A thoroughly researched look at what our baseline criteria should be for making websites today:
The baseline for web development in 2022 is:
- low-spec Android devices in terms of performance,
- Safari from two years before in terms of Web Standards,
- and 4G in terms of networks.
The web in general is not answering those needs properly, especially in terms of performance where factors such as an over-dependence on JavaScript are hindering our sites’ performance.
It’s somewhat damning to Safari to see it as a baseline browser, but with Internet Explorer out of the picture, something has to be the lowest common denominator. In this case, Safari is quite literally the new IE.
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, yetstilldoesn’t work in IE 11—meaning the transpiler and polyfill bloat is being downloaded by 100% of their users, but benefiting none of them.
I know that the number one cause of jank and breakage is another developer having messed with the browser’s default way of doing things.
THIS!!! A thousand times, THIS!
You can’t create a complex modern web application like Google Mail without JavaScript and a SPA architecture. Google Mail is a webmail client and webmail clients existed some time before JavaScript became the language it is today or frameworks like Angular JS or Angular BS existed. However, youcannotcreate a complex modern web application like Google MailwithoutJavaScript. Google Mail itself offers a basic HTML version that works perfectly well without JavaScript of any form—let alone a 300KB bundle. But, still, youcannotcreate a complex modern web application like Google Mail without JavaScript. Just keep saying that. Keep repeating that line in perpetuity. Keep adding more and more JavaScript and calling it good.
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.
A great talk from Addy on just how damaging client-side JavaScript can be to the user experience…and what you can do about it.
Fear of a third-party planet.
Improving performance on The Session.
When it comes to web performance, there are technical issues and then there are human issues.
Embedding YouTube videos without sacrificing performance.
You don’t need Chrome to run Lighthouse.