Mobitest by Akamai

Mobitest by Akamai is a free mobile performance testing tool to give you a deeper understanding of how to improve your mobile website’s web performance. Mobitest can provide you with a video of your website loading, the HAR file of your runs, the average loadtime, and the average size of your mobile website. Mobitest is built off of the webpagetest.org framework and leverages real devices to extract the data.

Mobitest was open-sourced in march 2012.

Other web testing tools for mobile devices are MobileOK and MobiReady.

Fiddler : Web Debugging Proxy

Last update : May 22, 2015

Building web applications is hard work and most people remain unaware of how their web application is interacting with the web browsers that their clients have installed. Fiddler,  a free web debugging proxy created by Eric Lawrence, helps to simplify the analysis process substantially by logging all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler is a transparent proxy that automatically adds itself to the WININET chain so that it can see every request being made. It logs those requests and the responses to allow you to see what is working and what isn’t working.

Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and “fiddle” with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language. Fiddler is freeware and can debug traffic from virtually any application, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and thousands more.

The developper, Eric Lawrence, was Security Program Manager at Microsoft for Internet Explorer. After over a decade of working on the web for Microsoft, Eric joined Telerik in October 2012 to enhance the Fiddler Web Debugger on a full-time basis. Telerik is devoted to making software development easier and more fun and has committed to keeping Fiddler free and expanding its value by further investing into the tool.

A quick summary of getting started with Fiddler has been published at Developer.com. A detailed documentation is available at the Fiddler website. A discussion forum and a developer section are available at the same site. Various addons and third-party extensions have been developped.

Fiddler can be configured to analyse the http traffic of iPad’s, iPhone’s and other web devices.

A simular tool called Charles is available for Mac Computers.

Some related tutorials about Fiddler and HTTP debugging are listed hereafter :

HTML5 Test website

screen snap of the test results

A very useful HTML5 test tool has been created by Niels Leenheer. The goal is to show an indication of how well a browser supports the upcoming HTML5 standard and related specifications. The test tool was upgraded in June 2010 (see the blog).

The maximum score of the test is 300 points. The support of one or more codecs provides additional bonus points.

The results for my installed browsers are :

  • Chrome Canari (beta 10.0.614.0) : 244 points + 13 bonus points
  • Chrome 8.0.552.224 : 231 points + 13 bonus points
  • Safari 5.0.3 : 207 points + 7 bonus points
  • Firefox 4 beta 8 : 197 points + 9 bonus points
  • iPod Touch 4 (version 4.2.1  8C148) : 196 points + 7 bonus points
  • Firefox 3.6.13 : 139 points + 4 bonus points (no H264 support)
  • IE 9.0.7930 : 96 points + 5 bonus points
  • IE 8.0.6001 : 27 points, no bonus points
  • BlackBerry Bold 9000 (version 4.6.0.126) : 14 points, no bonus points

Niels Leenheer stated on his blog that there are problems with the HTML5 video codec detection in most browsers. Safari and Chrome report an answer “probably” with the javascript  canPlayType() command even if the codec indicated is a dummy. I experienced the same behavior in my test environment. Today it’s not possible to check what profile is supported in browsers implementing the MIME video/mp4.

The Web Standards Project’s operates also a test website called Acid Tests site.

W3C provides the mobileOK Checker (version 1.4.2). This work is part of the MobiWeb 2.0 project supported by the European Union’s 7th Research Framework Programme (FP7). The checker is based on the open source mobileOK checker library developed by the Mobile Web Best Practices working group.