I was reading documentation on some bad practices when building a website. The MDN said this is very old and a bad practice but there are certain cases in which it is acceptable. Such as device detection.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Browser_detection_using_the_user_agent
If I were to build a mobile site and use UAS to detect the device to send a user to a less data intensive website; should I? I know there is fluid and responsive layout but most of those website include rules for a fix desktop width too. Are there any edge cases of devices that do no include mobile in their UAS?
I realise this is an old question but hopefully this isn't too late for you.
I would be very wary of using the UA alone to do anything for the reasons mentioned in the article you linked.
That said, there are plenty of situations where you can give a better user experience by using a device detection library like 51 Degrees and being aware of a few things.
In particular you mention less data intensive version of the website. There is something of a trend in places like India, where access to poor quality data connections is the norm, to use browsers like UC browser and Opera mini.
These work by going via a proxy and stripping out a lot of the heavier weight stuff in a web page. Needless to say, this can destroy your lovely ultra-modern, highly responsive interface.
51 Degrees will tell you if the browser is of this type with an attribute called IsDataMinimising and you can adapt accordingly, giving the user a better experience while also saving your bandwidth.
Full disclosure: I work for 51 Degrees.
Related
Problem Statement: Track an anonymous user to persist state (or lock out of a feature after a timer) on a device that has visited a website. This would need to work with cookies disabled, across browsers, including visits in incognito mode. This also would need to be device specific, 2 computers within a home network would have 2 independent timers.
I have seen this applied in a few scenarios with the most recent being the NBC Olympics with the stream timer. This has so many uses for "free no sign-up trials" while not giving away everything or limiting features in "try before you buy". Any ideas would be appreciated!
For this you would need to employ a cross-browser fingerprinting (or device fingerprinting) technique.
Related research
I recommend you read the paper (Cross-)Browser Fingerprinting via OS and Hardware Level Features by Yinzhi Cao, Song Li, and Erik Wijmans, which has an associated demo implementation of 2 of the techniques described therein.
Another good paper I found on web fingerprinting techniques which you should read if you're interested is Web-based Fingerprinting Techniques by Vítor Bernardo and Dulce Domingos.
The (in)security of device fingerprinting
The basis for device fingerprinting is collecting a variety of features from the client device which are indicative of the device/OS of the device, and are stable across browsers. Collect enough and the combination of these features of one user will very likely be unique among all users.
Most features useful for device fingerprinting can only be measured on the client (with JavaScript), and then need to be communicated back to the server, either raw or as a hash. Due to this, device fingerprinting as a security measure relies also on your ability to obfuscate the JS doing the fingerprinting and the corresponding network traffic communicating the fingerprint. If a user can figure out how the fingerprint is being collected and/or sent back to the server then they can spoof it to circumvent any protections you've put in place based on it.
Features that can be fingerprinted
Useful features to measure include (but are not limited to)
GPU rendering artefacts
anti-aliasing method
OpenGL driver varying interpolation
texture sampling
Installed fonts and writing systems
Text rendering minutiae
anti-aliasing
subpixel rendering
kerning, tracking and leading of particular fonts can indicate subtle variations due to different installed versions
In terms of low hanging fruit, there are Web APIs such as Navigator.hardwareConcurrency which expose details about the underlying hardware directly, however many browsers now disable or spoof this feature in order to avoid its use for fingerprinting.
The more features you collect the more solid your fingerprint, as long as they don't vary across browsers on the same device.
Conclusion
Ultimately, there is no be-all and end-all to device fingerprinting since it's a very complex topic with many potential approaches and a constant arms race with browser vendors trying to prevent fingerprinting techniques and developers trying to find new ones.
If you're looking for an out-of-box solution, there are currently a small handlful of open source and commercial browser and user fingerprinting services out there such as FingerprintJS (which is both). Though it does seem that many device fingerprinting solutions are not sold as standalone functionality but instead as a part of a fraud prevention system (such as SEON) or similar.
(The following is just opinion)
Overall it's my view that device fingerprinting is an iffy solution to locking out features, and a better solution is to make the signup process for an account as quick and easy as possible (though perhaps the free account could be used in combination with device or browser fingerprinting to temper abuse of the free trial system)
I'm planning on doing an interactive AR application that will use a laser sensor (for distances), GPS technology to get a location, and then use compass/gyroscope for tracking 6DOF viewfinder
movements. The user can choose from a number of ready-made 3D-models, and should be able to place them by selecting the desired location on the screen.
My target platform will be a 8"-handheld-device, running on windows8.
Any hints what would be the best AR-SDK or 3D-viewer to work with?
thanks in advance!
There are quite a few 3D viewers that are working in the browsers. But most recently and most notably: va3C viewer
It is webgl based app and doesnt require a server, so if your handheld device supports webgl, then you are good to go, however, whether it works on IE or not is questionable ;).
Although based on my experience and your usecase, I believe client side JS libraries do not provide enough access to the device's hardware. So you might have to serve the information like GPS, Gyroscope, from the server side, then gather this on the client using something like socket.io and then mash it up alongside the geometry.
I am trying to do something similar, although havent quite done it yet. Will keep you posted.
Another approach I am exploring is X3DOM, which gives the ability to write 3D data like XML alongside HTML, which is quite declarative and simple to pickup. X3DOM derives from X3D.
Tell me if you need more info.
Also, worth exploring for its motion abilities, is Robot Studio, which is a desktop app with SDK.
I am in the process of speeding the perceived load time of a website specifically aimed at the mobile platforms (iPhone primarily, Android secondarily, who cares about the rest...) I have already tried several general techniques for speeding load times for normal websites but I was wondering if anyone had specific pointers for the mobile web performance.
I am already bundling scripts, spriting images, lazy loading as much as possible, putting fixed sizes on things, linking css in the head etc. I want insights specifically for mobile.
For example I have heard that the iPhone will only cache files less than 25k so sometimes splitting a script/file into 25k chunks may give an overall boost since now they can be cached even though it caused additional connections to be made. Any other insights like this would be much appreciated.
Also, does anyone know of a good tool to test the load times in iphone?)
Ok, here's some measuring tools for you...
Steve Souders' mobile bookmarklet - http://stevesouders.com/mobileperf/mobileperfbkm.php (a bit limited on he timing front but has lots of interesting other features)
Stoyan Stefanov's iOS app for exploring page load - http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2011/i-see-http/ (very new, so not sure about it's limitations)
3P Mobile have their own iOS browser in beta that produces waterfalls - Android version was very good.
As far as optimisation goes...
The mobile cache may be small but you still have access to localstorage i.e. include CSS/js inline and extract and save to local storage - Bing mobile does this.
DataURIs are another way of reducing requests but of course the user loses the option to turn off images
Ensure you make good use of keep-alive and connection pipelining - splitting between multiple hostnames can get in the way of these so be careful if you do this.
Caching varies wildly between different phones an OS versions saw an article on it recently will see if I can find it again.
Yahoo! has a nice page about how to squeeze the most performance out of your site.
They also have a Firefox plugin (YSlow) that automatically checks whether your site follows them and suggest improvements. That plugin covers also performance problems that may affect mobile browsers.
I'd like to answer your call for a mobile web site profiling tool - WebDevTools:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.voltcode.webdevtools
disclaimer - I am connected to the company that released this software
While not being targeted for iphones, you could definitely test on various android models and get the load times.
From my experience, IPhone 4+ will load pages the same or better than HTC Desire and similar - both in general speed, but also in HTTP concurrency, etc.
Check out this testing solution:
Tutorial: Does Your Website Load in 3 Seconds?
http://blog.testobject.com/2013/09/does-your-website-load-in-3-seconds.html
I have been following the usage of JavaScript for the past few years, and with the release of extremely fast scripting engines (V8, SquirrelFish Extrene, TraceMonkey, etc.) the possibilities of JavaScript have increased dramatically. However, the usage share of Internet Explorer coupled with it's total lack of support for recent standards makes me want to drop a bomb on Microsoft's HQ, as it creates a huge amount of problems for any website.
The game will need to be pretty dynamic client-side, with animations and other eye-candy things, but not a full-blown game like those that run directly in the OS using DirectX or OpenGL. However, this might be a little stretch for JavaScript and will certainly feel extremely slow in Internet Explorer (given that the current IE engine can be hundreds of times slower than SFX; gotta see what IE9 will bring), would it be better to just do the whole thing in Flash? I know this means requiring the plug-in AND I have no experience whatsoever with Flash (other than browsing YouTube :P). It also means I can't just output directly from PHP, I would have to use XML or some other format to pass data to it (JSON is directly integrated in JS and PHP can deal with it easily).
Another idea would be to provide an alternative interface just for IE, though I don't know how (ActiveX maybe? or with Flash, then why not just provide it to all browsers) or totally not supporting it and requiring the use of other browsers, although this is plain stupid from a business perspective.
So here am I, wondering what approach to take and thus asking for your advice. How should I build the client-side? AJAX in all browsers, Flash in all browsers or a mix (AJAX for "modern" browsers and something else for the "grandpa": IE).
I recommend a plug-in platform (Flash, Silverlight, or Java) over AJAX. Having a clean layer of abstraction between your game and the client's browser is a big advantage. In any non-trivial AJAX game look forward to endless corner-cases where browsers differ in performance or implementation.
Personally, I think Flash is easy to learn if you are coming from AJAX experience. Flash is currently the most widely installed and proven plug-in for browser games. However, Silverlight and Java are both building momentum. Also, the Unity engine has become a popular choice for commercial browser games.
I think you shouldn't leave Java out of the equation. It's a powerful, fast language, and with Java applets, you can do almost anything. If you want hardware-accelerated graphics via OpenGL, JOGL can do it, even in an applet.
On the other hand, it might not be right for you. But at this early stage, I think you should evaluate all of your options, and since you have no experience with Flash but sound like you've got a bit of programming experience, you might feel more at-home with Java.
I believe the current answer is Flash game.
Alternatives:
Java Applet: getting less and less common those days and it is not commonly installed as a plugin on many computers.
SilverLight: too new and might vary and change in time. not commonly installed on many computers and it's Microsoft (whom tends to change technology every 2 years ...)
JavaScript / AJAX: Still a new kid on the block, it's on the rise it is true with many nice features, but still lack of good cross browser for IE even IE8, can not play sounds internally, still slower than the others, and you don't know where will it evolves.
Eventually probably the best solution for now is Flash development:
Cross platform. Works fast. Long time already alive and have a lot of support.
I hope this answer will change in the next year. Happy Peasach.
Check out Jmonkey. The "plugin" loads if you have Java on your machine. Once it's cached, the next time the visitor goes to the page, it your game loads very quick. Check out their website for demos and see what I mean: http://www.jmonkeyengine.com/
Oh, I forgot to say, it's a 3D scenegraph Java engine. I just tried it again, and it loaded in linux. Looks they've put in some good work.
Don't do it with javascript in the browser. And Flash really can be a pain just because it's closed source and you don't know if you've made a mistake or found a bug - speaking from experience. I'd never want to make another Flash game again.
How about using RaphaelJs , it is a Javascript library that make dinamyc images using SVG, and for IE, it try to make those images using the IE alternative: VML. Im using it on my own WebGame, but i dont really make complex graphics in it. The most complex thing done on RapahelJs was a heath map (20 * 20 tiles ) with a dinamyc opacity slider. An it work with jquery without any problem or configuration!
We provide a web application with a frontend completely developed in Adobe Flash. When we chose Flash 6 years ago, we did so for its large number of features for user interaction, like dragging stuff, opening and closing menus, tree navigation elements, popup dialogs etc.
Today it's obvious that AJAX/JS offers roughly the same possibilities and because of the number of frameworks that are readily available, it's very feasible to implement them.
Is there a technical reason one should choose either technology over the other? By "technical", I mean performance, security, portability/compatibility and the like. I don't mean aspects such as the very non-programmer way development is done in Flash or whether it makes sense to switch an app from one to the other.
As I just explained in another question, it seems to me that JS is way ahead in terms of market share and I'm wondering whether we are missing some important point if we stick to Flash.
In addition to what others have said, Flash is constrained in the "rectangle" and cannot be added to a normal html page in an un-obtrusive manner.
#Gulzar I think when more browsers will support the video tag like mozilla 3.1 does we'll see even more adoption of ajax/js over flash.
Adobe Actionscript is a statically typed language, Javascript is dynamically typed. Depending on your point of view, this may be a good thing or a bad thing.
With Javascript/HTML/CSS you're going to be heading into cross-browser compatibility hell, especially if you want to support older browsers. This can be mitigated by the libraries that are available, but it's still a big headache. With Flash, you write the code once and it just works in all browsers.
Even with the libraries available, Flash user controls are simply more advanced than anything you can find in the world of Javascript/HTML. In Javascript, you are not going to find anything that comes close to the simplicity and power of a databound user control that Flash provides.
I don't see how Javascript has more of a "market share" than Flash. Pretty much anyone with a web browser has a Flash plugin installed. I'd be curious to know how many people disable Javascript but have a Flash plugin.
Also keep in mind that you're going to be in for a huge learning curve and lots of development time if you decide to switch your technology base so you'd really better have a good business reason to do it.
This decision also has a lot to do with what your application does and who your install base is.
Edit: I see people have mentioned that the iPhone doesn't have Flash support. I would expect this to change with the install base of the iPhone - Adobe would be crazy not to support it.
Correctly designed AJAX apps are more googleable than Flash
Correctly designed AJAX apps are more easily deep linkable than Flash
AJAX doesn't require a plugin (Flash is pretty ubiquitous, so it's not really a big deal)*
AJAX isn't controlled by a single company the way Flash is
Edited to add:
* Except for the iPhone, as Abdu points out.
JS and Flash both have great presence on the web with overlapping capabilities. One area JS is still lacking is in rendering video.
Flash, used well, allows easy localization and internationalization.
Furthermore, it is much easier to use Flash in an accessible manner; you can feed screen readers the right text, instead of having them iterate over all of the possible form elements.
I think Flash should be limited to online games, videos and animation. Otherwise use html and Ajax. It's a web standard and supported by almost all devices.
AFAIK, the iPhone doesn't support Flash. That's a fast growing segment you're blocking out already. Keep it simple and efficient.
Although flash is pretty ubiquitous on desktop browsers, mobile support is very limited (flash lite? yeah, right). I get really frustrated looking up a restaurant on my phone only to find the entire site is flash based and I can't even get a phone number or address!
One benefit of Flash is that it has a few facilities to help do cross domain type operations safely, which can be helpful. Flash also has (limited) support for some hardware, which is not possible with Javascript.
Personally, I'd try to use as much Ajax as possible before turning to something like Flash. From the UI perspective, it is better in that the controls and basic authoring is a little more developed. The Sound Manager project is a good example of effectively using a small amount of Flash while keeping the remainder in Javascript.
I suspect one of the reasons javascript is becoming more popular is that it's more easy to retrofit into an existing application.
As I can't accept two answers, I'm going to merge Christ Upchurch's and 17 of 26's answers in my own post. I think, these two together pretty much sum up what I wanted to know. Thanks guys!
If you're dealing a lot with polygons, then Flash is still easier to program and debug. With AJAX there are a lot of libraries to handle polygons, but the more libraries your app uses, the slower it gets.