartphone?

• HTTP_USER_AGENT=[Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16]
• HTTP_USER_AGENT=[Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B367 Safari/531.21.10]
• HTTP_USER_AGENT=[Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-us; PC36100 Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1]
• HTTP_USER_AGENT=[Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2; en-us; Sprint APA9292KT Build/FRF91) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1]
• HTTP_USER_AGENT=[Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Linux armv7l; rv:2.0b11pre) Gecko/20110126 Firefox/4.0b11pre Fennec/4.0b4]

And herein lies the problem – with mobile devices exploding we’re now presented with more browsers than ever, all trying to connect to the web server. The issue for the web admin is simple – figure what just connected and send the appropriate data.