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 […]
WebPageTest (WPT) is a free, open source tool that is used to evaluate web page performance. The great thing about WPT is that it can be utilized by people with all levels of expertise, and has many options for advanced settings and customizations. The public WPT instances cover many scenarios, but private instances can be useful, especially when testing sites that aren’t yet publicly accessible. We decided to install our own private instance of WPT using an Amazon Micro EC2. However, as the WebPerfLab, we couldn’t just leave it at that. Come on, you should know us by now! We […]
Worldwide 4G/LTE Data Shows USA Performing Second Worst for Speed The speed of mobile broadband in the U.S. have shown no signs of improvement compared to other countries. The report from OpenSignal studied sixteen countries download speed. Australia took first place with 24.5 Mbps, improving 42%, from 17.3Mbps to 24.5Mbps The U.S was second to last, just ahead of the Philippines (5.3Mbps) with 6.5Mbps.To be more precise, the U.S. finished next to last in 4G (LTE) mobile broadband speed. LTE stands from Long Term Evolution, AKA 4G. According to OpenSignal “The technical definition of 4G is that it should have data speeds capable of reaching […]
If you’re looking for insights on how to improve your site’s performance, webpagetest.org is a good place to start. If it’s your first time running tests, the page test results can be a bit overwhelming, especially to someone new to performance analysis. This blog will provide some quick tips on where to start in deciphering the results of a test. Summary Page After running a test with the default settings, webpagetest.org (WPT) provides a summary of the test results. Sometimes looking at this page can be enough to point you in the right direction on how to optimize your site. […]
Controlling Super Bowl Website Traffic Since the Super Bowl is one of the biggest nights for television, companies are putting their best foot forward to engage their audience. Formerly a one-day event, Super Bowl advertising has morphed into a multi week campaign to keep viewers curious. Last year, CBS was charging companies $3.8-$4 million for a slot in the Super Bowl ads. This isn’t too surprising since it’s the biggest football game of the season. Unfortunately for some companies, the biggest game also caused their website’s to experience downtime. Last year, Coca-Cola directed users to Cokechase.com. The site showed three teams all dressed in […]
Swenzy Floods The Daily Dot’s Twitter with Fake Followers Swenzy is a company that offers marketing services on social media sites. They offer fake YouTube views, Facebook likes, and Twitter followers. The Daily Dot has recently received an additional 75,000 viewers and counting. Because of the extra boost, 85% of The Daily Dot’s followers are now fake. If The Daily Dot didn’t write an article of their experience, Twitter would’ve most likely took some form of action. The Daily Dot also stated that it was a DDoS attack. Unfortunately, the writer was wrong. The method of the attack is more […]
The Popularity of Vine, BuzzFeed, and GIFs Are you looking for something amusing, short, interesting, or funny on the web? My answer to you would be GIFs. An example of a site that incorporates GIFs would be Buzzfeed. Generally, here’s an idea of Buzzfeed’s guideline for writing: Gather Ideas for Top 10 List. Write One Sentence for Each Point. Deploy GIFs as Examples. Repeat. The Trending of GIFs The popularity of GIFs have inspired websites like Buzzfeed and mobile apps like Vine, which enables users to create and post seven second video clips. As the trend continues to grow, companies […]
How quick is your reaction time? To better comprehend the reality of what milliseconds are like, Human Benchmark has provided this simple tool to measure your reaction time. The test takes less than one minute. You are allowed five tries to measure your average reaction time. How’d your test go? According to the site, the median reaction time is 215 milliseconds. When I took this test, my average response time was 272 milliseconds. As an avid gamer, I thought I’d be a little quicker. Outside of the Human Benchmark, a similar study from Scientific American, shows that our brains are […]