Web Performance Journal #1

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WEB PERFORMANCE JOURNAL 01
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As an avid reader, I am always looking for
interesting articles or books to read. My
Goodreads to-read list is currently at 48 and the
list of work related articles and blogs I want to
read is currently at 13. On a regular basis Id
love to share with you interesting items I have
read in relation to the web performance space.
These can be articles that were forwarded to me,
I found on Twitter (follow me _at_dparzych), or I
stumbled upon in some other manner. Here are some
items that piqued my interest during January
(this is not a comprehensive list of interesting
articles, just a sample). WEBSITE OBESITY
CRISIS Macieg Ceglwoski at Idlewords posted the
text of a speech he made regarding website
obesity. People that know me, knew this would
interest me - I think it was forwarded to me by
at least 3 different people. The article is long
but it is definitely worth a read or if you dont
want to read you can watch the video of him
delivering the talk. The speech includes real
world examples of the problem, solutions that
have been proposed, and what we need to do to
ensure the web maintains its accessibility. F5S
STATE OF APPLICATION DELIVERY For the second year
in a row F5 has published a report on the state
of application delivery, this year expanding the
respondents globally. The survey asked about 24
application services pertaining to availability,
security, identity access, performance and
mobility. From a performance perspective a few of
the findings surprised me. In 2016 I would expect
that nearly every web application takes advantage
of common optimizations like caching and
compression, it was surprising to hear that only
50 of respondents currently have some form of
caching deployed and even fewer are using
compression (42). On the positive side, only 8
of respondents were willing to trade the
performance of their applications for a more
secure network.
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BROWSER NEWS Lots of news on the browser front,
from Internet Explorer terminating support for IE
8, 9 10 to the announcement of a new browser.
The end of support for Internet Explorer marks an
interesting time as this is the first time in
many years that Microsoft has not provided
support for multiple browsers. Newer browsers
generally load pages faster than older browsers
as they are able to take advantage new
technologies such as the timing specifications
(navigation, user and resource), prefetch and
HTTP/2. While support for 3 browsers ended a new
browser emerged on the scene. Former Mozilla CEO,
Brandon Eich, launched Brave. Brave is designed
to make the web faster more secure by blocking
ads and trackers that can impact a sites
performance. Brave claims that sites can load up
to 60 faster with ads and tracking cookies
blocked. I havent yet tested these claims out
myself but am interested in doing so soon.
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NEW COMPRESSION ALGORITHM Brotli has been around
for a few months, but there was an uptick in
conversations regarding it in January as Google
announced that it is now ready to be rolled out
and Firefox will also be supporting it soon.
Brotli provides higher compression ratios over
traditional algorithms than As was the case with
SPDY, Brotli will only be available on
applications that communicate over HTTPS to get
past proxies without being decoded incorrectly
and breaking the application. This requirement
has raised some questions, as today the majority
of sites do not use HTTPS, as shown from
HttpArchive.
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