Close-Up On Mobile Browsers & Cloud Four; How To Optimize Web Pages For Mobile
Kudos to Peggy Albright for her insightful analysis of the mobile browser battle for control over our mobile Internet experiences.
Email comments that have since filled the MSG inbox have provided more than valuable feedback. They confirm a growing frustration among developers with fragmentation and a lack of best practices to follow.
As I have developed MSG to be a knowledge resource at the intersection of content and context, I recognize a certain responsibility to showcase worthwhile research and online destinations that can help us all navigate this difficult terrain. I’ve begun my outreach to vendors and organizations for columns and commentary to publish on MSG, and will feature those contributions soon. If you feel you have research/insights/practical advice to share, then I invite you to contact me directly (peggy@msearchgroove.com).
In the case of Cloud Four – a Portland-based design, development and strategy company focused on web, mobile and emerging technology – you could say I have hit the jackpot!
Jason Grigsby, Cloud Four VP and Web Strategist, is also a thought leader with the rare ability to take an idea, communicate exquisitely about it, and craft a strategy to make it happen. (Taken from the website. But after a long conversation with Jason, a pleasant follow-up email exchange, and a look at this awsome slide show, and I couldn’t agree more.)
An outstanding Cloud Four research project is the Mobile Browser Concurrency Test, a public test that expertly examines the key factors that enable Web pages to load and render quickly. This is critical data that developers/publishers can wield to optimize web pages for performance and can save resources otherwise spent on bandwidth, infrastructure and trial and error.
In a nutshell, Cloud Four has collected this data in an attempt to determine the number of concurrent http connections by observing the behavior from the server instead of the client. (Jason tells me this is useful for any browser, but is particularly useful for mobile browsers where it is more difficult, if not impossible, to implement client-side network sniffers – which is the other way of observing the number of connections.)
By way of background, the research hones in on three key pieces of information:
- What is the number of concurrent http connections that the mobile browser supports – both per domain and overall?
- Does the mobile browser support gzip or other methods for reducing the size of pages?
- Does the mobile browser support caching if you set the Expires header far into the future?
You can check out the complete methodology here.
The concurrency test was a difficult one to conduct, but Cloud Four has concluded its research and you can review the valuable raw data here.
Granted there are excellent sources of information about the nuts and bolts of how browsers work on various devices, including Detect Right, Device Atlas, UAProf and the open source WURFL Project. But Jason tells me that they didn’t shed light on the factors he felt were equally critical to browser performance across devices. Cloud Four now has a comprehensive database of mobile performance characteristics, and will share the results of the test via its blog soon. I’ll publish this report along with other practical information/advice that might help developers build faster mobile Web pages.
A closing word about Jason and his worthwhile work. Cloud Four is also founder and organizer of Mobile Portland, a local user group focused on mobile development. As Jason puts it: “We are mobile evangelists who believe that mobile has the potential to change the world and founded our company to help make that potential a reality.”
That says it all really!
You can catch up with Jason next month when he speaks at the Web 2.0 Expo, and no doubt uses the opportunity to share the highlights of the Mobile Browser Concurrency Test. You can check out the agenda and details here.
