Tag: Mobile

This was a fun little trip down memory lane. Those BDConf events are still some of my absolute favorite memories, and so many of the speakers and attendees have remained good friends years later.

Alex is back at it with another very well written and important post, this time focusing on the state of mobile browser choice and how each major contributor is undermining user choice.

The mobile web is a pale shadow of its potential because the vehicle of progress that has delivered consistent gains for two decades has silently been eroded to benefit native app platforms and developers. These attacks on the commons have at their core a shared disrespect for the sanctity of user choice, substituting the agenda of app and OS developers for mediation by a user’s champion.

Imagine that situation. You buy a computer. It comes with one web browser pre-installed. You can’t install a different web browser on your computer.

You wouldn’t stand for it! I mean, Microsoft got fined for anti-competitive behaviour when they pre-bundled their web browser with Windows back in the 90s. You could still install other browsers, but just the act of pre-bundling was seen as an abuse of power. Imagine if Windows never allowed you to install Netscape Navigator?

And yet that’s exactly the situation in 2020.

You buy a computing device from Apple. It might be a Macbook. It might be an iPad. It might be an iPhone. But you can only install your choice of web browser on one of those devices.

We recognize, of course, that “Always accessible” is not a novel approach. Here in California accessibility is a guiding principle in the state’s digital strategy. And our work is just one part of the state’s larger commitment to ensuring that information and services are accessible.

What is novel is how our team is broadening the definition of accessibility for state government to include performance as a core component. Performance as accessibility.

Our goal is to make COVID19.CA.gov fast and easy to use on any kind of hardware or with any level of bandwidth. 

Latest data put out by the telecom regulator pegs the average monthly wireless data usage per user at 10.37 GB, which analysts say could rise by around 15% in the next two quarters if people continue to work from their homes over a prolonged period.

For government, GOV.UK is often the only place a user can get information. If the website were to perform badly, we become a single point of failure.

Great rundown of why performance is so important to GOV.UK and how the context of their visitors can vary dramatically, even within the same city.

I always like seeing how other folks handle performance audits. Here, Jake walks through 10 F1 sites, auditing them primarily with WebpageTest and a smattering of Chrome Dev Tools.

Remarkable story from Elvis Chidera about how he got started programming on a Nokia 2690.

As usual, Ethan makes a lot of sense in this post about how the way we build is impacted by the environment in which we build:

In our little industry, we often work on decent hardware, on reliable networks. But according to Pew Research, thirty percent of Americans don’t have broadband at home. One in ten American adults are smartphone-only internet users, while 13% of American adults don’t use the internet at all.

Meanwhile, we make mobile-friendly websites with widescreen devices, using broadband to design experiences for slow, unstable networks. In a lot of ways, we’re outliers among the people we’re designing for.