Accelerating Mobile Apps & Browsing

I want to talk about Google again. (This is starting to be a pattern, talking about Google and Microsoft, a couple of goliaths that are paying attention to topics near and dear to our hearts: web performance and application availability.)

GigaOm had a good piece last week about Google’s research into average mobile browser web page load times.

The story goes on to link to some Google blog posts that drill into detailed data and recommendations to web developers on how to optimize their sites for maximum speed, especially to mobile browsers.

But, as usual, the focus is on what webdevs need to do to make their sites better. That’s fine, they should be doing these things, but there are a hell of a lot of legacy web sites and web apps that aren’t going to be optimized any time soon because it would require so much effort.

And from the perspective of an end user, you have no control over if or when a website will be optimized. Do you really want to remain powerless, waiting and hoping that your favorite sites are improved?

The whole point of Mobolize CacheFront is that it does two really important things. The first is that it gives users the ability to speed up the web, independent of whatever the website owner may or may not do.

The second is that it takes the ultimate approach to optimization, which is to reduce the number of pages or web parts that are requested by the browser (or mobile app) in the first place. With all due irony, let me quote Ilya Grigorik, Google developer and author of the excellent High Performance Browser Networking. In it, Grigorik states what we consider to a fundamental truth:

The fastest request is a request not made – reducing the number of total requests is the best performance optimization, regardless of protocol used, or application in question.

Right on! But why, then, do so many companies, including Google, continue to fixate on optimizing the website, or adding WAN optimization to their networks? The answer is simple: limit the number of requests that the (mobile) browser makes, and do that by letting the browser cache much more content than it does by default.

If you haven’t already, take a look at our post on why “leaving your car at home” is the best approach for reducing congestion.