HTTP compression and incremental rendering

TL;DR: HTTP compression can delay rendering of web resources HTTP permits content to be served with different encodings, some of which can be used to compress [1] the data volume transferred over the network, which has become a frequent suggestion [2] towards optimising websites for performance. It turns out that the deflation phase of the … Continue reading HTTP compression and incremental rendering

Advanced web security topics

(Updated 22 May 2020) This post discusses web security issues that I come across - so far thankfully mostly by reading about them. It is a work in progress which I'll keep updating. The post title includes "advanced" because the topics discussed here involve clever, non-trivial hacks, are novel at the time of their publication … Continue reading Advanced web security topics

HTTP: The importance of declaring non-cachable resources as such

It works fine with Chrome and it fails on an Android 2.3 browser - the page is performing an XmlHttpRequest to the server for a resource that just changed for sure and yet it gets back an older version. That's the result of a. the browser assuming a resource is cachable even if no Etag … Continue reading HTTP: The importance of declaring non-cachable resources as such

HTTP pipelining, Tomcat 7 and Firefox 4

During an optimisation cycle for Bazarooma aimed at further reducing latencies I started experimenting with Firefox' HTTP pipelining [1] feature, which is disabled by default. This can be enabled by typing about:config in the URL bar, locating the network.http.pipelining entry and setting it to true. While Firebug did not report any measurable improvement, it turned … Continue reading HTTP pipelining, Tomcat 7 and Firefox 4