SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Jun 13, 2013) - CloudFlare, the web performance and security company, today announced Mirage 2.0, a new feature that dramatically increases mobile performance through adaptive image virtualization. With one click, Mirage 2.0 will optimize every image on a website, decreasing the time to interactivity of the average website by as much as 90 percent.
"As mobile becomes a larger and larger percentage of the requests to every website, maximizing the performance for mobile users is critical to staying relevant online," said Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare. "We spent six months designing Mirage 2.0 to solve the biggest problems that make the web slow on mobile phones and tablets, and then another six months making it one-click simple and radically affordable so every website can be fast on every device."
Early customers have raved about the results. "As one of the largest image sharing sites in the world, speed has always been really important to us," explained Alan Schaaf, founder and CEO of Imgur. "We've invested a lot of time into getting images to load as fast as possible over mobile networks, especially since we've been developing our mobile app, and we've seen great improvements with Mirage 2.0. We're really happy that CloudFlare continues to launch innovative products to ensure pages on Imgur.com load as fast as possible."
Speeding Up the Mobile Web
Based on projections from StatCounter Global Stats data, global traffic from mobile devices will account for nearly a quarter of all web traffic by the end of 2015. Sites that aren't fast on mobile risk being left behind. With Mirage 2.0, CloudFlare has revolutionized the way the websites load on mobile devices, making websites mobile-optimized with one click.
Mobile devices present a number of challenges to delivering fast web performance. Because they rely on radio networks, the bandwidth to a mobile phone or tablet is often slow. However, the problem isn't limited to just slow bandwidth. Mobile connections are much more likely to experience "loss," meaning every new request increases the chances that a page load will fail. Mirage 2.0 solves both these problems with three core features: the learning loader, virtualized images, and minimized requests.
Learning Loader
Mirage 2.0 is optimized to adjust based on browser and network connectivity and detect the different download speeds of cellular networks from LTE to 3G to Edge and optimize for each connection speed appropriately. The learning loader optimally loads the resources needed to make a page interactive while deferring the loading of heavy resources that are non-critical but potentially block page loading. Mirage 2.0 uses performance data from more than half a trillion monthly requests across the CloudFlare network to continuously get smarter about mobile performance for any device on any network.
Virtualized Images
Mirage 2.0's Virtualized Image Loader immediately loads virtualized images that allow the browser to begin rendering the page while the full-sized images are downloaded. Images make up 75 percent of the bandwidth required to render the average web page, which means they make up one of the biggest bottlenecks on the mobile web. Mirage 2.0's virtualized images are typically only 1 percent the size of full-resolution images but contain the meta data required for a browser to render the full page. By downloading virtualized images first, the browser becomes interactive almost immediately and Mirage 2.0's Virtualized Image Loader then fills in the page with full-resolution images as there is available bandwidth.
Minimized Requests
Rather than initiating a new request for each image, Mirage 2.0 is able to stream all the images from CloudFlare's network with a single request. This means that even a page with hundreds of images can begin rendering in the browser with as few as two requests. Even users on slow mobile connections can begin interacting with the page immediately, without having to wait for all the full-resolution images to load.
The Mirage 2.0 beta is open today for CloudFlare customers on the company's PRO tier of service ($20/month) or better. CloudFlare offers plans starting at free and never charges for bandwidth or usage. For more information on how to sign up, visit cloudflare.com.
CloudFlare, Inc. (www.cloudflare.com / @cloudflare) makes sites twice as fast, protects them from attacks, ensures they are always online, and makes it simple to add web apps with a single click. CloudFlare supercharges websites regardless of size or platform with no need to add hardware, install software, or change a line of code. The CloudFlare community gets stronger as it grows; every new site makes the network smarter. Thanks to our awesome sauce technology, every month more than a billion people experience a faster, safer, better Internet. CloudFlare was recognized by the World Economic Forum as a Technology Pioneer, named the Most Innovative Network & Internet Technology Company of the Year for 2011 and 2012 by the Wall Street Journal, and ranked among the world's 50 most innovative companies of 2012 by Fast Company. CloudFlare is based in San Francisco, California, USA.
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