Monthly Archives: April 2014

Benchmarking mobile browser performance

22 Tuesday Apr 2014

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Back in the early days of PC’s, comparing performance was relatively easy: just look at the processor and the clock speed. A 486/33 (with an Intel 80486 CPU running at 33mHz) will perform calculations about twice as fast as a 486/16.

Figuring out performance from mobile device specifications is a little more opaque these days. It can be much quicker and easier to just run a benchmark. 

For web-based applications, one useful benchmark is WebKit.org’s SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. 

Running this can give you an idea how much of the performance difference between two different mobile devices or browsers is due to raw JavaScript speed.

Sorry, Internet Explorer 8 is NOT going EOL next week

04 Friday Apr 2014

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Web developers and users notoriously hate old Internet Explorer versions.

You might think from the web that as of April 8, 2014, Internet Explorer is going to be unsupported, end of life, on its way out, an ex-browser, going the way of the dodo, dead.

Sorry. Not quite.

It is only on Windows XP that IE 8 is going EOL. IE support now follows the support lifecycle of the OS it is running on – so EVERY version of IE on XP is going EOL next week, not just IE8.

IE8 originally shipped as Windows 7’s built-in browser version. IE8 on Win7 (like Win7 itself) is still in mainstream support until January 2015. IE8 on Win7 will be covered under extended support until January 2020.

It’s the latter date – end of extended support – which most IT teams consider to be EOL for MS desktop products, because that’s when they’ll stop getting security updates.

So, if you create software for enterprises, you may have customers using IE8 for years to come.