Web Performance
Next.js Is Infuriating
WebPerf PSA: Abstraction layers aren’t always good.
Links, Resources, and Humans of Note
Catching up on a backlog of RSS posts. If you missed Alex’s big list of links last month, there’s a ton of good stuff to bookmark here!
Making Sense of the Performance Extensibility API
If you have a JS library that might impact performance spend the time to read and implement this!
MSEdgeExplainers/AnimationSmoothness/explainer.md at main · MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers · GitHub
Another performance area we’re looking at is giving devs the ability to measure smoothness of animations. Still early thinking and a lot of different directions - would love to hear if anyone has use-cases we should consider!
aluhrs13/JankExt
I've been doing a bit of animation benchmarking and perf work, so I pulled together a quick extension to inject main thread tasks onto a page to help simulate jank.
Stretching Google's prefetching
Huh. I know the basics of speculation rules, but this is an interesting take. Almost wonder if it’s a bug?
React Reconciliation: The Hidden Engine Behind Your Components
Minimal CSS-only blurry image placeholders
Improving rendering performance with CSS content-visibility
Yet another wonderful deep dive into effective web perf analysis from Nolan.
How does it work?
Must-know technology for web performance IMO.
How to make your web page faster before it even loads
A bit of a sales pitch for Sentry, but a good FCP article nonetheless.
Layers and Compositing
Web app memory is something I’ve been thinking about lately, and this is another masterpiece from Joe Liccini.
Cache Grab: How Much Are You Leaving on the Table?
Beautiful overview of everything caching on the web.
How to Read a RUM Histogram
SpeedCurve’s web performance documentation is really great for people new to the space.
Best Practices for Creating a Culture of Web Performance
Culture is one of the hardest problems in web performance, and this has some excellent tips for getting started.
How we sped up Notion in the browser with WASM SQLite
WASM SQLite is interesting in theory, but hadn’t seen anything at this scale. Interesting to see they have issues with cross-origin isolation.
CPUpro
A tool that offers a different view into DevTools traces than Edge/Chrome DevTools. A few interesting approaches like the list of functions that seem super helpful for starting investigations.
A Complete Guide to Performance Budgets
A really basic but thorough intro to some of standard web performance metrics, and more importantly a dive into navigating some of the politics of setting budgets and goals.
Web Performance Regression Detection (Part 2 of 3)
I love seeing how other companies track and resolve performance issues. Pinterest has a really detailed write-up here.
Latency numbers every frontend developer should know
Handy list of some basic performance-related numbers like latency, parsing, etc. for anyone thinking about the performance of their APIs or web apps.