futtta's blog

I had to look into CDN’s some time ago, to find a suitable temporary solution for a problem at work. There are a lot of players in this field, Akamai and Amazon (Cloudfront) being market leaders of some sort, but there’s also Microsoft with their Azure CDN (which we already had some experience with), other big guns such as Rackspace and Level3 and specialized shops such as CacheFly, CDNetworks and NetDNA as well. So how to choose?

Well, if you’re in a hurry, you could compare price and features via cdnplanet.com. The info might not always be complete, but it does give you a good first idea and you can always visit the CDN’s proper site for more details, can’t you?

After comparing features & pricing, you really should get an idea of the speed of these CDN’s, of their performance relative to your customers. I found this CDN Speed Test on cloudclimate.com very useful; it performs a live test of approximately 20 CDN providers, requesting a 64 kilobyte file 10 times for each CDN from within your browser. So if you can get a sample of your customers to perform that test and provide you with the results, you’ll have some very useful information about performance. Together with your overview of features and price, you should be able to make at least a vaguely educated decision, no?

To have an idea about performance for our market (Belgium), I asked some Facebook-friends to provide me with the results of the CDN Speed Test. Most data I received was for Telenet or Skynet/Belgacom, not coincidentally the biggest ISP’s here. You can see the aggregated results in that ugly table on the left (or a couple of paragraphs up, if you’re subscribed to the RSS-feed).

My conclusion: as I was looking for a pay-as-you-go (no obligations, no monthly fee) CDN for static files, with support for Origin-Pull, HTTPS and some administration features (for example to purge the cache and watch nice graphs), MaxCDN fit the picture pretty well. With a great introductory price ($40 for the first Terabyte and even less if you find the coupon code) and performance that is at 113% of the fastest competitor, they seem to have found somewhat of a sweet spot for my specific context.

The only problem; I’ve got to wait for a “GO” from some people higher up the food chain. Maybe I should already implement it on my blog, just for the fun of it?

I’ve always enjoyed riding the Firefox-bandwagon and that hasn’t changed, even though Google Chrome seems to be the browser of choice amongst the cool kids nowadays. And if only because I’m a faithful guy, I’ve been running Firefox Mobile ever since I bought a Samsung Galaxy SII as well. Sure it doesn’t do Flash, but I’m not that Flash-inclined anyway.

Now, I haven’t met too many people that use Firefox Mobile and indeed when reading about mobile browsers, Firefox is rarely if ever mentioned. But what if I told you that Firefox Mobile is by far the best browser on mobile when taking performance, features and security into consideration?

I won’t beat around the bush, here’s the pretty objective data.

Some remarks:

• the hardware is pretty comparable; all dual-core CPU’s and plenty of RAM.
• higher is better, except for Sunspider which measures time (in microseconds).
• I’ve got no screenshot or URL of the google v8 test results on my phone, but I’ll be glad to reproduce.
• sunspider and v8 are javascript performance benchmarks.
• html5test is an indication for support of “modern” browser features (html5, css3 and much more).
• the features of the browser GUI arent’t measured byhtml5test, but I’m pretty pleased with Firefox Mobile in that respect as well; great tabbed browsing, plugins (including noscript!), sync-ing of all relevant data between desktops & mobile, …
• I added Opera Mobile and Dolphin HD to the list. Opera’s not too shabby but not a winner either?

And last but not least; as Firefox Mobile isn’t native and since it’s on the same (crazy) rapid release cycle as the desktop-version, I consider it to be a lot more secure when compared to the slow evolving, rarely updated native browsers in Android and iOS.

My advice; if you’re an Android-user and you’ve got a recent handset or tablet, you really should consider switching to Firefox Mobile. It’s the best mobile browser no-one is using! Except for you?

I’m all of a sudden developing a keen interest in Amazon EC2 & simpledb (or RDS), but Google AppEngine might be an acceptable alternative. Do contact me if you have hands-on experience with webapps developed for and deployed on those platforms, or if you know someone who does. We could be in for a fun little project!