Fabrizio Giordano

Webmaster level: intermediate

At Google, we’re striving to make the whole web fast. As part of that effort, we’re launching a new web-based tool in Google Labs, Page Speed Online, which analyzes the performance of web pages and gives specific suggestions for making them faster. Page Speed Online is available from any browser, at any time. This allows website owners to get immediate access to Page Speed performance suggestions so they can make their pages faster.

In addition, we’ve added a new feature: the ability to get Page Speed suggestions customized for the mobile version of a page, specifically smartphones. Due to the relatively limited CPU capabilities of mobile devices, the high round-trip times of mobile networks, and rapid growth of mobile usage, understanding and optimizing for mobile performance is even more critical than for the desktop, so Page Speed Online now allows you to easily analyze and optimize your site for mobile performance. The mobile recommendations are tuned for the unique characteristics of mobile devices, and contain several best practices that go beyond the recommendations for desktop browsers, in order to create a faster mobile experience. New mobile-targeted best practices include eliminating uncacheable landing page redirects and reducing the amount of JavaScript parsed during the page load, two common issues that slow down mobile pages today.

Page Speed Online is powered by the same Page Speed SDK that powers the Chrome and Firefox extensions and webpagetest.org.

Please give Page Speed Online a try. We’re eager to hear your feedback on our mailing list and how you’re using it to optimize your site.

Posted by Andrew Oates and Richard Rabbat, Page Speed team

Webmaster Level: Intermediate to Advanced

Here’s a trending User-Agent detection misstep we hope to help you prevent: While it seems completely reasonable to key off the string “android” in the User-Agent and then redirect users to your mobile version, there’s a small catch… Android tablets were just released! Similar to mobile, the User-Agent on Android tablets also contains “android,” yet tablet users usually prefer the full desktop version over the mobile equivalent. If your site matches “android” and then automatically redirects users, you may be forcing Android tablet users into a sub-optimal experience.

As a solution for mobile sites, our Android engineers recommend to specifically detect “mobile” in the User-Agent string as well as “android.” Let’s run through a few examples.

With a User-Agent like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 3.0; en-us; Xoom Build/HRI39) AppleWebKit/534.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/534.13
since there is no “mobile” string, serve this user the desktop version (or a version customized for Android large-screen touch devices). The User-Agent tells us they’re coming from a large-screen device, the XOOM tablet.

On the other hand, this User-Agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2.1; en-us; Nexus One Build/FRG83) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1
contains “mobile” and “android,” so serve the web surfer on this Nexus One the mobile experience!

You’ll notice that Android User-Agents have commonalities:

While you may still want to detect “android” in the User-Agent to implement Android-specific features, such as touch-screen optimizations, our main message is: Should your mobile site depends on UA sniffing, please detect the strings “mobile” and “android,” rather than just “android,” in the User-Agent. This helps properly serve both your mobile and tablet visitors.

For questions, please join our Android community in their developer forum.

Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead