Month: September 2008

Google Chrome: First Impressions

Google Chrome is out. And from first impressions, it is stinking fast. However, i do have some gripes.

  1. Comes with link underlining enabled. I hate this. It’s the first think I disable in Firefox and any browser that supports disabling underlining
  2. Where’s the “get your hands dirty under the hood” option list? I love the Firefox about:config list. Chrome needs this.
  3. Ads. I know. There is little chance for built in ad-blocking, but it’s on my wish-list.

Otherwise, it’s good…so far. And the memory usage is, well, definitely less intrusive.
I plan to use this for a while and see what happens. I will likely find something that drives me back to Firefox eventually.
Ok, found a weirdness when you use a <li> tag in the WordPress editor. It seems that it starts injecting <div> tags to differentiate paragraphs after you close out the list.

Google Chrome: One thing we do know… (HTTP Pipelining)

 

All: If you got here via a search, realize this is an old post (2008) and that Chrome now supports HTTP Pipelining and SPDY HTTP/3.  Thanks, smp.

As a Web performance consultant, I view the release of Google Chrome with slightly different eyes than many. And one of the items that I look for is how the browser will affect performance, especially perceived performance on the end-user desktop.

One thing I have been able to determine is that the use of WebKit will effectively rule out (to the best of my knowledge) the availability of HTTP Pipelining in the browser.

HTTP Pipelining is the ability, defined in RFC 2616, to request multiple HTTP objects simultaneously across an open TCP connection, and then handle their downloads using the features built into the HTTP/1.1 specifications.

I had an Apple employee in a class I taught a few months back confirm that Safari (which is built on WebKit) cannot use HTTP Pipeling for reason that are known only to the OS and TCP stack developers at Apple.

Now, if the team at Google has found a way to circumvent this problem, I will be impressed.

Web Performance: TechCrunch Goes Crunch

It’s the first day back after the last long weekend of the summer. There is a a great amount of news flooding the intertubes, and what happens?
TechCrunch has a small issue.

techcrunch-crunch-sep022008

It’s likely they’ll be back soon, but it’s still an interesting thing to see.

Update – 09:17 EDT (13:17 GMT)

TechCrunch is back up as of 08:49 EDT (12:49 GMT).

Web Performance, Part VIII: How do you define fast?

In the realm of Web performance measurement and monitoring, one of the eternal and ever-present questions remains “What is fast?”. The simple fact is that there is no single answer for this question, as it it isn’t a question with one quantitative answer that encompasses all the varied scenarios that are presented to the Web performance professional.

The answer that the people who ask the “What is fast?” question most often hear is “It depends”. And in most cases, it depends on the results of three distinct areas of analysis.

  1. Baselining
  2. Competitve Analysis
  3. Comparative Analysis

Baselining

Baselining is the process of examining Web performance results over a period of time to determine the inherent patterns that exist in the measurement data. It is critical that this process occur over a minimum period of 14 days, as there are a number of key patterns that will only appear within a period at least that long.

Baselining also provides some idea of what normal performance of a Web site or Web business process is. While this will provide some insight into the what can be expected from the site, in isolation it provides only a tiny glimpse into the complexity of how fast a Web site should be.

Baselining can identify the slow pages in a business process, or identify objects that may be causing noticeable performance degradation, its inherent isolation from the rest of the world it exists is its biggest failing. Companies that rely only on the performance data from their own sites to provide the context of what is fast are left with a very narrow view of the real world.

Competitive Analysis

All companies have competition. There is always a firm or organization whose sole purpose is to carve a niche out of your base of customers. It flows both ways, as your firm is trying to do exactly the same thing to other firms.

When you consider the performance of your online presence, which is likely accounting for a large (and growing) component of your revenue, why would you leave the effects of poor Web site performance your competitive analysis? And how do you know how your site is fairing against the other firms you are competing against on a daily basis?

Competitive analysis has been a key component of the Web performance measurement field since it appeared in the mid-1990s. Firms want to understand how they are doing against other firms in the same competitive space. They need to know if their Web site is at a quantitative advantage or disadvantage with these other firms.

Web sites are almost always different in their presentation and design, but they all serve the same purpose: To convert visitors to buyers. Measuring this process in a structured way allows companies to cut through the differences that exist in design and presentation and cut directly to heart of the matter: Show me the money.
Competitive measurements allow you to determine where your firm is strong, where it is weak, and how it should prioritize its efforts to make it a better site that more effectively serves the needs of the customers, and the needs of the business.

Comparative Analysis

Most astute readers will be wondering how comparative analysis differs from competitive analysis. The differences are, in fact, fundamental to the way they are used. Where competitive analysis provides insight into the unique business challenges faced by a group of firms serving the needs of similar customers, comparative analysis forces your organization to look at performance more broadly.

Your customers and visitors do not just visit your site. I know this may come as a surprise, but it’s true. As a result, they carry with them very clear ideas of how fast a fast site is. And while your organization may have overcome many challenges to become the performance leader in your sector, you can only say that you understand the true meaning of performance once you have stepped outside your comfort zone and compared yourself to the true leaders in performance online.

On a daily basis, your customers compare your search functionality to firms who do nothing but provide search results to millions of people each day. They compare how long it takes to autheticate and get a personalized landing page on your site to the experiences they have at their bank, their favourite retailers. The compare the speed with which specific product pages load.

They may not do this consciously. But these consumers carry with them an expectation of performance, and they know when your site is or is not delivering it.
So, how do you define fast? Fast is what you make it. As a firm with a Web site that is serving the needs of customers or visitors, you have to be ready to accept that there are others out there who have solved many of the problems you may be facing. Broaden your perspective and put your site in the harsh light of these three spotlights, and your organization will be on its way to evolving its Web performance perspective.

Google Chrome: See No Evil, Do No Evil – An Internet Performance Perspective

The intertubes of the Web are abuzz with talk of the new, open-source Google Chrome browser [two articles here and here]. I will not presume to wade into the debate of whether it is necessary, or what strategic business goals Google has set that rely on having its own browser. I will limit my comments to the area of Web performance.

Open-Source Browser: Ours or Theirs?

When I read that Google Chrome was an open-source browser, the first thought was: is it theirs or a re-branded Firefox? No one knows at this point, but that will have a direct effect on how the browser performs, and how extensible it will be.

HTTP Standards

Unlike other standards, HTTP standards set out how a browser uses the underlying TCP stack. MSIE6/7 have very broken implementations, and MSIE8 is building on those by increasing the number of connections per host to 6, up from 2 set out in RFC 2616.
Firefox can be configured to mangle this as well, but by default it plays by the standard, adding the option of HTTP pipelining into its mix of persistent HTTP connections.
It will be VERY interesting to see how Google Chrome comes configured out of the box, and how much control users have over the HTTP behaviour of this new browser.

(X)HTML/CSS/JS Standards

This area is a mess. No browser implements this standards in a way that is completely consistent with the written text, and page designers have to use a variety of page testing products (such as BrowserCam) prior to release to ensure that their design is somewhat presentable in all browsers on all platforms.
The rendering of Javascript will be crucial in this new browser, as so much of the new Web is built on applications that are almost completely Javascript-driven.
I am sure that there will be sites that will be completely mangled by the new browser, but, knowing Google, we will be getting a 2.0 release, the 1.0 release being used within Google for a while now to test it under real-world conditions.

Caching

As a few sites in the world do use cache-control headers properly, it will be interesting to see how a browser created by one of the major ad-serving and search providers on the Web tracks page objects. Will it follow explicit/implicit caching rules? Or will it impose a heavy penalty on bandwidth by downloading objects more frequently than other production browsers do?

Proxies, and the Debacle of the Google Web Accelerator

Back in 2005, Google launched a badly designed and gighly flawed product called the Google Web Accelerator. This product proxied Web traffic through the Google network and allowed the company to develop a pattern of user browsing habits and search selections that would allow them to better target their ad products.
I have a great fear that this will be an integrated part of the Google browser project. If it is, it should be a configurable option, not an out-of-the box standard.
I am sure that there will be a few performance conversations that occur around the Google Chrome browser in the weeks ahead. I look forward to hearing what the community has to say about this new addition to the browser wars.

Thoughts on the China Market

At the The China Vortex, Paul Denlinger discusses how there is no unified “China market”, no monolithic, simplistic, single-minded Goliath that the rest of the world is trying to deal with. While I do not have the depth of on the ground experience that Mr. Denlinger has (I have not yet been blessed with the opportunity to visit or do business in China), I can see the truth he brings to the discussion.
One of the great pits that Western culture falls into when dealing with the China problem is just that: It is seen as a problem, not an opportunity to expand and learn from a culture that deals with life, philosophy, and business in a very different manner.
This should come as no surprise to any astute student of History, or even modern geopolitics, as the way that nations deal with perceived threats or challenges is to create a national culture of The Other, the us-v-them foreign policy.
When Japan was the country du jour in the 1980s, the Western World respected it, in a very shallow way, as a fellow industrial nation with a strong warrior culture. However, it was treated in a simple way, with Western media portrayals that strengthened perceived stereotypes, and plastered over the profound differences that exist within Japan, and within the Japanese people.
China is even more of a victim of this Politics of the Other, having spent more than 50 years as one of the adversaries in the Cold War, being vilified and portrayed in the least flattering light possible. Even without the base Human interpretation of simplistic interpretations of the Other, the West is crippled from the start in its attempts to understand a nation as large, diverse, and fractured as China.
China is far more than Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and small cadre of smaller, but no less important industrial / post-industrial metropolitan areas.
Drawing on my experience in trying to interpret Internet performance data from within this nation, it is clear to even the casual observer that the Chinese Internet does not simply exist in the major cities. It extends into the far reaches of the country, fractured by the internal conflicts of the connectivity providers, government officials at a many levels, and the unstoppable drive and creativity of the people who see the Internet as an opportunity to make their way in their world.
Cultural and national stereotypes are the way that humans ineffectively deal with the differences that exist. But just as the terms “All Brits..”, “All the French..”, “All Germans…”, “All Argentinians..”, et al. should be treated with disdain and seen as a sign of ignorance, using the words “All Chinese…” or “All of China…” should be quickly quashed and carted off to the dustbin of simplistic paranoia and xenophobia.
There is no such thing as a threat. As it is often stated in other contexts, a threat is simply an opportunity that is hidden by your own prejudices.

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