I wasted a day on CSS selector performance to make a website load 2ms faster | Trys Mudford
Picture me holding Trys back and telling him, “Leave it alone, mate, it’s not worth it!”
Harry divides his web performance work into three categories:
I feel like a lot of businesses are still unsure where to even start when it comes to performance monitoring, and as such, they never do. By demystifying it and breaking it down into three clear categories, each with their own distinct time, place, and purpose, it immediately takes a lot of the effort away from them: rather than worrying what their strategy should be, they now simply need to ask ‘Do we have one?’
Picture me holding Trys back and telling him, “Leave it alone, mate, it’s not worth it!”
This is grim:
If you look at the data below on how popular websites today are actually transpiling and deploying their code to production, it turns out that most sites on the internet ship code that is transpiled to ES5, yet still doesn’t work in IE 11—meaning the transpiler and polyfill bloat is being downloaded by 100% of their users, but benefiting none of them.
One dev team made the shift from React’s “overwhelming VDOM” to modern DOM APIs. They immediately saw speed and interaction improvements.
Yay! But:
…finding developers who know vanilla JavaScript and not just the frameworks was an “unexpected difficulty.”
Boo!
Also, if you have a similar story to tell about going cold turkey on React, you should share it with Richard:
If you or your company has also transitioned away from React and into a more web-native, HTML-first approach, please tag me on Mastodon or Threads. We’d love to share further case studies of these modern, dare I say post-React, approaches.
What Trys describes here mirrors my experience too—it really is worth occasionally taking a little time to catch the low-hanging fruit of your site’s web performance (and accessibility):
I’ve shaved nearly half a megabyte off the page size and improved the accessibility along the way. Not bad for an evening of tinkering.
This really is a disgusting exlusionary state of affairs.
I hate to be judgy, but I honestly wonder how the people behind some of these decisions can call themselves web developers.
Browser are user agents, not developer agents.
A performance boost in Chrome.
A small-scale conspiracy theory from the innards of Google.
Improving performance with containment.
Improving performance on The Session.