I’ve being using preload with clients over the last few years but I have never been completely satisfied with the results. I’ve also seen some things I hadn’t quite expected in page load waterfalls so decided to dig deeper.
Excellent work digging deeper into preload by Mr. Davies.
Ten years ago the network was the main bottleneck. Today, the main bottleneck is JavaScript.
A very approachable explanation from Sarah about what Hooks are and the problems they solve for Vue.
Ooo…this is smart. Ire explains why you should use the :lang pseudo-class instead of the [lang=''] attribute selector.
Fantastic post from Marcy about the consequences of the way we build, and how we can improve.
Pat has been doing some intense research around HTTP/2 prioritization which lead to this magnificent post discussing how each browser handles priorities (not well, for the most part) and also provides a handy test page for checking how CDN’s and servers are doing.
Andy has already taken that page and started tracking how CDN’s are doing (again, not well for most of them).
While ever you build under the assumption that things will always work smoothly, you’re leaving yourself completely ill-equipped to handle the scenario that they don’t.
I rather like Scott’s term for what happens when you use client-side JavaScript for A/B testing.
This pattern leads to such a unique effect on page load that at last week’s Perf.Now() Conference, I coined a new somewhat tongue-in-cheek performance metric called “Second Meaningful Content,” which occurs long after the handy First Meaningful Content (or Paint) metric, which would otherwise mark the time at which a page starts to appear usable.
Brucey-kins on how semantic markup like <strong> and <em> is interpreted by screenreaders.
Lovely performance “postmortem” from Eli Fitch about how MapBox got their first-meaningful-paint to drop from 4.7s to 1.9 seconds.
Some good insights into technical optimizations, but as always, the cultural aspects are the most difficult–and the most important.
Nurturing cultural awareness and enthusiasm for building fast, snappy, responsive, tactile products is arguably the most effective performance improvement you can make, but can be the most challenging, and requires the most ongoing attention.