“You can’t manage what you can’t mesure” And it’s not easy to manage or get a clear picture on mobile web browsers. Since this is a very important subject to any web developer and specially those who focus on their ‘mobile first’ plan. I’ve saw this good presentation on this subject and wanted to share with you my main takes. Studies show that Mobile users expect equal or better performance than desktop, where they demand 2s load times. This is a hard requirement to fulfill, give the limitations mobile imposes. Guy Podjarny (the CTO of blaze.io) go over the different aspects of mobile: network, hardware & software. We’ll review the challenges each presents, understand how they affect web performance, and show ways to overcome those challenges. We’ll also show the impact of these optimizations on real world sites, gleaned from manipulating and measuring websites using Blaze technology. We’ll summarize with updates on the recent mobile OS releases, followed by Q&A.
The video of this talk
My notes from the talk
- You will lose 13% of your users after 2sec! and 25% of your users after 4sec of load time.
- HTML5 is supported on mobile so use HTML5 localStorage for caching: It’s available on all major mobile platforms. It doesn’t expire and it will survives power cycle. Its size limit is around 5MB so it’s most useful for caching javascript and CSS files (like Bing and google search pages are doing on mobile browsers).
- Scriptable access enables other optimizations.
- Use far-future expiry dates
- You got more then ‘2 connections’ on modern mobile browsers (e.g. Galaxy S got a max of 12 connections) – so use them in parallel as you can.
Ido Green 
About mobile web performance whatever you explained here is informative. Desktop web performance and mobile web performance are not same; it’ll be hard requirement for mobile developer to fulfill. But I hope upcoming days they’ll sort out a way for better mobile web performance. Thanks and Happy New Year.
What do you think is the right choice for a startup? html5 with some js lib or to have native app?
@Moti – It and good question that doesn’t have one generic answer. The best answer is: It depends. It won’t help you too much but it’s the true. You want to check what are the needs of your users and then how your app should help them chive their goal in the best way. If you need APIs that are expose today in the native world you should go in that route. If you are in a position that HTML5 on the major devices/browsers you are targeting is giving you the right set of APIs you might want to check this option. It’s each specific case and its special/dedicated needs.
Good luck.