The new Microsoft Edge browser is here This week Windows 10 was released for free downloads. Along with it, the new Microsoft Edge browser, previously codenamed Project Sparta, was finally delivered. Edge features a redesigned interface, the ability to mark up pages, and the Cortana search assistance. Microsoft also announced the Edge supports automated testing through the W3C WebDriver standard, and has a recording option to create HAR files. Preliminary speed tests performed by Microsoft claimed it beat Chrome and Safari at their own JavaScript benchmark tests. The “browser built for getting things done” will be the only browser supported […]
This week in web performance news we saw an uproarious reaction to Amazon’s Prime Day, Google add the ability to purchase on Google, Facebook begin testing e-commerce pages, and Firefox temporarily ban Adobe Flash for security reasons. #PrimeDayFail? Not according to Amazon To celebrate its 20th anniversary this week, Amazon hyped up its first ever Prime Day, a one-day online sales event for Prime members. The sales day of the year, advertised to have more deals than Black Friday, turned out to be what many shoppers considered an overhyped e-garage sale. As many disappointed customers took to Twitter to complain […]
This weekend the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots battled to give fans quite possibly the strangest game ending ever. From a one-in-a-million catch, a turnover, and an all out fist fight, this game will go down as one of the most interesting in recent Super Bowl history. Super Bowl Site Performance Game But while we may love football, we all know that this is only half of the competition. At $4.5 million dollars a piece, Super Bowl commercials only get a few seconds to vy for our attention, beat the competition, and make a valuable impression. After previous […] 
In light of the recent Sony hack, security should be on every web developer’s mind. This cyber attack, which is being called “the worst cyber attack in U.S. history” by Sony’s CEO, is a perfect example of why security is something we all need to take seriously. An enormous amount of personal and financial information was revealed for millions of customers. As we grow increasingly aware of these occurrence, we as developers need to go forward with the mindset that people will be trying to access our data. As the internet and technology permeates throughout physical stores, our information is […]
Google recently announced their “no CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” method that simplifies the end-user experience while offering an intelligent threat assessment behind the scenes to detect potential robots. All you will typically need to do is click a checkbox that tells their CAPTCHA that you’re not a robot. Then a brief loading animation occurs while it runs the assessment algorithm. If the system is not sure you’re human, it will then prompt you with an additional CAPTCHA check that uses the traditional distorted image for an extra security check. However, if you’re on a mobile browser, you may encounter a different method […]
From Amazon to Argos, online retailers are experiencing more traffic than ever this holiday season. This Cyber Monday reached a record high of $2.68 billion! Competition is fierce, and in this game, seconds = $$$. This year, we selected 29 major e-commerce sites and used LoadStorm to run several tests to compare their performance on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving with Cyber Monday. We created scripts for each site to model typical e-commerce user activity. Each script would hit the homepage, search for a product, add a product to the cart, and then visit the cart. Then we ran our performance […]
So far in our series of Web Performance articles, we’ve addressed the three majors types of caching that Web server application developers can employ: server file caching, application caching, and data caching. We’ve looked at additional performance enhancements that Web server administrators can can activate, such as HTTP compression, file consolidation, and connection pipelining. In this latest installment of our series, we’re going a little deeper and focusing on Apache. The world’s most popular Web server, Apache currently powers over 63% of sites on the World Wide Web. While Apache runs decently out of the box, development teams and system […]