Faster test agents and more regions
We’re kicking off 2018 with a bang and a donut. We’ve been busy preparing all-new faster test agents and they’re now available for you to switch to – at no extra cost!
Go to your Settings to switch to faster test agents.
Faster agents
All our agents now run on much faster AWS C4.Large instances, which better approximate current desktop browsers. We’ve also switched to the latest WebPageTest agent running on Linux.
How much faster? 20-30%
When you switch to the new agents, some of your metrics will get 20-30% faster, so pick a time to switch that suits your team. In between projects or the start of the month are good times to set a new baseline.
SpeedCurve Waterfall
If you're a performance engineer, then you're familiar with waterfall charts. They are found in browser dev tools as well as other performance services. I use multiple waterfall tools every day, but the waterfall chart I love the most is the one we've built at SpeedCurve:
PWA Performance
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) combine the best and newest features of the Web to deliver an experience that rivals native applications on mobile. Even better, they work on desktop, too. In fact, they work everywhere that the Web works! "Ah", you say, "that's not true! They require features that don't exist in all browsers." Because PWAs are "progressive", they can adapt to older browsers to deliver the best experience possible given the features that are available.
Given these winning attributes, it's no surprize that PWAs are the most popular movement in web development today. And while there are already numerous conferences, videos, and evangelists for PWAs, there's less focus on testing and tracking the performance of PWAs. Mark and I discussed this gap in PWA performance. In response, we added some new features to SpeedCurve that, coupled with some existing features, provide a great toolkit for evaluating the performance of PWAs.
Easily add WebP, SVG and Retina responsive images to your site
A lot of sites are now using responsive design techniques to create great user experiences across mobile, tablet and desktop. Unfortunately images are often just set to 100% width with the same large image being delivered to all browsers and platforms. Picturefill was an important step in delivering responsive images and David Newton's fork now extends that approach to include WebP and SVG images in the mix you send down the pipe.
