Posted by
steve
in Code, Findings, Tutorials, browsers on June 11th, 2010
In the fourth part of our multipart Frontend Optimization series I’ll cover my notes from Steve Souder’s “High Performance Websites” and “Even Faster Websites” books that can help reduce your file sizes and configure your Apache settings to squeeze out more speed.
Reduce File Sizes
- See optimizing images for reducing image sizes.
- Minify CSS and JS files. Use Google’s Closure Compiler for JS and ICEY for CSS.
- Minify HTML files with HTML Tidy.
- Reduce file size with using relative links including //subdomain.example.com instead of http://subdomain.example.com
Configure Apache and .htaccess
- Disable ETags
- Add future expires headers
- Enable GZip Compression
- Since 15% of users don’t have gzip due to proxies you can override that with gzip detection. See…
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Posted by
in Business, Design, News, Usability, browsers on February 15th, 2010
In another blog post, I brought up the topic of how the web is being “abstracted” into new mediums and devices such as Rich Internet Applications, netbooks and tablets (e.g. the iPad). After pondering this topic a little more, it hit me that that this concept might be a lot bigger than I initially thought, and deserving of an individual posting.
As I already mentioned, there are new mediums and devices coming out that are abstracting the web and displaying the content in other more unique forms. Instead of the typical user sitting down at his/her work station and loading up…
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Posted by
steve
in Code, browsers on February 5th, 2010
With 2010 just getting started we’ve already seen many impressive developments in the world of HTML/CSS that have paved the way for a promising year for us HTML/CSS developers.
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Posted by
charles
in Business, News, Software, browsers on June 3rd, 2009
What started as an idea in our humble office on the north side of Chicago is now available to web designers worldwide!
BrowserLab, formerly named Meer Meer, was made available for free trial download on June 2. Read the press release here.
Our principals, Charles Stevenson and Ted Billups, formed a collaboration with Joshua Hatwich and Dean Vukas in 2006 to develop a web-based experience testing tool that would streamline web designers’ cross-browser testing processes and save them thousands of dollars on hardware required to do the tasks.
Together our team worked on all facets of this nascent SaaS idea: application development, remote…
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Posted by
steve
in browsers on May 5th, 2009
As IE 6 starts fading into the soft glow of the sunset in the distance we need to start looking ahead to IE 8 compatibility. Internet Explorer 8 was released a few weeks ago and according to the W3Schools.com its already climbed to 1.4% market share. There’s no doubt its going to gain traction and become one of the most used browsers on the planet. So what new quirks of IE8 are out there, what about our good friends quirks and standards mode, and what about Microsoft’s latest proprietary IE 8 features?
CSS Improvements
The day IE 8 came out we posted…
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Posted by
ted
in Findings, Inspiration, News, browsers on April 10th, 2009
It is my belief that Web 3.0 is the integration of digital content into our daily physical lives. The MIT Media Lab are working on a prototype called SixthSense that takes a leap forward in this quest. To better acquaint you with their vision, here are a few key elements from the project’s creators:
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“‘SixthSense’ is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.” |
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“The SixthSense prototype is comprised of a pocket projector, a mirror and a camera. The hardware components are coupled in a… |
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Posted by
steve
in Software, Usability, browsers on April 6th, 2009
In the world of web development there has been a recent push from all around the world to finally drop support for IE6. It’s understandable since IE8 is now released and IE6 is about 8 years old, an antique in computer years. However, there are still a measurable amount of users still launching IE6 as their primary browser, 17.4% of all users according to w3schools. So should we abandon the traditional model of graceful degradation and cross browser compatibility and stop supporting IE6? Some very substantial web developers have said yes.
37signals.
37signals started phasing out support for ie6 starting in October 1, 2008.…
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Posted by
steve
in Featured, browsers on March 19th, 2009
IE8 is here! Some of you may be ignoring that exclamation mark thinking, “Great, now I have 3 IE’s to cross browser test”. Or do you? Since IE8 officially launched at 9am Pacific time this morning I spent the next 3 hours upgrading Vista with the 90 or so upgrades it asked me to do before I could finally install IE8. I then proceeded to ask myself that same question every web developer out there is thinking, “How big of a pain in the ass is this IE going to be”. So I did a few test and benchmarks just…
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