CategoryPerformance

February 16, 2016 — In this article, Rachel Andrew will look at the basics of HTTP2 as they apply to web designers and developers. She’ll explain some of the key features of the new protocol, look at browser and server compatibility, and detail the things you might need to think about as we see more adoption of HTTP2. You will get an overview of what to consider changing in your workflow in the short and long term. Rachel will also include plenty of resources if you want to dig further into the issues raised. Her aim is to give you enough of the background to be able to make good decisions as you plan your move to HTTP2. Read more…

February 15, 2016 — Google announced its own plan to revolutionize mobile news consumption with an open-source web-based solution called Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP. While Facebook and Apple have a significant head start on Google, there’s every reason to believe that AMP will catch up quickly. If you’re a developer or a publisher who needs to get up to speed on the why, what and how of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages as fast and efficiently as possible, you’re in the right place. Read more…

February 4, 2016 — Smashing Magazine is known for lengthy, comprehensive articles. But what about something different for a change? What about shorter, concise pieces with useful tips that you could easily read over a short coffee break? As an experiment, this is one of the shorter Quick Tips-kind-of articles — shorter posts prepared and edited by our editorial team. Read more…

January 18, 2016 — Developers have no reason not to explore Client Hints. The key benefits are more maintainable responsive image tags, fewer image bytes transferred and, ultimately, happier end users. In this article, Jon Arne Sæterås will focus on how to address responsive images issues, with a little help from the web server and Client Hints, the new way for the browser to request images with specific properties. Read more…

January 13, 2016 — Over the time, OSS has turned into crowd-sourced marketplaces and this big range open source functionality is great, but it also carries big risks. Whenever you are running a stranger’s code inside your applications, you might question yourself “Do you know if these authors understand or care about security?” or “Do you know if they have vulnerabilities?”. In this article, Guy Podjarny will show you a good way to start acknowledging and handling this risk which is to address the known vulnerabilities in your dependencies and Snyk makes it easy for you to find, fix and monitor these vulnerabilities in Node.js. Read more…

December 21, 2015 — Single-page applications tend to take the form of runtimes, JavaScript executables deployed like popup shops into vacant  elements. In this article, Heydon Pickering will introduce a solution for architecting progressive single-page applications using little more than a couple of CSS tricks, less than 0.5 KB of JavaScript and, importantly, some static HTML. It is not a perfect or complete solution, but it testifies to the notion that performant, robust and indexable single-page applications are achievable: You can embrace web standards while reaping the benefits of sharing data and functionality between different interface screens on a single web page. Read more…

December 10, 2015 — User reaction to a wait online is no different from that in the offline world. Studies based on the analysis of more than a thousand cases identify 14 distinct types of waiting situations on the web. Being dependent on your users’ loyalty, you cannot leave them facing a passive wait. In this final part, Denys Mishunov discusses pure passive waiting on the web, how you can deal with it and what can be done to keep user satisfaction high even when the service cannot be delivered fast enough. In addition to the studies on waiting online, your analysis will employ the psychology of waiting lines, customer satisfaction and other tools applicable to offline waiting. Read more…

November 28, 2015 — The “P” in P versus NP stands for polynomial time. That just means we can predict the maximum amount of time it will take to solve the problem. You may have never heard of P versus NP, but in this article, Zack Grossbart will walk you through it, show you how it works and explain why it matters. There’s a little math, but don’t worry; it’s all pretty easy. P versus NP is a mathematical question masquerading as a philosophical one. It describes the difference between solving a problem and knowing whether you’ve solved it. Read more…

November 11, 2015 — Any experienced traveler will tell you that some companies do it better than others. To find out, let’s take a closer look at a few airline websites from around the world. With this article, we start exploring various industries and study the current state of front-end, UX and performance of relatively complex websites. First up are airline websites. Some sections of the article were written by the editorial team. We’d love to hear your flights booking experience in the comments to this article! Along the way, Joshua Johnson will discover the critical steps of booking air travel and how they’re presented by different companies. Read more…

November 10, 2015 — When we shop for a theme, do we get what’s on the tin? Some themes aren’t as fast as what is advertised on the demo websites. When running small tests on themes for other CMS’, like Joomla, Philip Blomsterberg had the same findings. The theme he started out with seemed very good, offering speeds that were quite good, especially for a news website or portal. He tested the theme with demo content; however, regardless of how hard he tried, speeds and scores never reached those on the vendor’s website. This led him to believe that theme vendors sometimes set up demos to make their websites appear faster than they really are. Read more…