July 14, 2023, by

Those of you who pay attention to your web server log files may have noticed some curious patterns emerging over the last few months. Most websites will have seen a steady rise in devices with User-Agent headers looking something like this: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/<majorVersion>.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 or like... Read More

August 28, 2019, by James Kielty

Monetizing apps by adding ads is a popular way for creators to fund their efforts. Consumers are more likely to install an app which doesn’t have an up-front fee, so in-app advertising is a natural fit for both parties. However, as apps don’t function the same way as browsers do, the default exchange between the... Read More

June 28, 2019, by Luke Captain

In this article we’ll give a run down of what non-blocking is, how it can help you improve performance on your site, and maybe even get that sweet, sweet 100 on performance in Google Lighthouse. (All examples will be JavaScript/node related) What is blocking code? Blocking code is any code that prevents the execution of... Read More

June 6, 2019, by James Kielty

Our latest dive into Android v iOS market share compares data from Q1 2019 with the previous year. In Canada, iOS lost over 10% share. It also lost over 12% in Egypt, 14% in Ireland, 9% in Italy and Japan, and a concerning 18.17% in Portugal. There were some gains, though, such as 11.65% in... Read More

May 1, 2019, by James Kielty

Huawei are in the headlines again – it’s been a hectic 12 months for the world’s second largest smartphone manufacturer. The latest news follows a leak from the UK’s National Security Council, confirming Huawei will be allowed to supply non-core 5G tech (such as antennas) for Britain’s emerging network needs. The news travelled quickly across... Read More

April 16, 2019, by James Kielty

Allowing web crawlers to scan your site is vital if you want your web pages to appear in Google, Bing and other search results. However, unwanted traffic spikes caused by non-human visitors can be costly in terms of bandwidth, website stability, potentially leading to site outages. To help you understand web crawlers, bots and spiders... Read More

April 4, 2019, by Mike Eichler

This would be the ugly secret of the internet, except everyone knows about it: the overuse of JavaScript makes the modern web slow and annoying to browse as well as possibly dangerous. On the desktop, many people choose to restrain the beast with something like NoScript which allows the user selectively run/stop scripts using simple... Read More

January 3, 2019, by James Kielty

The latest DeviceAtlas whitepaper explains the difficulty around accurate device detection of iOS devices. In all Apple devices, the User-Agent string only indicates the hardware type, not the model. By parsing User Agents alone, all you’ll know is whether you’re dealing with an iPhone or an iPad. This leaves some useful properties outside your field... Read More

May 30, 2018, by James Kielty

As GDPR rolled into town, we spotted some odd examples of how companies and news websites are dealing with their newly enforced responsibilities. Instead of submitting to the spirit of the whole exercise, many high-value sites chose to segment their traffic into EU v Non-EU, and provide the former with a stripped down, minimal version... Read More

February 2, 2018, by Martin Clancy

Launched in 2014 Google’s Physical Web project promised much, but seems to have died a quiet death over the last few months. This post takes a look at what the technology promised, and the speed bumps it hit along the way that may ultimately prove to have derailed it. Everything is a tap away Google’s... Read More

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

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

March 28, 2017, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue

When approaching the issue of web page weight, it’s useful to keep in mind the well known engineering maxim, “Simplify, and then add lightness“. This article describes some of the ways you can add lightness and reduce your web page weight... Read More

December 14, 2016, by Martin Clancy

Anyone involved in developing content for the mobile web is probably already aware of the huge performance challenges on mobile. There is now widespread acceptance that we should budget for performance just as much as we should for design, and functionality. Perhaps even more so. So why are many websites still failing users by serving... Read More

October 21, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue

You’re probably already familiar with the idea of offline web apps, web apps that can continue to work in the face of intermittent network connectivity. This concept has been around for a while, and various technologies have been developed along the way to achieve offline web apps, (Google) Gears, and Appcache for example, but none of these addressed the offline challenge quite as well as service workers... Read More

September 17, 2015, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue

Web push notifications are the best thing to hit the web since the hyperlink! No kidding, this technology is going to be huge. Until recently web developers could only dream of push enabled web apps. Things have changed however, and web push notifications, the asynchronous delivery of messages to a user's device from a website, even when the website is not open in the browser, are now a reality thanks to a number of HTML5 APIs:... Read More