It's a Mobile, Multi-Browser World

The Challenge

Delivering an exceptional web experience has never been easy, but it used to be simpler. If your content looked good in Internet Explorer 6, you could be reasonably certain your web site was working for most of your end users.

Not anymore.

Today, no one browser dominates the market. And even within browsers (e.g., Firefox), different versions perform and behave in very different ways. Users of Firefox 3 and 4, as well as Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, will all experience the same web site differently due to diverging browser capabilities like:

• The number of parallel network connections they open
• The way they process JavaScript and CSS
• How they load source code, images and third-party objects
• How they render web pages.

Now, not only do desktop browsers like Firefox and Chrome enjoy a greater share of the market, but there are smartphones and other mobile devices to contend with. Mobile users may be willing to trade some functionality for the convenience of mobile connectivity, but they will not sacrifice mobile application or web site speed and availability. Yet the biggest change may be the least visible. Web applications have evolved: A greater share of the responsibility for the web experience has shifted from servers to the client, where the user’s own browser plays a bigger role in delivering today’s Rich Internet Applications (RIA).

 

Why Does It Matter? Revenue is at Risk by Compromising Your End Users' Experiences

Gomez performance data shows an average difference of eight seconds in response time between the slowest and fastest browsers.

 

  

With such a wide range of load times across browsers, it’s vital to deliver top performance, ensure compatibility and optimize for the browser versions that drive your highest traffic — and revenue.

If your web site or application doesn’t perform optimally across all browsers and devices, you’re putting your revenue at risk: Compromising your end users’ experiences will impact your business. Browser problems can occur at multiple points along the application delivery chain. When they do, your users will experience a number of common issues, including:

• Malfunctioning pages and failed transactions
• Dramatically different response times across browsers
• Pages and transactions that don’t display properly in some browsers or devices
• Frustrated end users.

The Answer

With Gomez, you can test and monitor the performance, functionality and compatibility of your web and mobile sites across different browsers, operating systems and devices. Get the precise information needed to manage your web and mobile applications so you can optimize performance for your end users. Unlike other application performance tools, Gomez helps you measure and optimize the performance of today’s composite web and mobile sites across the most important browsers.

Testing across the variety of browsers your customers use is essential. With Gomez, you can use:

• Website Performance Monitoring — Set up repeatable, reliable web monitoring across multiple browsers from over 150 locations around the globe.
• Real-user Monitoring — Measure performance directly from your end users’ browsers while they are accessing your web and RIAs, so you can understand the impact of performance on their behavior and your business.
• The Gomez Virtual Test Bed — Automate cross-browser compatibility testing on more than 500 combinations of browsers and operating systems and over 5,000 supported mobile device profiles.
• Mobile Performance Monitoring — Quickly and easily identify, diagnose and resolve issues with mobile web sites, SMS and applications across browsers, devices, networks and geographies. 

 

 

 

Read more about the mobile, multi-browser world and watch the video below.