The FCC Proposes to End Net Neutrality This week’s web performance news hits close to home for performance engineers. The concept of “the end of net neutrality” leaked a couple weeks ago and the public response was very strong. Learn more about what net neutrality means to you from our blog post last week. Last Thursday (5/15) the FCC voted on a proposal that will allow internet “fast lanes” for companies willing and able to pay for them. The proposal was accepted by a 3-2 majority vote. The vote was divided down party lines with the 3 democratic commissioners voting […]

A Look Back at Healthcare.gov The period of time during which individuals are able to take part in the open enrollment end March 31, 2014. The amount of publicity Healthcare.gov received in October last year drew in numerous discussions. The situation has settled down and now we can look back with a clearer picture. Complex System Healthcare.gov was more than just a website. It’s a front-end for an entire set of systems interconnected to exchange data. The system has to make requests to a handful of other agencies checking for citizenship, financial eligibility, IRS, Homeland Security, SSA, etc. Because of […]

Does Adblock improve your load time? An essential rule is to have ad banners displayed after the main content is displayed. In terms of perception, users wont notice the banner until they find the content they’re looking for on the page. While your web page will most likely download less data, your perception of speed isn’t likely to fluctuate drastically due to the adblock extension. Perhaps testing this would be an interesting experiment! How does adblock work? Adblock takes the div of the ad and gives it a height of 0. You can test this by putting a mini ad […]

Brief History: How IE 6 Ruined Internet Explorer’s Reputation In the early 2000s, IE 6 was the dominant web browsers that reigned supreme due to the lack of competition. This gave them the power to set the standard. Unfortunately, the standard was set all the way down to Satan’s feet. Because there wasn’t any competition at the time, the standard didn’t matter. Web developers had to make their websites compatible with IE. It was never the other way around. The lack of debugging tools, performance optimizations, and upgrades were little to none. IE 6 was released in 2000. For five […]

Optimizing Video Streaming: MPEG-DASH, Video Compression, and Codec. Want to wach a video? Go to YouTube. No questions asked. If you’re a rebel, LiveLeak or Vimeo. YouTube serves more than 1 billion unique visits every month. 80% of their internet traffic is outside the U.S. while 100 hours worth of videos are uploaded every minute. Crazy, right? How is YouTube optimized? MPEG-DASH A few years ago, YouTube switched to a streaming protocol called MPEG-DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP). MPEG-DASH is a standard on how to handle streaming content. Back in the old days when you experienced buffering issues, the […]

Remember When Al Gore Created The Internet? Neither did we. The World Wide Web is getting ready to turn 25 this year. One notable contributor we can thank for the advancement of the Internet is Tim Berners-Lee. Back in 1989, Tim was a British computer Scientist in Switzerland at CERN. Often times researchers were wasting time by spending weeks solving an issue, only to find out that it had already been done years earlier by another researcher. Concerned by the constant loss of data, he made a proposal for an information management system. A system of interlinked documents that can […]