After years of being spoiled with a TV in my office (a benefit when working with big media) I spent the last two years unable to keep up except for frequent scoreboard checks.
So it was nice to read that this year they will be streaming for free on iOS devices, of which I have several. Â It looks like I will have an opportunity to run some realistic bandwidth tests on our internet connection.
So here we go again.  Just when it seemed like we were starting to get the browsers in line with standards and consistency Google goes and pulls support for H.264 in Chrome.
So now Web Developers are stuck with maintaining WebM and H.264 for video players. Â And of course don’t forget Flash which also uses H.264 for its video which is still available in Chrome.
So while Google and Apple take sides the web developers lose and have to keep working to hold it all together for the users.
The Gloves Are Off: Google Chrome Browser Will Drop Support For H.264 Video Codec.
I wasn’t able to attend Velocity this year but have been consuming what I can find online and this article from a few days ago from Steve Souders talks about a great approach to handling clients (or more likely proxies and software) that don’t claim to handle Gzip content.
From Andy Martone’s presentation:
The iframe test only runs once so the impact to performance is minimal (and to start the sample size of those getting the test is a small fraction of your traffic). Â The upside is that you quickly gain a savings by delivering Gzip payloads to any client that can handle them. Â From their testing you might improve the experience for ~15% of your users.
Of course there are still those using seriously old browsers and just can’t handle the compression, but I would say that burdening them with an extra iframe might give them that final reason to upgrade.
via High Performance Web Sites :: Velocity: Forcing Gzip Compression.
Nice article and video on a few easy things to do to improve the front end performance. Â This is something I am enthusiastic about and enjoy squeezing out savings (time rendering, bandwidth, etc.) from a site without impacting its look and feel.
Of course at CNN.com this has been a focus for years, especially the progressive rendering to combat that long homepage.
Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: You and site performance, sitting in a tree….
From Tim Bray’s piece on enterprise systems:
What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups.
I have spent years on the enterprise side of development and pushed on occasion for more iterative development methodologies and can say that the more successful projects I can recall started as a more simple effort and grew. Those that attempted to solve all the problems with the flip of a switch got mired in change requests and requirements docs and in the end made everyone just want to deploy the thing so we could move on.
I have a great sense of accomplishment for the systems I have been a part of constructing, developing and then maintaining but many came before the Internet had as many options and examples as there are today. Building a large scale, flexible CMS in the late ’90′s for example didn’t offer any options to pull from open source or commercial products and tools. Today that is different and I think most companies are starting to understand.
In the last few years with two different large Internet companies I can say that the enterprise is starting to come around. While there are still a few core competencies that are worth that do it all yourself mantra, most are now seen as a utility that should be handled in the most efficient manner possible. It might be that since the two companies I have experience with are both on the Internet side of things and thus faster to catch on, but I think that most companies are realizing that there is no need to write code every time a need arises.
The push for change needs to come from more folks at my level – those that have the authority to make decisions and the influence to explain the potential rewards over the perceived risks. I agree with many of the comments that the enterprise is focused on no risk (or transferring that risk to a partner) and that often backs them into a let’s do it ourselves corner. The job for the next class of leaders and executives is to understand the new Internet culture and take some of this and weave it into the enterprise. This will empower the development teams (and the product teams) and should result in more innovative projects coming from not just the startups but from the once staunch Fortune 1,000 as well.
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