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5G Will Definitely Make the Web Slower, Maybe
16.9.2019
Scott Jehl has written this wonderful piece about how 5G is on the horizon and how it could cause problems for users. But first, he starts by talking about the overwhelming positive news about it:
[...] as it matures 5G is predicted to improve network speeds dramatically. Carriers are predicting...
Fast Software
3.9.2019
There have been some wonderfully interconnected things about fast software lately.
We talk a lot of performance on the web. We can make things a little faster here and there. We see rises in success metrics with rises in performance. I find those type of charts very satisfying. But perhaps even...
Jeremy Keith – Building the Web
23.8.2019
I really enjoyed this interview with Jeremy Keith on the state of the web, how things have changed in recent years and why he’s a mix of optimistic and nervous for the future.
One thing that caught my attention during the interview more than anything was where Jeremy started discussing how folks...
Weekly Platform News: Improving UX on Slow Connections, a Tip for Writing Alt Text and a Polyfill for the HTML loading attribute
23.8.2019
In this week's roundup, how to determine a slow connection, what we should put into alt text for images, and a new polyfill for the HTML loading attribute, plus more.
Detecting users on slow connections
Algolia is using the Network Information API (see the API’s Chrome status page) to detect users...
Using rel=”preconnect” to establish network connections early and increase performance
20.8.2019
Milica Mihajlija:
Adding rel=preconnect to a <link> informs the browser that your page intends to establish a connection to another domain, and that you'd like the process to start as soon as possible. Resources will load more quickly because the setup process has already been completed...
Accessibility and web performance are not features, they’re the baseline
16.8.2019
This week I’ve been brooding about web performance and accessibility. It all began when Ethan Marcotte made a lot of great notes about the accessibility issues that are common with AMP:
In the recordings above, I’m trying to navigate through the AMP Story. And as I do, VoiceOver describes a page...
Weekly Platform News: HTML Loading Attribute, the Main ARIA Specifications, and Moving from iFrame to Shadow DOM
15.8.2019
In this week's roundup of platform news, Chrome introduces a new attribute for loading, accessibility specifications for web developers, and the BBC moves visualizations to the Shadow DOM.
Chrome ships the loading attribute
The HTML loading attribute for lazy-loading images and iframes is...
The Simplest Way to Load CSS Asynchronously
30.7.2019
Scott Jehl:
One of the most impactful things we can do to improve page performance and resilience is to load CSS in a way that does not delay page rendering. That’s because by default, browsers will load external CSS synchronously—halting all page rendering while the CSS is downloaded...
Get Peak WordPress Performance with Jetpack
18.7.2019
The irony of web performance is that the average page weight of a site continues to go up year after year, despite us being more aware of the problem and having more tools at our disposal to fight it than ever.
To paraphrase Seinfeld, "we know how to fight page weight issues; we just don't use...
How to Increase Your Page Size by 1,500% with webpack and Vue
19.6.2019
What we don’t have are enough articles showing you how to increase your page size. In fact, the only article I could find was this one from the Geek Squad which ended up being about making the font size bigger. This is a good start, but I think we can do better.
The post How to Increase Your Page...
Your first performance budget with Lighthouse
7.6.2019
Ire Aderinokun writes about a new way to set a performance budget (and stick to it) with Lighthouse, Google’s suite of tools that help developers see how performant and accessible their websites are:
Until recently, I also hadn't setup an official performance budget and enforced it. This isn’t...
Self-Host Your Static Assets
5.6.2019
Harry Roberts digs into why hosting assets on someone else’s servers (including CDNs) is not such a great idea if we want our websites to be lightning fast.
Harry writes:
One of the quickest wins—and one of the first things I recommend my clients do—to make websites faster can at first seem...
Weekly news: PWA Issue on iOS, Performance Culture, Anti-Tracking in Browsers
17.5.2019
In this week's news: resolving an issue when restarting progressive web apps in iOS, why The Telegraph now vets all scripts before they make it to their codebase, and Microsoft plans to add tracking prevention to the Edge browser.
The post Weekly news: PWA Issue on iOS, Performance Culture...
A Deep Dive into Native Lazy-Loading for Images and Frames
15.5.2019
Today's websites are packed with heavy media assets like images and videos. Images make up around 50% of an average website's traffic. Many of them, however, are never shown to a user because they're placed way below the fold.
What’s this thing about images being lazy, you ask? Lazy-loading...
Preload, prefetch and other link tags
24.4.2019
Ivan Akulov has collected a whole bunch of information and know-how on making things load a bit more quickly with preload and prefetch. That's great in and of itself, but he also points to something new to me – the as attribute:
<link rel="preload" href="/style.css" as="style"...
The Serif Tax
9.4.2019
Fonts are vector. Vector art with more points makes for larger files than vector art with fewer points. Custom fonts are downloaded. So, fonts with less points in their vector art are smaller. That's the theory anyway. Shall we see if there is any merit to it?
Open Sans (top) and Garamond...
Native Lazy Loading
9.4.2019
IntersectionObserver has made lazy loading a lot easier and more efficient than it used to be, but to do it really right you still gotta remove the src and such, which is cumbersome. It's definitely not as easy as:
<img src="celebration.jpg" loading="lazy" alt="..." />
Addy Osmani says...
Who has the fastest website in F1?
2.4.2019
Jake Archibald looks at the websites of Formula One race teams and rates their performance, carefully examining their images and digging into the waterfall of assets for each site:
Trying to use a site while on poor connectivity is massively frustrating, so anything sites can do to make it less...
Chrome Lite Pages
19.3.2019
The Chrome team announced a new feature called Lite Pages that can be activated by flipping on the Data Saver option on an Android device:
Chrome on Android’s Data Saver feature helps by automatically optimizing web pages to make them load faster. When users are facing network or data constraints...
Planning for Responsive Images
13.3.2019
The first time I made an image responsive, it was as simple as coding these four lines:
img {
max-width: 100%;
height auto; /* default */
}
Though that worked for me as a developer, it wasn’t the best for the audience. What happens if the the image in the src attribute is heavy? On high-end...