Writing

Alex posted a follow-up to a prior post on avoiding scrollbar jumping when using content-visibility.

It's clever stuff—the combination of ResizeObservers and IntersectionObservers helping to avoid the shifting around that would occur otherwise.

This doesn't do much though to eliminate the reservations I have about content-visibility. In theory, it's a great addition, but the fact that it seems to need so much supporting scaffolding to make it usable for a relatively simple use-case makes me feel like it may be missing a few other pieces of native plumbing before it's really ready for primetime.

Sad, but true words:

For a few months, those who will buy M1 machines will enjoy great responsiveness and blazing start-up time. Some once bloated applications will again behave like most tools should. But soon these metrics will start to degrade. Responsiveness and start-up time will progressively revert to what they used to be and old "non-M1" machines will become even slower than they used to.

For every cycle a hardware engineer saves, a software engineer will add two instructions.

Imagine that situation. You buy a computer. It comes with one web browser pre-installed. You can’t install a different web browser on your computer.

You wouldn’t stand for it! I mean, Microsoft got fined for anti-competitive behaviour when they pre-bundled their web browser with Windows back in the 90s. You could still install other browsers, but just the act of pre-bundling was seen as an abuse of power. Imagine if Windows never allowed you to install Netscape Navigator?

And yet that’s exactly the situation in 2020.

You buy a computing device from Apple. It might be a Macbook. It might be an iPad. It might be an iPhone. But you can only install your choice of web browser on one of those devices.

Super clever stuff from Andy about how he's using Cloudflare Workers and WebPageTest to test performance optimizations. I've done a little of this, but there's a bunch here I haven't played with. Going to have to change that for sure!

I've been super keen on getting some sort of way to measure when the accessibility tree is ready ever since first chatting about it with Marcy Sutton 5 years ago or so. Scott has a great post here about why it's important. He's also filed issues on WebPageTest and Lighthouse to get something added. Hopefully we'll see something soon!

The folks at Chrome, talking about the business impact of hitting their Core Web Vitals thresholds:

We analyzed millions of page impressions to understand how these metrics and thresholds affect users. We found that when a site meets the above thresholds, users are 24% less likely to abandon page loads (by leaving the page before it finishes loading).

We also looked specifically at news and shopping sites, sites whose businesses depend on traffic and task completion, and found similar numbers: 22% less abandonment for news sites and 24% less abandonment for shopping sites.

We recognize, of course, that “Always accessible” is not a novel approach. Here in California accessibility is a guiding principle in the state’s digital strategy. And our work is just one part of the state’s larger commitment to ensuring that information and services are accessible.

What is novel is how our team is broadening the definition of accessibility for state government to include performance as a core component. Performance as accessibility.

Our goal is to make COVID19.CA.gov fast and easy to use on any kind of hardware or with any level of bandwidth.

Super interesting insight into how the folks over at Google came up with their new Core Web Vitals—including everything from how they figured out what "good" or "poor" looked like, how they chose which percentiles to look at, and more.

Netflix talks about the security and performance implications of rolling out TLS 1.3. Seeing a 8.2% improvement in play delay at the 95% percentile—not too shabby!

Detailed post about how v8 used Pointer Compression to reduce heap size by up to 43%, resulting in less CPU usage and less time on garbage collection.

It's...dense. I'm going to likely have to re-read this several times to really understand all the details. Lots of interesting bits here.

Some staggering stats from Fastly showing how traffic and download speed have changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Performance has quite literally never been more important.

Visits to news sites went up as much as 60%. And people are spending more time playing online games.

A similar pattern is emerging in the U.S. Cloudflare says Internet traffic jumped 20% on Friday, after President Trump declared the pandemic a national emergency. In hard-hit Seattle, Internet use was up 40% last week compared to January.