The title is a question I ask because I hear so many different views and perspectives about HTTP compression from the people I work with, colleagues and customers alike.

There appears to be no absolute statement about the compression capabilities of all current (or in-use) browsers anywhere on the Web.

My standard line is: If your customers are using modern browsers, compress all text content — HTML (dynamic and static), CSS, XML, and Javascript. If you find that a subset of your customers have challenges with compression (I suggest using a cross-browser testing tool to determine this before your customers do), write very explicit regular expressions into your Web server or compression device configuration to filter the user-agent string in a targeted, not a global, way.

For example, last week I was on a call with a customer and they disabled compression for all versions of Internet Explorer 6, as the Windows XP pre-SP2 version (which they say you could not easily identify) did not handle it well. My immediate response (in my head, not out loud) was that if you had customers using Window XP pre-SP2, those machines were likely pwned by the Russian Mob. I find it very odd that an organization would disable HTTP compression for all Internet Explorer 6 visitors for the benefit of a very small number of ancient Windows XP installations.

Feedback from readers, experts, and browser manufacturers that would allow me to compile a list of compatible browsers, and any known issues or restrictions with browsers, would go a long way to resolving this ongoing debate.

UPDATE: Aaron Peters pointed me in the direction of BrowserScope which has an extensive (exhaustive?) list of browsers and their capabilities. If you are seeking the final word, this is a good place to start, as it tests real browsers being used by real people in the real world.

Every so often, you wake up and realize that the world has changed around you. Or, to say it better, your view of the world has changed so profoundly, but also so subtly and slowly that it is imperceptible unless you take the time to look back at where you came from.

Six years ago, if you had asked me what the most important problems in Web performance were, I would have reeled off a list that was focused on technology and configuration: HTTP compression, HTTP persistent connections, caching, etc. In fact, six years on, these are still the concepts that dominate Web performance conversations.

Slowly, glacially, shaped by six years of working with customers and clients, listening to the Web performance conversations that flow across the Web and within companies, I realize that technology is only one component of the Web performance solution.

Web Performance is NOT Just Technology

Most organizations focus too much of their efforts on solving the technical problems because they are discrete, easy to track, and produce quantifiable results.

Fair enough.

But a highly tuned engine with a rusted chassis, four flat wheels, and a voided warranty still has a Web performance problem, even if it is technically sound.

The complexity of the issue arises from the terminology used. Web performance, in current parlance, refers almost completely to the delivery of the site in an appropriate and measurable manner.

Web performance is not simply the generation and delivery of HTML and other objects. Web performance is conversation that defines the basic nature of any Web site.

Approaching Web performance, as I had for so many years, as a technical problem with a discrete solution overlooks the true nature of Web performance. A culture of effective Web performance absorbs a number of different inputs, and then ensures that the site performs across many different vectors, not just the two-dimensional response/success over time graph.

Web Performance is Culture and Communication

Web performance is an issue of culture. And at the root of all cultures lies communication.

The Web performance conversation has three components, each one shaping the potential response to the problem and providing elements of the solution.

1. Technical Capabilities

Technical organizations spend a great deal of their time defining what they can’t do. In an organization that has a culture of effective Web performance, the technical teams provide clear definitions of the current capabilities, and clearly demonstrate how far they can take the organization down the chosen path, hopefully without spending all of the company’s treasure.

2. Business Objectives

Just as the technical organization has to define what they can do with what they have, the business organization has to come to the table with a clear definition of what they want to achieve. If a business goal is clearly stated to the technical team, then a conversation about where there may be challenges and opportunities can occur. When business and IT talk and listen, a company is becoming far more effective at delivering the best site they can.

3. Customer Expectations

Neglected, forgotten, nay, even ignored, the role of the customers’ expectations in the Web performance equation is just as critical as the other two participants. With clear business objectives and defined technical capabilities, a site can still be seen as a Web performance failure if the expectations of the customer are not met. And it is not simply listening to customer and providing everything they want. It’s understanding why they need a feature/function/option in order to be more successful at what they do, and balancing that against the other two players in the conversation.

Now What?

But where does an organization that wants to take Web performance beyond the technical problem, and into the realm of the strategic solution go?

Do a search on any search engine and you will find page upon page of technical solutions to a supposedly technical problem. Web performance is not solely a technical problem. In many cases, the site is configured and tweaked and tuned and accelerated to such a degree that you have to wonder if is under-performing out of spite more than any other reason.

Scratch the surface. Look beyond the shiny toys and massively-scaled infrastructure and you will find that technology is not the issue. The demand placed on the site by the business are bogging the site down in ways that no amount of tuning could improve.

Perhaps the business goals of the site, the need to support the business, have pushed the technology to its breaking point or beyond, but the technology team cannot clearly articulate what the problem or solution is.

Maybe customers, used to competitors delivering one level of Web performance and experience are simply not happy with the site, no matter how tuned it is and how clearly the call to action may be.

Making a Web site perform effectively means stepping back and asking some key questions:

• Why do we have a site?
• How does this site help our business?
• Why do our customers use our site?
• Do we like using our site?
• What are our competitors doing?
• What are the best Web companies doing?

These seem like silly questions. But you may be surprised by the differing answers you get.

And from there, the conversation can start.

Takeaways

Simply put, Web performance is not about understanding how to make your site faster. Web performance is about understanding what you can do to make your site better. An effective Web site is one that is shaped by a culture of effective Web performance.

Striving to make a better, more effective Web site may lead to such profound cultural and organizational changes that the process ends up making a better company. A company where the Web site is seen as an active conversation shared with employees, shareholders, investors, and customers.

A conversation where you explain what can be done, why you are doing it, and how you will do it. A conversation where you listen to what must be done, how it is expected to work, and what the customer defines as success.

So when you wake up six years from now, and realize that the day you stopped treating your Web site as a technical problem that needed to be fixed, and started seeing it as an opportunity to create a more effective business, I hope you smile.

Once again it is time to analyze browser usage in the US for the last month. July saw the appearance of Firefox 3.5, which has replicated the pattern seen with Internet Explorer 8, where it supplants the previous version slowly and linearly as people get around to upgrading.

Can MSIE 8 overtake MSIE 7 in August? How much will Firefox 3.5 usage grow in August and will it replace FF 3.0 as the dominant version in the Firefox family?

As with previous analyses, Internet Explorer 6 retains its iron grip on the corporate, custom Web application market. The question is not when, but if, this browser will actually fade away. It is unlikely that Internet Explorer 6 will disappear until Windows 2000 and Windows XP percentages are in serious decline.

This points to a larger concern that organizations will have to face within the next 18 months: What do they do when the Windows 2000 lifecycle terminates in July 2010 and as Windows XP sees fewer updates moving toward lifecycle retirement in 2014? [See the Microsoft LifeCycle information here]

Hiding from the inevitable just makes changes that much more dramatic and difficult.

It is not likely that the patterns in the StatCounter data will change until the summer vacation season is over in the US, and students bring their shiny new computers online at the start of the school year.

June is one of my favorite months. The sun returns (although in the Boston area there are concerned that it has been replaced by clouds and humidity), the kids get out of school (and get sent to camp), and the outdoor pool opens (and I actually swim in it).

In the US browser market, Internet Explorer 8 continues its slow replacement of Internet Explorer 6 and 7, finally overtaking MSIE 6 on June 11 [Stats courtesy of StatCounter].

The great news is that Internet Explorer 6 is slowly falling of the pace, relegated to large companies with proprietary code and a degree of inertia that impedes their movement to accepting new browsers.

The two-month trend does show some very dramatic changes, most notably with Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.

While these changes appear dramatic, the lack of absolute values to base the StatCounter graphs on means that it’s very difficult to determine if these values are a result of a shift in the actual browser market, or a result in decreasing numbers of visitors to sites with the StatCounter tracking code.

Worldwide for June, the primary trend is that the decrease in Internet Explorer 7 is matched almost precisely by the increase in the use of Internet Explorer 8.

Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 6 remained almost completely unchanged through June, indicating that the US trend is very different than that seen throughout the rest of the world. The tracking trend indicates that Firefox 3 could have overtaken Internet Explorer 7 by the end of July.

Could have is used purposely here, as the release of Firefox 3.5 will fragment the market share for this browser, and it is not likely that it will match the stats for Firefox 3 immediately.

Despite all the claims that the browser war is over, and that applications have moved beyond the browser, it is highly unlikely that this dream will be realized in the consumer browser market until late 2010, when the effect of Windows 7 can be seen on the use of Internet Explorer 8 .

Overall, June 2009 was a month of substantial shifts in the US browser market, which will be further aggravated with the release of Firefox 3.5, and the slow and steady adoption of Internet Explorer 8 by consumer and business users.

UPDATE: TechCrunch has noted the ongoing shifts to the browser share market [here].

This week marks a momentous time in the history of the Internet. In the United States, StatCounter reports that for the first three days of the work week (Monday – Friday), Internet Explorer 8 usage is equal to Internet Explorer 6 usage.

Tie this to the trend of decreasing Internet Explorer usage noted late last week and the release of Firefox 3.5 RC1 and Safari 4.0 and Opera 10 in the last few weeks, and it appears that the balance of browser usage on the Internet is becoming more fluid.

Does this mean that standards will become more relevant? Can you truly count on limiting customers to one browser?

Will browser lock-in for certain applications continue to be considered acceptable?

I have been monitoring this trend for a couple of weeks to see if it remained constant, and it appears to be a real thing. Since the end of May 2009, Internet Explorer 7’s browser share in the US has collapsed, with a requisite increase in the use of Firefox 3.0.

This is a staggering change. Either this is an artifact of the way that StatCounter is capturing browser data or a very large organization(s) suddenly switched the default browser that it allowed its customers to use.

Does anyone have any insight into why this may have occurred?

Since its GA release on March 19 and its addition to Windows Update in late April, Internet Explorer 8 has been gradually increasing its market share in the US. Based on the current growth pattern in StatCounter’s GlobalStats data, it appears that Internet Explorer 8 will overtake Internet Explorer 6 sometime in late May or early June.

In other parts of the world, the adoption of the new version of Internet Explorer is substantially slower, and affected by regional differences in the browser population. Europe is notable in this as MSIE8 has just overtaken Opera 9.6 in the browser population in the last week.

In Asia, Internet Explorer 8 has moved into fourth in browser share, but is a substantially lower percentage of the population than the top three browsers. In a frightening statistic, Internet Explorer 6 is the most popular browser in Asia, indicating that path to adoption may be longer in this region.

Overall the adoption of this new browser as a replacement for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 is slow and steady. MSIE8 does not appear to be significantly cutting into the Firefox population, but this could change as people begin to hear more about the features of the new browser, and Web sites begin to be designed to its features, rather than those of MSIE6 and MSIE7.

At CNet News today, the article What browser wars? The enterprise still loves IE 6 nicely sums all the reasons that Internet Explorer 6 is still in use in enterprise environments. The dominance of Internet Explorer 6 in the workplace is something I discussed a few days ago, supported by the pattern of higher weekday use of this browser during the work-week.

Limiting employees to a browser that is considered an ancient technology by Web developers poses an interesting dichotomy to companies. Internally, they are powering their internal applications with coal and steam, and turning the cogs of business with leather drive-belts. Externally, the customers get to see a site that is shiny, one that has all the gadgets of a rich-Internet application that require the computationally advanced capabilities of a modern browsers.

To some extent, the companies who use Internet Explorer 6 internally are saying to their employees that the Internet is simply another desktop application that they must use.

I am firm believer that the Web will be the home of many of the applications we use on a daily basis in the very near future [here and here]. My vision of this is that the Web application is designed to free the user, and lessen the workload for IT departments.

Most organizations continue to see the Internet as a negative, a threat to productivity, a necessary evil. So if they restrict their employees and provide them with a browser that doesn’t quite work properly on the Internet, they still have ultimate control.

I have had the benefit of working for organizations throughout my professional career that did (do) not limit my choice of browser or operating system, allowing me to find my own preference. I realize that this is rare in corporate Industrial Culture, and I consider myself lucky.

So, why is their still a need for Internet Explorer 6? Frankly, there is really no need for it in my opinion, and the CNet News article has a table from Forrester that supports that. That doesn’t mean that my browser idealism and utopian dream of “may the best browser win” will hold any sway over the IT decision makers in large organizations.

StatCounter still shows that during the week, Internet Explorer 6 holds 12% of the browser share in the US [here]. So, will this 12% of the browser world hold back the promise of the Internet for the rest of us?

While I was performing my standard Windows Update on my work virtual machine this morning, I wondered if the promised Internet Explorer 8.0 release to Windows Update had been dropped.

I switched to my test-bed, vanilla Windows XP virtual machine, ran Windows Update, and PING! Up it came. The masses of people who blindly do what Windows Update tells them to do will now be installing Internet Explorer 8 on their machines.

The interesting thing is that the only piece of software that Windows Update said was a critical Update was Internet Explorer 8.0. Given that it would be replacing Internet Explorer 7.0 on my virtual machine, how bad was Internet Explorer 7? Are they trying to push MSIE6 and MSIE7 out of the way ASAP?

Today should see a large number of new installs of Internet Explorer 8, either on purpose or inadvertently by those folks who install everything that Microsoft tells them to. I will be monitoring StatCounter’s GlobalStats over the next few days to see if there is a spike in, most notably, US installs of Internet Explorer 8.

Just as a sidebar, Internet Explorer 8, without the support of Windows Update, has increased from 3.5% to 6.28% of the browser share in the US (3.33% to 6.2% in North America; 2.65% to 4.4% Worldwide) in the April 1-28 2009 period. [Stats courtesy of StatCounter GlobalStats]

I can’t make a lot of comments about the quality of browsing experience in one version of Internet Explorer over another; I have been a dedicated Firefox user on Mac, and a Safari user on Windows (yes, that is weird) for a while. But the desire to move as many people as quickly as possible to a new browser speaks volumes to where Microsoft thinks the Web is going. And they realize that it is not going in the direction that its older browsers had been taking it.

Further Updates will follow.

UPDATE: A colleague forwarded me this article on the release of Internet Explorer 8 to Windows Update. Effectively, you still have to go through the Web interface and agree to download the new browser. It’s not being pushed down onto Windows users through the automatic update built into the OS, no doubt to placate the glacially-slow IT departments I mentioned here.

Internet Explorer 6.0, that infamous dinosaur from the dark ages of 2001, is still with us. And on occasion, I have hinted that this is the result of the biblically-slow pace of change in large corporate IT departments.

Well, now I have proof of this.

Using data from our good friends at StatCounter, this graph leaped from the screen and nearly exploded my mind.

The pattern in the data is clear, if you are paying attention, which I haven’t been. The dips that appear in the Internet Explorer stats occur on weekends.

That means that many of the Internet Explorer 6.0 users are only using it because it is forced on them by their IT departments.

Why?

Dear IT professionals of the world: Internet Explorer 6.0 is an exploit waiting to happen and a barrier to inventive Web development. Please upgrade. Thank you.