The 10 Biggest WebPerf Storylines of 2013

From headline outages to staggering growth statistics, the WebPerf community has had a lot to talk about this year!  We counted down what we believe are the 10 biggest storylines of 2013 as we look forward to another banner year for Web Performance in 2014.

10. Netflix and Open-IX

Netflix announced that it will be the first customer of AMS-IX, an open internet exchange that models European standards. We’ll see how this impacts bandwidth and usage in 2014!

9. DNS is Still a Weak Availability Link

Microsoft’s and LinkedIn’s outages mark just two of many other availability hits caused by DNS related problems. As IPv6 adoption increases, the importance of DNS monitoring will increase as well.

8. Cyber Monday Beats Black Friday

Spending online is increasing, while offline dropped for first time in 7 years. See the results here.

7. Mobile Usage Continues to Grow

As mobile usage grows so does the need for capacity support on mobile networks, as well as optimizations for delivering content over saturated networks. Since you’ve probably already seen usage trends, here are some other interesting mobile stats.

6. Website Sizes Continue to Grow

As the size of sites grows in both # of objects and bytes, the demand for speeding up delivery increases. See the trend here.

5. High Performance Browser Networking by Ilya Grigorik

Ilya’s book is a great perspective on where we are in web performance in 2013 indicating that many optimization techniques will become obsolete with HTTP 2.0. He also goes in depth on optimizing for mobile networks.

4. Progress on HTTP 2.0

New developments were made, including: Microsoft’s HTTP 2 prototype server Katana, the announcement that the protocol will be HTTPS only, and many more sites adopted SPDY.

3. The Quest for a True User Experience Metric

We are still struggling to define what metric best represents user experience, especially pertaining to ‘perceived render time as onload’ becomes less reliable. This seemed to be the biggest topic discussed at Velocity this year.

2. Apple Still hasn’t Added Navigation Timing to Safari

Apple delivers a blow to the WebPerf community and standards body; it does not support performance timing on latest Safari. See why this is important here.

1. Failure is Still Happening, and Nobody is Safe

Outages for providers like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Healthcare.gov impact many of those reliant on their services.  A little insight into the trend towards failure.