Tags: ban

“Never-Slow Mode” (a.k.a. “Slightly-Fast Mode”) Explained

I would very much like this to become a reality.

Never-Slow Mode (“NSM”) is a mode that sites can opt-into via HTTP header. For these sites, the browser imposes per-interaction resource limits, giving users a better user experience, potentially at the cost of extra developer work. We believe users are happier and more engaged on fast sites, and NSM attempts to make it easier for sites to guarantee speed to users. In addition to user experience benefits, sites might want to opt in because browsers could providing UI to users to indicate they are in “fast mode” (a TLS lock icon but for speed).

Mobile E-Commerce UX: Deemphasize ‘Install App’ Ads or Avoid Them Entirely

The test results are in:

During our testing “Install App” banners were the direct and sole cause of several abandonments of some of the world’s largest e-commerce websites.

Read on for details…

Native lazy-loading for the web  |  web.dev

The title is somewhat misleading—currently it’s about native lazy-loading for Chrome, which is not (yet) the web.

I’ve just been adding loading="lazy" to most of the iframes and many of the images on adactio.com, and it’s working a treat …in Chrome.

Web Bloat Score Calculator

Page web bloat score (WebBS for short) is calculated as follows:

WebBS = TotalPageSize / PageImageSize

Yes, this is a tongue-in-cheek somewhat arbitrary measurement, but it’s well worth reading through the rationale for it.

How can the image of a page be smaller than the page itself?

Atlas of Urban Expansion

Oodles and oodles of data on cities, including gorgeous animations of urban growth over time.

AddyOsmani.com - Native image lazy-loading for the web!

The loading attribute for images and iframes is coming to Chrome. The best part:

You can also use loading as a progressive enhancement. Browsers that support the attribute can get the new lazy-loading behavior with loading=lazy and those that don’t will still have images load.

Performance Budgets That Stick - TimKadlec.com

I like Tim’s definition here:

A performance budget is a clearly defined limit on one or more performance metrics that the team agrees not to exceed, and that is used to guide design and development.

And I agree about the four attributes required for a performance budget to succeed. It must be:

1. Concrete
2. Meaningful
3. Integrated
4. Enforceable

The point is not to let the performance budget try to stand on its own, somewhere hidden in company documentation collecting dust. You need to be proactive about making the budget become a part of your everyday work.

Minimal Google Analytics Snippet | Minimal Analytics

If you really, really have to add Google Analytics to a sites, here’s a way to do it in a more performant way, without the odious Google Tag Manager.

Blockchain and Trust - Schneier on Security

Honestly, cryptocurrencies are useless. They’re only used by speculators looking for quick riches, people who don’t like government-backed currencies, and criminals who want a black-market way to exchange money.

Bruce Schneier on the blockchain:

What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You need to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure.

Limiting JavaScript? - TimKadlec.com

Following on from that proposal for a browser feature that I linked to yesterday, Tim thinks through all the permutations and possibilities of user agents allowing users to throttle resources:

If a limit does get enforced (it’s important to remember this is still a big if right now), as long as it’s handled with care I can see it being an excellent thing for the web that prioritizes users, while still giving developers the ability to take control of the situation themselves.

The Ethics of Performance - TimKadlec.com

When you stop to consider all the implications of poor performance, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that poor performance is an ethical issue.

Performance Calendar » All about prefetching

A good roundup of techniques for responsible prefetching from Katie Hempenius.

Barely Maps

Minimalist cartography.

Folding Beijing - Uncanny Magazine

The terrific Hugo-winning short story about inequality, urban planning, and automation, written by Hao Jinfang and translated by Ken Liu (who translated The Three Body Problem series).

Hao Jinfang also wrote this essay about the story:

I’ve been troubled by inequality for a long time. When I majored in physics as an undergraduate, I once stared at the distribution curve for American household income that showed profound inequality, and tried to fit the data against black-body distribution or Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. I wanted to know how such a curve came about, and whether it implied some kind of universality: something as natural as particle energy distribution functions, so natural it led to despair.

The Three Types of Performance Testing – CSS Wizardry

Harry divides his web performance work into three categories:

1. Proactive
2. Reactive
3. Passive

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?’

AddyOsmani.com - Start Performance Budgeting

Great ideas from Addy on where to start with creating a performance budget that can act as a red line you don’t want to cross.

If it’s worth getting fast, it’s worth staying fast.

The Hurricane Web | Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer

When a storm comes, some of the big news sites like CNN and NPR strip down to a zippy performant text-only version that delivers the content without the bells and whistles.

I’d argue though that in some aspects, they are actually better than the original.

The numbers:

The “full” NPR site in comparison takes ~114 requests and weighs close to 3MB on average. Time to first paint is around 20 seconds on slow connections. It includes ads, analytics, tracking scripts and social media widgets.

Meanwhile, the actual news content is roughly the same.

I quite like the idea of storm-driven development.

…websites built for a storm do not rely on Javascript. The benefit simply does not outweigh the cost. They rely on resilient HTML, because that’s all that is really necessary here.

How to Build a Low-tech Website?

This is fascinating! A website that’s fast and nimble, not for performance reasons, but to reduce energy consumption. It’s using static files, system fonts and dithered images. And no third-party scripts.

Thanks to a low-tech web design, we managed to decrease the average page size of the blog by a factor of five compared to the old design – all while making the website visually more attractive (and mobile-friendly). Secondly, our new website runs 100% on solar power, not just in words, but in reality: it has its own energy storage and will go off-line during longer periods of cloudy weather.

Ping! That’s the sound of my brain going “service worker!”

I’ve sent them an email offering my help.

Medieval Fantasy City Generator by watabou

Procedurally generated medieval town plans. Pick a size and then have some fun with the “warp” option.

Chrome’s NOSCRIPT Intervention - TimKadlec.com

Testing time with Tim.

Long story short, the NOSCRIPT intervention looks like a really great feature for users. More often than not it provides significant reduction in data usage, not to mention the reduction in CPU time—no small thing for the many, many people running affordable, low-powered devices.