Taming the Mobile Beast

This tutorial will cover the following topics:

• Using mobile browser performance measurement tools to evaluate mobile website performance on Android and iOS: We’ll walk through the process of collecting mobile webpage performance using popular mobile measurement tools, like Blaze.io, and step through the process end-to-end of running measurements and evaluating the result.

• Understanding mobile web performance using waterfalls: We’ll look in detail at the waterfall for a few web page loads on several sites on both Android and iOS, and highlight the key differences between OS and browser versions. We’ll talk about how the browser manages parallel connections and pipelining, and showcase differences between different Android and iOS versions. We’ll explain how mobile network behavior, such as RRC state machine timings, impacts the results. We’ll focus on issues that mobile web developers need to be on the lookout for when tuning their sites for mobile networks.

• Using Chrome Dev Tools on Android: We’ll demonstrate how to use Chrome Dev Tools with Chrome on Android, which provides a new, powerful tool in the arsenal of a mobile web developer. We’ll show how to configure Dev Tools on the desktop to talk to either a local tethered phone or using an emulator. We’ll walk through some representative web page measurements and show how to use Chrome Dev Tools to explore the performance and state of the mobile phone’s browser for debugging.

• Other topics: We will briefly cover some additional tools for mobile web performance analysis: Mobile bookmarkets, Firebug Lite, JDrop, and PageSpeed for Mobile.