We've always put a heavy emphasis on performance at Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange. Not just because we're performance wonks (guilty!), but because we think speed is a competitive advantage. There's plenty of experimental data proving that the slower your website loads and displays, the less people will use it.[Google found that] the page with 10 results took 0.4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took 0.9 seconds. Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.In A/B tests, [Amazon] tried delaying the page in increments of 100 mill...

With the release of the iPad, HTML5 technology has recently come into the spotlight.  The format that will likely kill Adobe’s Flash is a lot of fun to use, but we’ve  not seen much of it yet.The good news is that you don’t have to wait until the iPad is in your hands to see what HTML5 can do.  If you have a compatible browser, there are already a wealth of sites that show off the capabilities.First, make sure that you have a browser that is capable of rendering HTML5 content. At the moment, Google’s Chrome is king in this department.  So for the...