The BrowserMob Blog

It seems that Mozilla’s new release of FireFox 3.5 is a lot faster, but still a bit behind Google’s Chrome.

In our page-loading tests, Firefox 3.5 speeds past Internet Explorer and Safari, but it still can’t catch Google’s browser.

Google Chrome showed the fastest page load time in five of the eight sites we tested it against, with an average page loading time of 1.699 seconds. However, Firefox 3.5 also put on a strong showing, coming in a close second with an average page-loading time of 1.762 seconds. (via PC World)

Earlier today TechCrunch reported that Microsoft has released pricing and a time line for its cloud platform Azure. We have already been in talks with the Azure team and it is interesting to note that the platform seems to straddle the line between IaaS (Infrastrure as a Service) like EC2 and PaaS (Platform as a Service) like Google App Engine. Given this, Azure may be the perfect way for BrowserMob to add IE-based tests to our system.

Over at Web Performance there is a well written blog post about issues one must be careful of when doing load testing from Amazon’s cloud. The major issues that didn’t seem to have obvious fixes in the article were:

CPU Utilization

High CPU usage can cause timing delays in page durations, skew the distribution of users as the load is ramped up, and slow down page processing (particularly extractors using regular expressions).

Bandwidth

Amazon and other cloud-computing services either do not guarantee a level of bandwidth, or guarantee a certain amount of bandwidth rather than a level.

TechCrunch is talking about how Google is redefining the operating system.

So in other words, it basically is the web as an OS. And applications developers will develop for it just as they would on the web. This is similar to the approach Palm has taken with its new webOS for the Palm Pre, but Google notes that any app developed for Google Chrome OS will work in any standards-compliant browser on any OS. (Via TechCrunch)

We can see a future when tools for testing web applications become the same tools for testing most applications.

An interesting article over at Belfast Telegraph about how Michael Jackson’s death brought down several sites including Google News. One thing that should be noted is that even sites that didn’t have news were affected.

Some of the sites that continued to function experienced sluggish performance because of the way they were built. For example, some slowed down because they needed to fetch third-party content, such as advertisements, before serving up the page to the reader.

Ironic that it would be somthing like this and not an outbreak of war that would truely test the net’s infrastructure.

Last week Patrick represented BrowserMob at Portland’s CloudCamp un-convention. Here is a partial, but very good, writup of what was discussed. With so much happening with companies and cloud services these types of events are a great way to get up the learning curve.