Mobile web isn’t the only thing taking a hit. Radware’s Spring 2013 State of the Union – a look at page speed and web performance – found that internet performance is getting worse. Here are some key findings from Radware:

• Load times have increased by 22% in just one year. The median load time for a first-time visitor to a home page in the Alexa Retail 2000 was 7.25 seconds, compared to the median of 5.94 seconds recorded in December 2011.
• Top retailers underperformed the rest of the pack. The median top 100 site had a load time of 8.23 seconds, 14% slower than the overall median load time of 7.25 seconds. Top sites are also slowing down at a faster rate: 28% compared to 22% for the top 2,000 sites.
• Firefox outperformed Chrome and Internet Explorer. With a median load time of 6.64 seconds, Firefox was 8.4% faster than Internet Explorer 9, which had a median load time of 7.25 seconds. More significantly, we noted that median load times have slowed down for all three browsers. This suggests that, despite the huge performance leaps made by browser vendors, development cannot keep pace with the demands placed by ever-growing and increasingly complex web pages

Based on historical trends, we expected to see some degradation in page load time; this has been the trend since 2010, when this set of sites was initially measured. We did not, however, expect to see such a dramatic performance decline.

PCWorld writer Ian Paul and I have a lot in common. We are both big adopters (and fans) of Microsoft’s entire product line, but we have a few gripes with certain products. For me, it’s about the lack of Instagram on my Nokia Lumia 920, but that’s a story for another blog.

Paul’s grip is with Office 365 Home Premium – the web version of Microsoft Office. In one of his latest posts, he addresses five key issues that Microsoft should fix, especially if they want to supplant Google docs. Here is a brief clip, along with an excerpt on the two issues I found the most interesting (and annoying).

Microsoft recently said it plans to roll out new features to Office Web Apps that would allow you to “create polished Office documents from start to finish, all from the Web.”

New features planned for Office include real-time document co-authoring, faster launch times for apps, improved file management, and Chrome for Android support.

It’s great to see Microsoft making Office for the Web into a more full-featured version, especially while we wait for rumored Office apps for Android and iOS. Before Microsoft straps on a bunch of new features to its online Office suite, however, the company needs to make some improvements to the current version first.

And here are the two issues I referenced earlier:

Read more …

Rob Lambert, author of The Social Tester, took a series of his posts – and a few extra ideas – and packaged them into a handy (free) PDF eBook.

Titled “36 Days of Web Testing” the book is designed to help “those new to testing websites and web applications. This could be people new to the product quality and testing industries, but also those working in web design and new media who wanted to know what to look for when testing.” It covers topics like web accessibility, cross browser issues, browser extensions, http and https, load times and a slew of other things that web testers need to be on the lookout for. Each section gets a “why” and “how introduction and includes useful hints and resource links.

Whether you’re new to testing, new to website testing or just want to make sure you’re not missing (or haven’t forgotten about) any crucial tests, this book can help you out.

Special thanks to Adventures in QA for drawing our attention to this awesome resource!

The HTML5 game industry is a big one, and it’s expected to grow. But it’s an industry we don’t often hear about. So what’s inside the world of HTML5 games?

Austin Hallock, of VentureBeat, recently  assessed the game industry, and looked at things like the most popular game apps and tools used to develop HTML5 games.  Here’s a look:

The 10 most popular HTML5 games:

1. Angry Birds Chrome
2. Z-Type
3. Entanglement
4. Sinuous
5. BrowserQuest
6. Cut the Rope
7. Rumpetroll!
8. Agent 008 Ball
9. Pirates Love Daisies
10. Chain Reaction

The most-used game engines:

1. Construct 2
2. ImpactJS
3. EntityJS
4. LimeJS
5. GameMaker
6. Crafty
7. EaselJS
8. Cocos2s-X
9. Cocos2d-X
10. Cocos2d-javascript
11. MelonJS
12. enchant.js
13. gamecore.js

See the full list here>>

How far has HTML5 gone since its launch? Check out this infographic from visual.ly to find out:

EdX, a non profit founded by Harvard and MIT, has recently introduced a software that will actually grade student’s essays instantly and provide feedback. Automation in the educational world is not a new concept, standardized testing has been around for quite some time, almost always using machine scoring. However, EdX’s software uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to accomplish this task on written essays in attempt to offer students a better learning experience through instant feedback, and freeing up time for professors to focus on other things.

Of course, the growing number of those who are against this type of practice is large and outspoken. The group known as “Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays in High Stakes Assessment has collected early 2,000 signatures, including some from luminaries like Noam Chomsky. The opposition to this technology is quite understandable. The testing required to ensure that it is accurately grading essay would have to be broad and in depth. “One longtime critic, Les Perlman, has drawn national attention several times for putting together nonsense essays that have fooled the software grading programs into giving high marks” In my opinion if this can be achieved then this software is not ready to be released.

What do you think about this concept and how would you go about testing it?

Read more about this here.

Yet another company has redesigned their mobile website to give it a more native app like feel – and this time it’s resulted in booming user interaction.

Answers.com added swipe navigation to its HTML5-based mobile website. The company reportedly decided to update its mobile website (before creating a native app) because the majority of its traffic comes from search engines. While many search engines have started incorporating apps into their search results, a mobile website that appears in traditional search results would get Answers.com more eyes and more drive-by traffic. Though they chose to focus on a mobile website, Answers.com still wanted to speak the language of their mobile users. From MediaPost:

The company wanted to add the swipe functionality in its mobile site to suit the way people are consuming content on devices. “That’s just a behavior that the market understands,” said [Peter Horan, president and COO of Answers Corp]. By swiping, users necessarily have to view an extra page on the mobile screen to see an answer. Swiping after the first answer page reveals more related questions and answers, driving more page views in turn.

Adding swipe navigation made it easier for users to navigate the site. It also added a casual, fun aspect to the website that made it easier for users to consumer more information, view more pages and ultimately spend more time on the site.

During testing over the last few months, that “app-like” feature has helped boost interaction on the mobile side. People are now viewing more than five times as many pages per visit and spending twice as much time engaging with content on the mobile site. Mobile overall now represents half of all Answers page views and a third of its unique users.

The change, and Answers.com’s focus on mobile, has paid off . The company is tapping into an important sub-set of web users (mobile-only users) and increasing overall user engagement.

“We’re among the publishers that are really happy with the shift to mobile. We’re seeing more content consumption, and it’s driving great business results,” he said.

With nearly 49 million unique visitors in January, Answers.com ranks as the 20th largest Web property, according to comScore. But Horan noted that growth is focused on the mobile side, where a third of its visitors are mobile-only. The site is seeing increased activity around big events and breaking news. The election of a new Pope last week, for instance, generated 250,000 visits in one day with questions related to the elevation of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio.

Read the full article at MediaPost >>>

Answers.com found success with its mobile web strategy because they spent the time figuring out what mobile users want and how they like to interact with their devices. Instead of making a miniature (hard to navigate) version of their traditional site or launching a native app that might see little direct use, the company combined the best of both worlds and found a solution that worked for them and their users.

Which major news organization has the fastest loading website? What about the slowest? PBS’ Idea Lab did some research (using GTmetrix) and here’s what they came up with:

What’s slowing these websites down? Phillip Smith, who wrote the article, suspects it’s all the add-ons found on websites these days. From Idea Lab:

I had a hunch it might be widgets, buttons and badges. The Web is now awash in third-party services — Facebook, Google+, Twitter, just to name a few — that all provide their own handy little code snippet for you to embed on your site. Each of these little code snippets is time-saving for the developer implementing it, but potentially time-consuming for the end user. Could widgets be to blame? I asked [Alex Krohn, founder of ... hosting company Gossamer Threads, the company that created the GTmetrix performance testing tool] that question too.

“Each one of these adds a ‘hit’ to the site, in terms of the resources required and the total time to load everything. If you do it in a way that’s smart and doesn’t slow things down for the user, then it can be a good thing. However, if you do it wrong, it can impact the speed of the site,” Krohn said. He went on to explain, “It’s important to have a good understanding of the numbers and what they mean. So, for example, a ‘15-second page load time’ doesn’t necessarily mean the user is staring at a blank screen that whole time, and using a lot of resources may be OK if the user gets what they want out of the site within the first couple of seconds.”

Phillip takes quite the in-depth look at the issue. Check out his findings at Idea Lab >>>

If you see something fishy with the data around your online display ads, there’s a chance it could be the new chameleon bot uncovered by researchers at security firm Spider.io. Dubbed the first of its kind, this particular botnet has been credited with costing advertisers upwards of $6 million thus far. Here’s VentureBeat with the details:

We see botnets steal advertising revenue through text-only advertising, such as the search engine advertising you might see at the top of Google. But display advertisers are more difficult to target, says Spider.io. Those behind the display  advertising use different techniques to judge their target audience and decide whether they are human or not.

The bot is able to mimic human interaction with a website so that no one suspects there is a bot behind the click, hence the name Chameleon. The bot only clicks on advertisement 0.02 percent of the time, and it re-creates “normal”  mouse traces — or where the mouse hovers on the webpage — as well as “random”  click-throughs on a specific advertisement. That is, it doesn’t click the ad in the same spot every time.

The firm first started investigating the botnet in December and say the program  has cost advertisers up to $6.2 million so far. The botnet specifically targeted  262 unnamed websites and accounted for 65 percent of the traffic served to those  websites. Spider.io was able to detect at least 120,000 “host machines,” thus  far, and it says the majority of them are from United States IP addresses.

Read the Rest >>>

Interested in website security testing? If you’re already a tester and looking to expand your knowledge, check out uTest’s Tester Help Topics.

If you’re brand new and looking for something a little more basic, check out Google’s new “Help for Hacked Sites” series. It’s designed to help webmasters identify vulnerabilities and reclaim hacked sites, but it could also be helpful for those interested in learning about website security. From TechCrunch:

The first part of the series is geared toward relatively non-technical users, while the later part is aimed at users who can read code and are comfortable with using terminal commands. Overall, the series features about 80 minutes of video and a dozen or so articles that cover everything from basic things like figuring out that a site was actually hacked to working with your host to recover a site, all the way to using vulnerability scanners, understanding SQL injections, reading log files and using the shell to log into your site to determine the root-cause vulnerability.

It is an eight-part series that ranges from beginner technical expertise level to advanced. Some of these will be more helpful if you’re a website owner or dealing directly with Google, but others will give you an idea of what to look for when dealing with a hacked site, where to look for problems and how to avoid issues all together. Parts of the series cover:

1. “Help for Hacked Sites” overview
2. Contact your hoster and build a support team
3. Quarantine your site
4. Touch base with Webmaster Tools
5. Assess the damage (hacked with spam) or Assess the damage (hacked with malware) – two separate lessons
6. Identify the vulnerability
7. Clean and maintain your site
8. Request a review

This is by no means the end-all-be-all of becoming a web security tester, but it’s a good place to start if you’re interested in the field and want more information on what it entails.