Varnish Cache is an open source HTTP accelerator that is used for speeding up the content delivery of the world’s top content-heavy dynamic websites. However, the performance or speed a newcomer to Varnish Cache can expect from its deployment can be quite nebulous.
This is true for users at both extremes of the spectrum: from those who play with its source code to create more complex... Read More
Preload (spec) is a new web standard aimed at improving performance and providing more granular loading control to web developers. It gives developers the ability to define custom loading logic without suffering the performance penalty that script-based resource loaders incur.
A few weeks ago, I shipped preload support in Chrome Canary, and barring unexpected bugs it will hit Chrome... Read More
The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the protocol that governs the connection between your server and the browsers of your website’s visitors. For the first time since 1999, we have a new version of this protocol, and it promises far faster websites for everyone.
In this article, we’ll look at the basics of HTTP/2 as they apply to web designers and developers. I’ll explain some of... Read More
In May of 2015, Facebook unveiled its new in-app publishing platform, Instant Articles. A month later, Apple declared that the old Newsstand experience (essentially a fancy folder full of news apps) would be replaced in iOS 9 with a brand new news-aggregation and discovery platform called Apple News.
Four months later, it was Google’s turn to announce its own, somewhat belated but no... Read More
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. What do you think? Let us know in the... Read More
The way we consume open source software (OSS) dramatically changed over the past decade or two. Flash back to the early 2000s, we mostly used large OSS projects from a small number of providers, such as Apache, MySQL, Linux and OpenSSL. These projects came from well-known software shops that maintained good development and quality practices. It wasn’t our code, but it felt trustworthy, and it... Read More
What is the difference between a web page and a web application? Though we tend to identify documents with reading and applications with interaction, most web-based applications are of the blended variety: Users can consume information and perform tasks in the same place. Regardless, the way we approach building web applications usually dispenses with some of the simple virtues of the readable... Read More
When technical performance optimizations reach certain limits, psychology and perception management might help us to push the limits further. Waiting can consist of active and passive phases; for the user to perceive a wait as a shorter one, we increase the active phase and reduce the passive phase of the wait. But what do we do when the event is a purely passive wait, with no active phase at... Read More
Let’s get a few things out of the way first. This isn’t your regular Smashing Magazine article. It’s not a “how to“; it won’t show you how to build a better menu or improve your project tomorrow. This article shows you how a core problem in computer science works and why we're all pretending we know something for certain when we really have no idea.
You’re looking at Smashing Magazine... Read More
