Required Reading: Yahoo Research on Mobile Cache Size

With more and more people embracing the idea of producing HTML5 mobile web apps, research like this is becoming vital. There are a lot of gotchas in this article, especially if you’ve been ignoring this space.

You should read the whole article, but I just want to point out a pair of findings before I send you on your way. One has been a known issue for a while (it’s a ySlow rule, after all,) but it’s still worth pointing out. The other… wow… my emphasis.

Results varied wildly across the three most recent versions of iOS. Astonishingly, Mobile Safari on iOS 3.1.3 did not cache components of any size, despite having an apparently unlimited page cache size. This is troubling since it means iOS 3.1.3 users are likely getting a suboptimal browsing experience, especially if they aren’t using wifi. The unlimited page cache size does little good here, since it only comes into play for back/forward navigations. This behavior is a significant change from what others observed in previous iOS releases and I can’t imagine any good reason for it, so I suspect this may be a bug.

Mobile Safari on iOS 3.2 (which is only available on the iPad) does not exhibit this bug. Its 25.6KB component limit and ~281.6KB total cache limit are better than nothing, but they still seem paltry compared to the other devices tested. Uniquely among iOS devices, the iPad appears to limit the size of pages in the page cache to 25.6KB, the same as its component size limit.

Read the rest of the article:

Mobile Browser Cache Limits: Android, iOS, and webOS

Performance Tip: When Linking to JavaScript on the Google Ajax Library CDN, Use a Specific Version Number

I’ve seen this a few times over the past few months:


<script type="text/javascript" src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1/jquery.min.js"></script> 

What that basically says to Google is “give me the latest 1.* branch version of jQuery and make sure it’s minified.”
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Browser Size, a Simple But Useful Tool From Google

Browser Size does just what the name implies. Enter a URL, hit “go” and you’ll see just what percentage of the internet will see what without scrolling. Scrolling isn’t quite the bugbear it once was, but for certain types of pages immediate impact is still very important (campaign landing pages are a good example,) so having this as an easily accessible tool is really nice. Sure, designers have these guides in Photoshop and developers can resize the window with the Web Developer Toolbar, but this handy web-based tool is just the kind of thing to use in a meeting.

For an example of the output, here’s this site put through the wringer:
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Great New Google Webmaster Tools Feature – “Site Performance”

You use Webmaster Tools, right? If you rely on Google traffic in any way shape or form you really should be using it.

It’s an invaluable service and it just got better with the addition of a new, performance specific feature. From the Google Webmaster Central blog:
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Google’s Sitelinks vs. Bing’s Deep Links + D-Card

For some searches on both Bing and Google, the top result is enhanced with additional data. For simplicities’ sake (and because I’m selfish) I’m going to focus on one search for my personal site to compare the two.

Google’s result for my site looks like this:
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