A rather geeky/technical weblog, est. 2001, by Bramus
Tim Kaldec has measured the JavaScript bytes and the JavaScript CPU time for a bunch of sites. Right now, if you’re using a framework to build your site, you’re making a trade-off in terms of initial performance—even in the best of scenarios. Some trade-off may be acceptable in the right situations, but it’s important that …
TIL: When working with namespaced files in PHP it’s a huge performance win when using fully-qualified function calls. ~ If you’re calling is_null in your code, PHP will first check for the function’s existence in the current namespace. If not found there, it will look for the function in the global namespace. This extra check …
Lighthouse 6 is the first major release of the popular auditing tool since May 2019, introducing critical changes that will impact everyone relying on the scoring. This article explains the changes in the upcoming Lighthouse 6.0.0 and its scoring algorithm. Lighthouse changes how Performance Score is calculated →
This post describes some techniques to make front-end apps load faster and provide a good user experience. We’ll look at the overall architecture of the front-end. How can you load essential resources first, and maximize the probability that the resources are already in the cache? Performant front-end architecture →
Tim Kaldec takes a look at our modern workflow – in which lots of tools have removed friction – and makes the case to add some “healthy friction”: A lot of modern workflow improvements have been around removing friction. We want to make it easier to deploy rapidly. Tools like npm make it very easy …
Interesting approach by Clearleft on how they make performance clear to their clients. Instead of showing waterfall charts to their clients, they show them videos: Download the video of your client’s site loading. Then repeat the test with the URL of a competitor. Now take those videos and play them side by side. This is …
Google Fonts is great, but it also has a downside: it affects your page’s waterfall (during which some render-blocking may occur, as it involves CSS) as explained by Barry Pollard: The problem is that your website (say www.example.com) loads the stylesheet from fonts.googleapis.com, which returns some CSS made up of font-face declarations. This means you …
Talk by Alex Holachek, as brought forward at React Conf 2019: As the technology to create Progressive Web Apps continues to mature, React developers have the opportunity to write web apps that in some cases can rival native ones in terms of speed and convenience. However, one barrier to feature parity is the difficulty of …
Continue reading “Building mobile-first web animations in React”
Philip Walton on how to progressively enhance your site by leveraging Service Workers to fetch partial HTML content and replace it in the DOM: On this site, after a user visits once and the service worker is installed, that user will never request a full HTML page again. Instead the service worker will intercept requests …
Continue reading “Smaller HTML Payloads with Service Workers”
Harry Roberts on how to set a Performance Budgets if you really don’t have a clue where to start: Time and again I hear clients discussing their performance budgets in terms of goals: “We’re aiming toward a budget of 250KB uncompressed JavaScript; we hope to be interactive in 2.75s”. While it’s absolutely vital that these …
Continue reading “Performance Budgets for those who don’t know where to start”