Higher Ed Webs

Browser Speed Comparisons

Of course there are many benefits to designing with usabiility and accessibility in mind and doing so with web standards. One of the benefits is faster loading pages. Of course with an external CSS once the first page of your site has been loaded the CSS is in the browser cache of the user so that's one less thing that has to be downloaded and one less hit to your server. Additionally, separating presentation and content code keeps the amount of code to a minimum which decreases download time and minimizes the overhead on the server.

Yes, this is a minimal amount for each person and may be negligible but that all adds up on your server and you will see and better performing server. Additionally, if you don't have your own server and pay for hosting and have a business level plan that charges by bandwidth then you just incurred some immediate cost-saving benefits.

If you go through all this effort it's important to know how much the browser factor into this. Of course this is something out of a designers control but it's good to know what's going on in the environment you are designing for.

There a interesting article on browser speed comparisons that I came across. In general the site I found the comparison data on howtocreate.co.uk is quite excellent. He has a RSS feed which I was more than eager to add to my watchlist.

posted by Paul N. @ 2:24 PM