Let them block ads!
How to choose media query breakpoints to best support all connected devices
Why HTML5 is killing Flash: it’s the devices, people!
August 3, 2017, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
It’s 7 years now since Steve Jobs famously declared war on Flash in an open letter entitled Thoughts on Flash. With his knack for prescience, only now is it really looking like it’s lights out for Flash. In response, during the Android Keynote at Google IO 2010, Vic Gundotra cheekily declared that "it turns out on the Internet people use Flash", that Android would still support Flash, and that it was “much nicer than just saying no”... Read More
Mobile ad UX: how to use ads and alienate people
July 27, 2017, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
As a follow up to our previous article on the rising prevalence of ad blockers we thought it would be useful to review the types of ad that are likely to deliver a poor user experience, annoy your visitors, and sink your conversion rates. Ads, even at the best of times, aren’t particularly liked by... Read More
User Agent parsing: how it works and how it can be used
July 20, 2017, by Martin Clancy
The User-Agent is a central piece of web architecture and plays an important role in content negotiation. It was created with the express intention of building the ability to address users making requests with different clients or ‘agents’ differently, depending on capabilities or context. This article will answer many of questions you may have around... Read More
The SIM – the tiny computer in your pocket that’s really in control
July 11, 2017, by ronan
The Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) was first introduced by the GSMA in 1987 in a farsighted move to ensure that a mobile subscriber on a GSM cellular network could maintain an identity on the network independant of a particular mobile device. While its visibility has decreased over time, the humble SIM has been an essential... Read More
Let them block ads!
June 20, 2017, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
A lot has happened since we last took a look at the ad blocking landscape—time to come up for some air. Although ad blockers have been used in desktop browsers for years, it all really kicked off in September 2015 when Apple opened up iOS for ad blocker plugins, and since then there’s been a... Read More
How to choose media query breakpoints to best support all connected devices
June 14, 2017, by Stephen Delaney
Håkon Wium Lie first sketched out media queries in his initial CSS proposal in 1994. Unfortunately, we had to wait another 8 years till it became a recommended W3C standard in June 2012. When browsers started to widely support media queries, we thought that all our problems were solved. We had the solution to the evolving... Read More
AMP: thoughts on a 2 billion page project
June 6, 2017, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
At Google IO this year it was announced that there are now over 2B AMP pages live on the web, and counting. This is massive for a project that opened to the public only last year. When you look at the number of domains, around 900K, it’s not quite as impressive. Many of the 2B... Read More
Mobile web performance on news websites too slow for many
May 24, 2017, by Martin Clancy
We’ve written extensively on mobiForge on how web performance on mobile devices really makes a huge difference to your visitors and your business. We’ve also highlighted that the fast metropolitan WiFi speeds enjoyed in the offices of many content creators simply aren’t reflected in the real world where the vagaries of the network and the... Read More
JavaScript server-side rendering with device detection
April 13, 2017, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
React and other JavaScript frameworks have frequently come under fire for not being suited to mobile. Hence mobile-first was a cornerstone of the Angular 2 rewrite. And despite React’s popularity, it still attracts the wrong kind of attention regarding mobile. To my friends on the React team: you are on the hook until there's a... Read More
13 Statistics Showing The Importance of Mobile Web Performance
April 6, 2017, by Pawel Piejko
With the increasing popularity of AMP, web performance on mobile has become a mainstream issue discussed even by non-tech media. If you’re looking to better understand the problem, here is a ready-made list of 13 recent statistics related to web performance on mobile. As mobiForge’s Ronan Cremin recently put it, today the world of mobile... Read More
