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.

Una recently added a “Save Offline” button to her blog posts that gives users control over whether an article will be saved offline or not. There was some recent discussion prompted by Nicholas Hoizey about how much data is too much to save offline. Giving users control (whether on an individual post basis or in bulk) seems like one way to deal with that question.

The smart folks at Google are now using a technology called RAISR to shave up to 75% off the file size of the images they display. It uses machine learning to enable it to be much more intelligent about the upsampling methods applied to images. Clever stuff!

Pretty impressive investigation and creative work done by the GitHub folks to make their diff pages, some of the slowest on the site, three times faster.

I love companies that are as invested in giving back to the community as they are at doing quality web-work. The Guardian is certainly one of them, and their latest post is a great example. They walk through several errors and mistakes they made on their site this year, why those mistakes were made, and how they fixed them.

Great introduction to the various different types of browser caches by Yoav Weiss, told as a tale about Questy’s Journey. The illustrations by Yoav’s daughter, Yaara, are also wonderful.

Sarah has written a really useful post about the different roles animation can play. Naturally, I was really happy to see her talking about the impact on perceived performance:

Animation also aids in perceived performance. Viget conducted a study where they measured user engagement with a standard loading GIF versus a custom animation. Customers were willing to wait almost twice as long for the custom loader, even though it wasn’t anything very fancy or crazy. Just by showing their users that they cared about them, they stuck around, and the bounce rates dropped.

In most cases, I’d argue, it would be even better to provide some sort of feedback to the user about what is happening in the background, but the same general idea applies: taking the time to design for when processes take too long is important.

Vitaly published a lengthy checklist of performance optimizations, which I was more than happy to review. There are PDF and Apple Pages versions available of the list if that’s your cup of tea.