Tired of so many notifications ...
Pure madness
The other day I was waiting on a disqus blog to start up, loading the comments section. I have a 20MB/s ADSL line. I can download at 1.8 Mega Bytes per second without any issue.
The browser was spinning for so long that I decided to hit F12 in Firefox and headed for the "Network" tab. I hit F5 at that stage.
When everything was finished loading I could read:
340 requests, 7 557,42 KB
Granted, the content was available way before everything was loaded. But still. 7 Megabytes. 340 requests... This is PURE MADNESS!
Then again, buzzfeed.com's home page:
223 requests, 9 382,25 KB
Ok, ok, this is buzzfeed. Let's go to the nytimes.com.
283 requests, 8 158,95 KB
The biggest page of the website I'm currently working on shows:
40 requests, 198,45 KB
Out of these, there are 32 images that come out of a DB. And I find that too high and am trying to reduce it.
This. Is. Madness... Pure madness. But it seems to be the web today.
The good news is, on the performance front it is quite easy to get an edge. There is always an opportunity :-)
Is it lunch yet?
I get it, you're hungry. Because luch time can never be too soon, I've designed this webpage:
Just set it up as your homepage and everytime you open a tab you'll see if it's that time of the day already. On Chrome, you can use the New Tab Redirect extension, on Firefox, the New Tab Override extension.
Garbage Collectors are awesome (until they bite back)
JPEG Compression: Is 80 the magic quality - Part 1 - the retina screens
Foreword - encoding JPEGs
How do you encode your JPEGs ?Let's take a concrete example. You you have a 150x150 image. You want to compress it in JPG, but which quality settings should you use? JPEG encoders usually take a quality setting as a parameter, between Q1 and Q100, where 1 is the worst quality and 100 the best.
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| Q 10 - 1579B |
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| Q 20 - 1960B |
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| Q 30 - 2260B |
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| Q 40 - 2513B |
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| Q 50 - 2729B |
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| Q 60 - 2973B |
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| Q 70 - 3308B |
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| Q 80 - 3826B |
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| Q 90 - 4939B |
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| Q 100 - 32KB |
We can see that the greater the quality, the better and bigger the image. There is clearly a compromise to be done as Q100 is clearly too big an image and the increase in filesize doesn't translate to an equivalent increase in visual quality. 80 seems a sensible choice. The filesize is 3.8KB.
While this 80 quality settings is the most sensible, we're going to show that in some circumstances it is completely off the mark.
In this first part, we'll focus on high density displays, aka retina screens as they were first introduced by Apple a few years ago.
Hamburger anyone?
Under the idea of learning something new every day, I stumbled upon a nice article depicting the flaws of the hamburger menu.
And I learned a thing or two. So instead of rehashing the article here, I invite you to click the link above, leave my website and have a good read.