Speed up your site using prefetching by Jon Fox
More details on DNS prefetching, page prefetching and, controversial, page pre-rendering.
Link archive: January 21st, 2013
Front-end performance for web designers and front-end developers by Harry Roberts
A really good introduction to front-end performance techniques. Most of this was already on my radar, but I still picked up a handy tip or two (particularly about DNS prefetching).
At this stage it should go without saying that you should be keeping up with this kind of thing: performance is really, really, really important.
The impending crisis that is Windows XP and IE 8 by Troy Hunt
A good explanation of the litany of woes that comes from Internet Explorer 8 being the highest that users of Windows XP can upgrade to. It’s a particularly woeful situation if you are a web developer attempting to provide parity. But there is hope on the horizon:
2013 will see the culmination of all these issues; support for IE 8 will drop of rapidly, users of XP will find an increasingly broken web, the cost of building software in XP organisations will increase.