Is my host fast yet?

Web bloat

Pages are often designed so that they’re hard or impossible to read if some dependency fails to load. On a slow connection, it’s quite common for at least one depedency to fail.

Fire up Reader Mode and read this excellent article informed by data from using a typically slow connection in rural USA today. Two findings are:

1. A large fraction of the web is unusable on a bad connection. Even on a good (0% packetloss, no ping spike) dialup connection, some sites won’t load.
2. Some sites will use a lot of data!

Time to First Byte: What It Is and Why It Matters by Harry Roberts

Harry takes a deep dive into the performance metric of “time to first byte”, or TTFB if you using initialisms that take as long to say as the thing they’re abbreviating.

This makes a great companion piece to Drew’s article on server timing headers.

The “Developer Experience” Bait-and-Switch | Infrequently Noted

JavaScript is the web’s CO2. We need some of it, but too much puts the entire ecosystem at risk. Those who emit the most are furthest from suffering the consequences — until the ecosystem collapses. The web will not succeed in the markets and form-factors where computing is headed unless we get JS emissions under control.

Damn, that’s a fine opening! And the rest of this post by Alex is pretty darn great too. He’s absolutely right in calling out the fetishisation of developer experience at the expense of user needs:

The swap is executed by implying that by making things better for developers, users will eventually benefit equivalently. The unstated agreement is that developers share all of the same goals with the same intensity as end users and even managers. This is not true.

I have a feeling that this will be a very bitter pill for many developers to swallow:

If one views the web as a way to address a fixed market of existing, wealthy web users, then it’s reasonable to bias towards richness and lower production costs. If, on the other hand, our primary challenge is in growing the web along with the growth of computing overall, the ability to reasonably access content bumps up in priority. If you believe the web’s future to be at risk due to the unusability of most web experiences for most users, then discussion of developer comfort that isn’t tied to demonstrable gains for marginalized users is at best misguided.

Oh,captain, my captain!

Tools that cost the poorest users to pay wealthy developers are bunk.

CrUX.RUN

This is so useful! Get instant results from Google’s Chrome User Experience Report without having to wait (or pay) for BigQuery.

Here’s an example of my site’s metrics over the last few months, complete with nice charts.